SouthWest Nicaragua

We continued down the Interamericana Hwy to Southwestern Nicaragua, an isthmus of land, only 20km wide at one point, is all that separates Lago de Nicaragua (the largest lake in Central America), from the Pacific Coast. We landed on the town of San Jorge, a hub that serves as a cross over to Isla de Ometepe; with nothing much happening on this town, we decided to Ferry ourselves across the Island, also called (in Nahuatl) “Between two Hills” to Moyogalpa, the larger of the Islands two main villages. The island was formed by two twin volcanoes, whose lava flows created an isthmus between them. A mysterious place that sits in the middle of “nothing,” with a charming roughness and a simple one road that goes around the Island one can easily miss the natural beauty of this “ecology jewel”, if looking for an up-beat party scene. Even though, it is a major tourist spot for both local and foreigners, there wasn’t much of either, we were pretty surprised by how undeveloped Mayogalpa was. It was pretty funny that every 30 minutes electricity would go out, the first night we were there, we had to eat dinner to candle light.
Isla Ometepe, is great for hiking and swimming, though we couldn’t do any swimming because the waters of the Island were pretty agitated, and we were a little disturbed by a news report we had watched over the TV, ironically, as we traveled on the Ferry. According to the report, the government of Nicaragua, had just received millions of dollars to launch a major project to develop sewage treating plants, frazzled by the reality that a majority of Managua’s (Nicaragua’s capital and largest city) sewage systems were being dumped on the Lake. Nevertheless, it would have been impossible to swim, due to the destruction of beaches around the Lake, palapas were submerged with water and places of access to the beaches were not allowed. According to some of the locals, the water conditions had been overflowing its beaches for months. We felt, that it really wasn’t our “destiny” to spend more than a couple of days in the Island, due to the fact that every time we tried to get anywhere we were faced with stressful situations we couldn’t avoid. Like, waiting hours to catch one of the rugged buses to get anywhere, if you were lucky or a ride (buses stopped running around 5), or had no access to money due to continuous electricity “apagones.” Then, after hiking up rocky and rough roads towards the Volcan Concepcion (not reaching its top!), walking along farms on volcanic soil, and after hours of exploration heading towards Playa Santa Domingo (to come back to the main road to find out that the last bus had broken down with nowhere to go, but to wait in the middle of the road, and being finally picked up a British volunteer doctor that drove us for most of the way back…thank God!) we decided to continue our journey down to our next destination….Nicaragua’s Pacific Coast!