My Two Ometepes
Like Ometepe’s two volcanoes – the active, northern Volcan Concepcion and the dormant, southern Volcan Maderas – I hold two Ometepes in my mind.
One Ometepe, is the mystical one, which came to me over the years from traveler’s and expat’s blogs and from our son who claimed: “Once you and Dad visit, you’ll sell your home in San Juan del Sur and move there.”
The second Ometepe is the one I breathed and ate and saw with my very own eyes for the first time last weekend, when the visit from a friend spurred my husband and I to go traveling: my personal Ometepe.
The first Ometepe was in bright, sunny technicolor and there, tourists frolicked under waterfalls and road scooters below dappled leaves.
The second Ometepe, my personal Ometepe, was in a dark, rainy and muddy October, and the three solo tourists we came across looked lost, like lone survivors.
Both Ometepes are the world’s largest island on a freshwater lake. The lake is Lake Nicaragua, also known as Lake Cocibolca. It’s the nineteenth largest freshwater lake in the world.
Two Types of Roads
Ometepe also has two types of roads.
There is a smooth road paved with pavers. From where the ferry lands in Mayogalpa, it runs south along the western side of the island’s upper orb, then across the top of the isthmus and back up the eastern side to Altagracia, forming a slanted giant happy face smile.
It’s dirt from Altagracia back up and around to Mayogalpa and unpassable in the rainy season and to us anyway. That is the second kind of road.
The paved road though extends south along the eastern side of the isthmus and on down the east side of the island’s lower orb a little ways to Balgue. It also runs a bit along the northern edge of the island’s lower orb, but it quickly turns to dirt, and in our case mud, long before reaching Merida.
The paved road, just south of the ferry terminal at Mayogalpa, even channelled cars across the island’s small airport runway, allowing a great view of Volcan Conception. When a plane wants to land or take off they must have to call someone to run and remove the fence.
But we saw so few cars on the lovely paved road (and even fewer on the dirt ones) that I started to count each car. But I quickly tired of the game after we argued whether I should include trucks, and if trucks which ones: the ones carrying only passengers or also the ones piled high with bananas and carrying teenage boys perched on top?
I didn’t count the motorcycles or the bicycles. There were more of them.
We did agree though that there were many many many more pigs than cars or trucks, or even cars and trucks combined, banana-carrying or not. And also more cows and horses. And people walking on the roads.
The paved road especially made for a majestic promenade sitting wide as it did between the fields and the flanks of Concepcion with its tossed scatterings of car-sized black, volcanic rock; a virtual yellow brick road in Oz, if the road were only yellow.
The dirt roads are as bad as the paved roads are good. And there were many more walkers and many more bicycles on the dirt roads than cars.
The dirt roads were too wet and rough for us to go to the waterfall. It was too rough and wet for us to give the gal that cooked for us one night at Caballitos del Mar a ride home in the pouring rain. And it was too wet for us to drive up to the petroglyphs.
We made it to our beachfront Nica airbnb lodging (see Ometepe #3) but arranged for our host to cook our second dinner and breakfast so we didn’t have to head out again onto the muddy, slalom course between trees.
In dry season, the difference between the paved roads and the dirt roads won’t be as extreme as it is now in rainy season.
And in due time, I expect a personal isthmus to form in my own mind joining my own two Ometepes. It might take more tourists though.
(Stand by for #2 Ometepe Ferry; #3 Where We Stayed; #4 Where We Visited and #5 Favorite Scenes)
