Jenny’s sister Katie came to visit us for New Year’s and to participate in the January solar culture course given by Grupo Fenix. She came a week early to hang out with us so we decided to take the opportunity to go some place cool, la isla de Ometepe. Ometepe is an island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua. It is in the shape of a figure eight because it was formed by two volcanoes, one of which is still active. Our travel book said it had beautiful beaches and tons of cool outdoorsy activities so we figured we should check it out.
No matter what kind of traveling you are doing in Nica, it can always be a challenge and an adventure, our little vacation was no exception. Katie flew into Managua at 9pm so Jenny and I took the second to last bus out of Ocotal to Managua, it was at 2:30 pm. We packed up our stuff that morning, and left the house at 12:20 pm, we walked a mile with our bags to the bus stop, took the 12:45 bus to Ocotal (20 min ride), then we got on a 4 hour “express” bus to Managua. Upon arrival to Managua we negotiated with the taxi drivers trying to give us gringo prices to take us another 30 minutes to the neighborhood where we stayed with some nuns which was arranged by Grupo Fenix. Then we had a little luck, my friend Douglas who takes me on the solar panel installations, has a pick up truck and offered to drive us the last 15 minutes to the airport to meet Katie. It didn’t hurt that we told him she was a cute single muchacha in her 20’s. It just so happened that Douglas had just returned from an installation with 3 of our other volunteer buddies so we all piled into the pickup together. On the way to the airport we got pulled over, not for having 3 dudes riding on the highway in the back of the truck—that’s legal, it was for having 3 dudes riding in the back incorrectly. We finally arrived back at the nuns’ house with Katie at about 10:30pm, what a day. If we were to take that trip in the states it would have taken about three hours instead of ten. We capped off the day nicely by going through all of Katie’s luggage, which was full of gifts and goodies from the states for Jenny and I.
We woke up at 5:30 am to get a jump on our next day of travel from Managua to La Isla de Ometepe. We had a wonderful breakfast of huevos rancheros cooked by the nuns and paid only 300 Cordobas ($15) for the 3 of us for the night and breakfast, it was also the nicest home I had been to since leaving the States complete with a modern bathroom and running water—what a deal! Traveling was the same drill as the day before. We cabbed to the bus stop, then “express” bus for 2 hours (standing up in the aisle) to Rivas, then bus to San Jorge, then Ferry across Lake Nicaragua to Ometepe, then cab to the hotel (because busses don’t run on Sunday on the island). When we got on the first bus to Rivas it was totally packed and the three of us took our positions standing in the aisle, I told Katie that it was about a 2 hour ride and she was like “yeah right C.J., quit messing around”. Well, I said, this is Nicaragua, this is normal; and our bus ride actually took nearly 3 hours. Our acronym of the vacation was birthed from that moment TIN(This Is Nicaragua), which is pronounced tin, like the metal, because Nicas all like to say all their acronyms like words, which is kinda fun. The TIN theme carried on throughout our whole trip, but it was good for us to have the mindset of TIN, because that way we were more prepared for all the new experiences and silly screw-ups that are part of vacationing in the third world.
We stayed at the Villa Paraiso, which means paradise villa. It was the nicest, most expensive hotel on the island, for US$63/night. Not bad. The hotel pretty much lived up to its name. We were in this cute little cabana right on the beach with electricity, a/c, running water and a modern bathroom, and direct TV, totally sweet. (Thanks Mom, Dad, and Grandma!) Taking a real shower was totally glorious. It was kind of a let down that they didn’t have hot water, but it was awesome none the less. I butted heads with the owner at the front desk until they gave us a discount for not delivering on the hot water, which they advertised, but TIN. The Direct TV was also a total crock, it only had 6 channels, and they were direct TV feeds, but only 6 channels and all in Spanish, TIN. The hotel restaurant was great. I had some delicious spaghetti bolognese with actual meat sauce made with real tomatoes, not ketchup and mayonnaise. The ladies sucked down some margaritas and I had so-cold-it-will-give-you-a-headache beer, again, it was glorious.
Our vacation consisted of hanging out on the beach, eating good food at the local restaurants and partaking in the outdoor activities. On our first day we decided to start the day off by doing a zip line canopy tour that was nearby, so we figured we should walk. We had a leisurely breakfast and then got to hiking at about 9:15am because the lady at the desk said that the canopy tour place opens at 9. We ended up walking for about 2.5 kilometers in the wrong direction before turning back and we realized it was only about 100 yards from the front door of our hotel. It turned out that it was just a small booth, and we arrived at 10:30 but it still wasn’t open. We went into the hotel next door to ask about what activities they had and we ran into the two guys that run the zip line. They were like “oh, you want to ride it? I guess we will open then.” TIN. The zip line was cool, but kind of anticlimactic because it was only 4 lines and it took all of 15 minutes to do. For the afternoon we decided to schedule a personal horseback riding tour for the 3 of us to see some of the Nicaraguan petroglyphs, which are 800 to 1200 year old carvings in rock that have been preserved. The ride was pretty cool, it was the first time I ever rode a horse. My horse was a total ego maniac and he would refuse to let any of the other horses get in front of him the entire trip. He even got to the point where he would break into a full speed gallop just to keep the other horses behind. Unfortunately due to this being my first time on a horse and that I had no freaking clue what I was doing, I pulled a muscle in my back that still hurts. It was still a pretty fun 4 hour excursion though. Katie said she was unimpressed with the petroglyphs because other civilizations had been writing books already and these were just stick figures carved into rock, my response was ¨TIN¨. Later in the week we went kayaking with all 3 of us on a 2.5 person kayak to a small island off of Ometepe inhabited by monkeys. Katie and I paddled while Jenny got a free ride and took some pictures. It was ok, but we couldn’t get too close because the monkeys are apparently aggressive and would even go as far as jump in your boat from overhanging branches if we got close. We rented mountain bikes one day and rode around the area of Playa Santo Domingo and stopped off at a natural watering hole in the forest where a lot of the locals like to go. It was called Ojo del Agua and it was beautiful and even had a cool rope swing that you could get to from climbing part way up a tree, then swing into the deep water. Jenny and Katie were like the only women there in actual bathing suits and there was plenty of staring going on. I felt like the lucky dude but it was a little awkward.
New year’s eve was pretty cool. Our hotel had a big party that they planned for the guests and anyone local that wanted to reserve a table. They had a late buffet and live music all night with a cash bar. We learned about the Nicaragua tradition that when you want a rum and coke you don’t just get a glass with some coke and a shot of rum. They bring you a 375ml bottle of rum with some ice, limes, a shot glass, and 355 ml bottle of coke. Lots of rum, not much coke. It was a good night. Being that I am a total light weight now and Jenny and Katie always have been, the bottle of rum along with a few other drinks had the 3 of us ¨happily¨ celebrating the New Year.
Our original plan was to book 3 nights at Ometepe, then decide if we wanted to stay for a 4th night or head back to main land and go see Granada for our last day. We were enjoying Ometepe so much that we opted for a 4th day there. Unfortunately our hotel didn’t have any rooms for us to stay in so we got bumped to another hotel two doors down. Everything looked nice, the rooms were big, had modern bathrooms, a/c, TV, and all that, but the price was 50% less and we couldn’t figure it out… until later. Our last day was so windy that going to the beach was torture; we would get pelted by sand, our towels blew all over the place, and tossing around the frisbee was out of the question. We kept ourselves busy by taking a bus ride into the nearest town to tour around and have dinner; I even caught a little bit of one of the bowl games at a bar. When we got back to our hotel for the night we discovered why it was so cheap. We were the only ones staying at the place so they had made special arrangements for one of the staff members to stay in a guest room for the night in case we needed something. We did. When we got back to our room I felt something fall onto my shoulder, it was a really small baby frog. Then I looked at the wall and it was covered with them. I pointed it out to the girls and they freaked. The frogs were inching their way up the walls, and when one would get almost to the top, it would slip and fall all the way to the floor. This made Jenny scream, because she thought they were splatting on our floor, and occasionally they would fall off the wall near the bed and land on it. This was unacceptable; I had to go wake up the staff guy. He moved us to another room, that was frog free, but it had a large ceramic frog lamp on the table--weird. The frogs weren’t all of it. There was a TV in the room, but I turned it on and they didn’t have a single channel, suddenly 6 channels of Direct TV Spanish looked good. Why in the heck did they even have a TV in the room if they have no channels? I looked outside and could see that the room next to us where the staff guy was staying had a hole cut in the screen window with a wire running out of it that went up the wall and was wrapped around a make-shift antenna on the roof. TIN. Also, the water in the bathroom didn’t work and we had to ask them to turn it on. The reply was that we needed to wait 20 minutes for the pump to kick in and fill the tank. There was also no hot water here, there was a hot water knob in the shower and on the sink, but they didn’t do anything. Only in Nicaragua.
Remember how I said that it was really windy on our last day? Well it was still really windy the next morning, but we didn´t think anything of it until after our expensive cab ride to the ferry port 30 minutes away. We got to the ferry to find that there was a ton of people and other tourists all waiting at the gate to the ferry. We heard from some of the people in line that none of the ferries had left all day due to the wind. A ferry came into the port full of passengers after about 30 minutes of waiting, and we all boarded the boat. We waited for about an hour an a half, then finally got official word through the gossip channels that the authorities were closing off the ports for the rest of the day due to wind. I had never heard of this before, its not like we were going in a sail boat, or like we were going to cross the sea, it was just a 1 hour ferry ride to shore. We luckily caught a bus that was passing by as we got off the boat and headed back to the same town as the night before. We stayed the night and I went back to the same bar so I could watch the VT bowl game. It was great that I could see it live, but pretty depressing that we lost our 4th BCS bowl game in a row—the last two being by only 3 points each. The next day we got up at 530 and hustled to the bus stop to get the first bus back to the ferry and when we arrived we found out that they had already cancelled all boat traffic for the second day in a row. We took the 1 hour bus ride again back to the town of Altagracia to get an available hotel room one more time. We found out that we could skip the one hour bus ride the next morning if we took a 6 am ¨lancha¨ out of the local port about a 20-30 minute walk from town. We stayed the night again and got up this time at 4:30 am to check out of the hotel and get to the port in time to catch the plantain lancha. We walked about a mile and a half with our bags, which were heavy as heck by the end and happily found a small boat loading up to leave. We were the only gringos around and they spent the next 45 minutes loading plantains by hand. When they were done the boat was chock full of plantains. They only took about 10 passengers and we set off. It seemed just as windy as the two previous days but for some reason the ports were opened again. The ride on the lancha was 3 hours of the rockiest boat ride I have ever been on. I would look out the opposite side of the boat and see nothing but sea, then I would see nothing but sky, sea, sky, sea sky, ugh… Lucky for me I was smart enough not to eat breakfast that morning; I had nothing to barf up. We had already spent 2 extra days in Ometepe and Katie had missed the first day and a half of her solar culture course in Sabana Grande. So, we took a cab straight from the ferry port for 2.5 hours to the bus station in Managua, then we took another ¨express¨ bus to Ocotal and finished off our 13 hour travel day with a 1 mile up hill walk from the bus stop to our cozy mud home in the mountains. It was a fun vacation but maybe a little too heavy on the adventure. At least we got a chance to show Katie the real Nicaragua.
