From Granada we went to Isla de Ometepe, by taking a bus to San Jorge and then a ferry to the island, to a little village called Moyagalpa. Before we left on the ferry, we booked a guide to climb Volcán Concepción, the larger of the two volcanoes that comprise Isla de Ometepe. We went directly to Hospedaje Central, a very open hostel with monkeys and deer living in the yard next door. It was about $5 a night. We spent that night relaxing, and had a nice (albeit strange) dinner together at the hostel of mangos, cottage cheese, bread, and ham and cheese. We were all ready to go to bed and have a nice long sleep to prepare for the hike, when I realized that I had been robbed. I had locked up my valuable stuff (camera, ipod, nook), but I left my backpack on my bed – most of the people in the hostel had left their backpacks on their bed or on the floor. My backpack was taken out into the yard next door and pretty much emptied – all my chargers, a pair of shoes, a book, a towel, all of my toiletries, and worst of all, my journal. I had also foolishly left my wallet under the backpack, so that was gone too, along with my ID, my debit card, and almost $200. We spent the next few hours talking to the police and trying to find my stuff, with the help of some backpackers from Sweden and Holland, but the police were no help at all. I definitely learned my lesson – lock up EVERYTHING – and I had to just get over it. It could have been much, much worse, so in a way, I’m lucky.
After 5 hours of sleep, we got up at 5:30 to leave for the hike. We were wildly underprepared – we brought one loaf of bread for an 11 hour hike. The hike was not supposed to be 11 hours – we were with a very slow girl. But it was ridiculously intense! The hike up to the treeline was very steep, and it was extremely hot (like all of Nicaragua). I don’t think I’ve ever sweated that much in my entire life. After about 10 minutes, I barely had a dry spot on my shirt to wipe my face. Once we got above the treeline, we looked at the top and realized that what we had just hiked was kiddie stuff compared to what was to come. The top of Concepción is literally a point, and it was incredibly steep. There were unstable rocks embedded in sand and pebbles, so it was very slippery. People had installed climbing equipment – that’s how dangerous this was. When we were almost to the top, the rocks started to get really hot. There were a lot of little vents with steam coming out, and the rock around the vents was always scalding. When we finally reached the summit, there were so many massive bugs and so much gas that we could only stay up for about a minute. It felt great to reach the top though! And then we began the descent, which was almost more difficult than the way up. We were all slipping on the sand and the loose rocks, and we got to the treeline looking pretty beat up. When we finally got back to the hostel, we could barely move. We didn’t do much of anything the next day. Between the intense sunburn and the excruciating pain in our leg muscles, we were pretty much out of commission. Katrin and I were down for the count for almost 2 days after – walking was extremely difficult. We slept very late, hung around the hostel, and got some delicious massive juicy burgers at a restaurant owned by an expat who entertained us with his conspiracy theories during our meal.
We stayed one more night at Hospedaje Central, and then proceeded to the next hostel, in Santa Cruz, on the other side of the island – El Zopilote. We had met an American named Paul at Hospedaje Central, and he ended up staying with us for the rest of the trip. El Zopilote was a total hippie hostel. Very “earthy-crunchy”, as Mom would say. They are very earth friendly, and do a lot of recycling. They have compost toilets, which are just toilets on top of holes in the ground, which your pour rice in after you do your business. They had good homemade organic food, a good kitchen, and a brick oven pizza night. One morning we tried the homemade yogurt – not what we were expecting, but it was okay when we drowned it with honey and granola. I slept in a hammock for the 2 nights that we spent there, for $3 a night. Most of the time at El Zopilote was spent relaxing and recovering from the Concepción disaster. One day we took a bus to a huge half-natural half-artificial pool, El Ojo de Agua. It was really crowded, but really nice.
One of the nights was pizza night – we signed up in the morning, and all had delicious pizzas for dinner. Breakfast one morning was cooked by our new friend - delicious egg sandwiches on the hostel’s homemade multigrain bread with their homemade hummus, and some homemade nutella. For one of our other dinners there, we went to a tiny little “restaurant” that we were told was decent. Up until now, that is the only time that I hated the food from a place like that. The choices were chicken or chicken, so we all got chicken. We weren’t sure what part of the chicken we were eating – not one of the five of us had something that even remotely resembled a breast, or a leg, or a wing. And the rice – oh god, the rice. The rice tasted like it had been cooked in sewer water. We theorized that they had run out of rice, so someone had snuck up to the bathrooms in El Zopilote and stole some of the rice from the big bags next to the toilets. There were also very cute, but very irritating animals everywhere. Lots of kittens, dogs, and even a pig were running around. One of the cats kept jumping up into our laps. So that restaurant was an experience.
The dirty rice night, we were invited by some hippies to a bonfire on the beach. We decided to check it out, and it was definitely one of the most interesting experiences I’ve had here. Everything that I thought would happen at a hippie bonfire, happened. Lots of singing, guitar playing, talking about the significance of astrological signs, etc.
After the two nights at El Zopilote, we headed to the beach for a night. Theresa and Oskar and Paul slept on the beach, but Katrin and I refused, so we sprung for the hotel. No regrets there, we slept very comfortable! The next day we headed back into town to catch the ferry back to San Jorge. I have never seen a ferry so ridiculously stuffed full of people. We were sitting on the bottom floor, in the bed of a pickup truck. From there, we took a 2 busses to get to Leon!
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When we went, there were hundreds of people there
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Leaving San Jorge
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Ferry to Isla de Ometepe
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Volcán Concepción
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Theresa and I with some awesome free straw party hats
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Hospedaje Central dorm
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…aka scene of the crime
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Mean monkey next door
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Our “room” for two nights!
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Compostable toilets!
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Outside the kitchen
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The kitchen
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Map of El Zopilote
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Homemade liquors. Café, chocolate, limón, etc
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Homemade organic bread, etc.
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They always had Jamaica, a typical juice made from la flor de jamaica – hibiscus. This fridge contained the gross yogurt, and fresh milk as well
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Don’t pee on us!
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Spider under my hammock
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I bought some chai tea, a choco banano with organic chocolate that was mainly cacao, and a bracelet here.
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AKA the bed of Theresa, Paul, and Oskar
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Me and Katrin’s luxurious hotel. No regrets about skipping out on the beach.
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On the way back to Moyagalpa to catch the ferry, at a cow roadblock
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Pasteles de piña…que ricas!
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Ferry back to San Jorge, sitting in a pickup truck
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Beach at San Jorge
