Nicaraguan phantasmas - Ometepe Island Part 1

This weekend’s grand adventure took me to Ometepe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ometepe), which screams awesomeness from the most cursory glance at a Nica travel guide. Rising from the huge freshwater sea of Lake Nicaragua (that at one point was being explored as a possible canal site to rival Panama's) are Concepcion and Maderas, twin volcanoes that form the hourglass Ometepe Island. On Friday night I headed south to Rivas so I could catch a boat in nearby San Jorge early on Saturday. I figured I’d be slumming it once I got to the island, so I treated myself that night to Rivas’s finest, a $45/night hotel with A/C and a hot shower, my second this month. I got some long sleep and headed to the docks in San Jorge where, for the first time in Nica, I saw a slightly large group of western travelers and backpackers. I chatted with a pair of older Bay Area ER doctors on the 1.5-hour boat trip about my project. They’re staying in Granada for three weeks (free, courtesy of Kaiser) to learn Spanish (increasingly important in Bay Area hospitals) and were interested to learn what this crazy PCR they always hear about is. (“Is it like an MRI?”) They were very nice though, and let me share their shuttle around the island.

I took it as far as they would take me and walked the remaining two kilometers to the base of Volcan Maderas to Finca Magdalena, an organic coffee farm. (And yes, I’m bringing back coffee for all the people I love. And rum, of course.) Along the road to the farm, I passed a local baseball game with a volcano as a backdrop. The players all wore various non-matching American jerseys and the catcher’s lone pad was a dusty old shinguard. Despite the ragtag unis, they called signs and played with a very serious air and at a semi-professional level. The pitcher probably topped 85 or 90mph. A bus driver had stalled his jalopy bus nearby to catch the end of the inning while his passengers waited.

Finca Magdalena is large coffee farm at the base of Volcan Maderas collectively owned by twenty island families. They offer the latest in island habitation, from a old barn converted to dormitory at $2/night, or, for the thrifty, $1/night hammocks. My all-inclusive bill for two nights, including several meals, many beers, several liters of water, a hired volcano guide, a bottle of rum, and two-pounds of coffee beans came to about $50. What’s also cool is that several thousand years ago men left stories chiseled in the large rocks all over the island, including rocks around the farm. Around midnight three young Americans and I flash-lighted our way into the tarantula woods and shined our sights on the very old petroglyphs, way cooler under a clear and dark starlit sky. Cooler in the way the that cemeteries improve at night. The local word for ghost is phantasma, one of the many that I think just sounds better in Spanish (mariposa, or butterfly, being another.)

Ok, science is calling. More on Ometepe tomorrow, including giant spiders, the muddiest hike ever, and Nicaraguan Axe body spray ads.