Isla de Ometepe

After the madness of Sunday Funday and a somewhat relaxing Monday Hungday we headed onwards and upwards to Isla de Ometepe. We got a cab from San Juan to San Jorge pier between the 4 of us. You can also jump on the chicken bus from San Juan to Rivas and then get another bus from Rivas to the pier, but for $5 each and less than half the time we opted for the taxi. 

First off let me start by saying Isla de Ometepe is beautiful and the boat ride over is no exception. There’s something pretty darn incredible about jumping on a ferry and heading towards an island made of two volcanoes! I of course wanted to stand outside and watch the whole time (this also helps me not get motion sick) and due to the breeze I forgot about the sun and resultantly got a little fried (sorry mum and dad!).

Eventually we arrived and found our accomodation. We dropped our things and headed of for some food and an explore.

The next day we headed off for a trek up Concepcion Volcano. There are 2 volcanoes on the island; Concepcion and Maderas. Maderas is the one with a lake in the centre that you can climb all the way up to, however we got told by multiple people that the hike wasn’t great and there is a huge amount of mud due to the constant rain, so we gave this one a miss and decided on Concepcipn instead. Due to the recently increased volcanic activity and a high concentration of sulphuric gases at the top we were unable to climb higher than 1000m on Concepcion (the cauldron is at 1600m). Regardless this was still pretty awesome and we were surrounded by clouds.

As we walked/slipped our way back down the clouds thinned and the view was pretty incredible, it turns out even though we weren’t at the top 1000m is still pretty darn high!

The return trip with pit stop for food at the top took about 4 hours walking up and down, not as bad we thought!

We got home, has some lunch and headed out to Ojos de Agua, a natural spring that’s had some infrastructure built around it to cater for tourists.

The pool was nice and going for a swim felt reaaaal good. However I would have preferred it was all natural as opposed to built up, but hey it was still fun and I even got to watch Sean and Tash attempt/fail a water tightrope!

That night we grabbed some pizza and packed our things, we were heading off the next morning. 

Unfortunately all of us were awoken in the night with a stomach bug. The ferry and car ride onwards Granada was going to be interesting… 

Next stop.. Granada!