time for some r&r

Posted on April 7, 2012 by Bec

after our intense miraflor adventure, we decided we weren’t quite ready to tackle a tourist city (granada) as our next stop. so, we followed pete’s lead and headed out to meet him at the island of ometepe in the middle of lake nicaragua. we caught the 4pm ferry, thinking that would give us plenty of time to get to the hotel where pete was staying before dark. well, it didn’t quite work out that way. it took awhile to get all the people and cars off the ferry and we were the last vehicle to pull off. so, we headed to the other side of the island and started down the 5km dirt road that would take us to hacienda merida right as it was getting dark. we decided that we were so close we might as well try it. little did we know, this would be the roughest road we’d gone down thus far in the trip and the darkness made it 50 times harder (which we found out leaving in the daylight three days later). it was tricky and insanely rocky. and we came close to dropping the bike more than once. but, bob championed the route straight through to the end and kept us upright. we were pretty relieved when we reached the end of the road. we just hoped they had a room for us, as we had no plans to head back out the same road that night.

other than being slightly overrun by young, early 20s travelers, the hacienda was a nice place to take it easy for a few days. and we ended up meeting a nice british couple, close to our age, that we really hit it off with who are traveling for 11 months, started in the US on greyhound buses and are headed to south america, and had a really similar story of trip planning/preparation/stress until they took off on their own adventure. so, we thoroughly enjoyed swapping stories with them and bonding over similar experiences. but, that was pretty much the highlight of our stay on ometepe. otherwise, we swam, ate, laid around in hammocks and planned what our next stop would be.