Volcán Maderas

My first night in Ometepe, I arranged to climb one of the island´s two volcanoes with a guide from a nearby hotel (the place I was staying was a little too barebones to have a guide - although we did have a scorpion in one of our rooms).The trip to Maderas began at the hotel at 7:30 a.m. The group consisted of two couples (one from Canada and one from New York), two guides, and myself. We drove for about a half an hour down a dusty, potholed dirt road, and parked at the Finca Magdalena, where we paused to use the restrooms and fill up our water bottles.

We left the farmhouse and started hiking, climbing gradually at first through low farmland, passing coffee plants and then cacao trees. The trail very quickly turned into a steep hike through thick forest. We passed howler monkeys and blue jays, and stopped to rest at an ancient petroglyph.

Distance was marked at every kilometer, and it was supposedly only 5km from the farm to the lake, but it seemed much longer. The first two kilometers were steep, and I was sweating buckets, but the trail was fairly solid and well maintained. The second half of the trail was just as steep, but a slippery slog through ankle deep mud. I had made the mistake of wearing a white shirt, thinking it would be cooler in the heat. The shirt was ruined by the end of the day, and I could not for the life of me figure out how I would get down without breaking my ankle.

As we headed towards the crest of the volcano, our guides gave us a choice: the hard way with a view of the crater and lake, or the easy way, without a view. We chose the hard way, and he wasnt kidding. Aerobically, we werent working any harder than we had been all along, but now the trail had disintegrated and was half trail, half bushwack. Within 15 minutes, we reached a bald patch of rock and could look down a the crater lake below. It was somewhat unstriking - it looked more like a bowl of pea soup than a cool mountain pond you would want to swim in - but we climbed down just the same.

My guidebook had promised me icy-cold water filling the basin, but what we found was lukewarm, muddy bathwater. You had to squelch through several steps of goo just to reach the water, and nearly halfway across the laguna, I could still reach down and touch the bottom with my hands as I swam.

The way back down the mountain was not as treacherous as I expected, although I did have a few near misses on slippery, mud covered rocks. When we got to the bottom, we had to wait about an hour for the hotel vehicle to come and pick us up, so we hung around the Finca and watched backpackers and hippies mill about.

I returned to the farm the next day with my parents, thinking we might tour the coffee operation or just have lunch. The bus let us off along the main road, about a kilometer from the Finca. We walked up the long drive, watching the campesinos harvest plantains and deliver them, on horseback, to a waiting truck. Several locals were walking up or down the driveway as well, and after a few minutes my mom glanced back to see a machete in the hand of the campesino walking a few meters behind us. I looked around, trying to get a better sense of our situation, but after about 100 meters he turned into a row of trees and returned to work.

We wandered around the farm/paradise, side-tripped down dirt roads and trails to see more petroglyphs in the area, and returned to the large farmhouse in time for some of the best food I´ve had so far in Nicaragua: it was all comida tipica - roasted chicken, rice, beans, and salad - but the farm fresh chicken hadn´t been cooked to a point beyond recognition, like most I´ve encountered in Nicaragua, and the salad consisted of more than just cabbage and beets.

We finished lunch just in time to sprint down the driveway to wait for the bus, which came - depending on who you asked - at either 1:30, 2:00, 2:15, 2:30, or 3:30. Everyone wanted to help, but no matter who I asked, I never heard the same answer twice. We waited for about 45 minutes or an hour - watching pigs and chickens foraging at the side of the road, and a dog waking up every now and then to bark and chase the pigs as they wandered by - until the bus showed up at around 2:45.