Nicaragua part 1 - San Juan Del Sur and Ometepe Island

For the most part Costa Rica's transport system sucks and is rather pricey, however the route from La Fortuna to the boarder is particularly bad. Again leaving super early we catch one bus that was quite decent in comfort, but we are only on this one for 10mins or so. We are dropped at a random road crossing to wait with about 10 other people for our next bus. Of course this one is not very comfortable and rather full and Lisa ended up half way up the bus while Rad, Barry and I were at the back seats. The cool kids seats, or in this case the super duper bumpy have a hand on your chest so boobs stop bouncing seats. After 5/6 hours of discomfort we finally reach the border to stamp out of Costa Rica and then walk across no mans land to the pay the ridiculously high Nicaragua entry fee. At this point we are all tired, hungry and need to pee. We also can't easily find where the chicken bus is (the 1st of 2 to get to where we are going) one guy offered to show us but only if we paid him a dollar each! We succumbed to the badgering of the taxi drivers, of course after we negotiated down! Or I should say Lisa and Barry did as they speak Spanish and we don't 😂. Taxi was worth it! Dropped us right at our chosen hostel Pacha Mama the starting place for what is supposed to be the best bar/hostel/pool crawl in Central America. If you stay here you get half price tickets. We later found out that there is a 2nd Pacha Mama which is newer and not as grotty around the corner and that another stop on the crawl Naked Tiger also get half price tickets. The cleanliness of our Pacha Mama was very questionable and I would recommend one of the other two.... We arrived on a Saturday, the day before the crawl, had a little wander of the small town. The week before there had been a hurricane on the Pacific coast and the town had be hit pretty bad, lots of washed up boats! 

There was a trivia night on in the hostel if you won you get 3 free tickets! The chap doing the quiz kept on trolling everyone by adding in questions about snowboarding or snowboarding champions and laughing at the blank faces in the room! Some how, I don't know how, we came joint 1st and then needed to do a deciding round with 3 more questions. Due to the other team trying to cheat and being given the wrong answer by their friend we actually ended up winning! Would have been another tie, serves them right! So with 3 free tickets we split the last one and only paid $3.75 each when other people pay $30-35! Pretty good for the free t-shirt, transport and some shitty free shots! After our travel day we were very tired and tried to get an early night. Seemed like everyone else in our hostel plus some others wanted to party so falling asleep was not easy as our room overlooked the courtyard and pool aka party central. The next morning we got our tickets and free tops, we wanted to make use of our time and hike to the 'Cristo de la misericodia' statue overlooking the beach. It was high tide as we tried to cross a river that crosses the beach to the sea beach. We were misled by seeing some locals walking through it understanding it was only thigh depth. In actual fact they had tried to cross, gotten too deep and turned around. Which is exactly what happened to us...  

After our failure and being super wet we just gave up and went to get food before we started drinking. Now we paced ourselves pretty well starting at 2ish and finishing at 11pm. All the people that were staying at the Naked Tiger hostel started drinking at 10am and turned up in vans to hostel at about 2/3 completely fucked. Alcohol and maybe a few other things had helped them get the party underway early.

Eventually we all left Pacha Mama for the second bar on the beach front, got our shitty free shots on the way in and jumped in the pool.  

Third stop was Naked Tiger out of town and up a hill we had a awesome view for sunset and we took about 20 too many photos with the back drop. 

They were also serving some pretty awesome burgers that for most were needed at this point. On to the last bar! Back to town as it was another beach front bar. We had been told it had a pool but it didn't have a pool. Lisa and I were a tad annoyed as we didn't want to get out of the last one but soon got over this by getting into the ocean instead. After swimming and dancing everyone was tired, Barry especially! They headed of to bed, we got some food then followed them. All in all a great night made better by free tickets!! Ometepe The aftermath of Sunday Funday wasn't to bad for us. We all woke up feeling tired but all in all fine and more than ready to move on to our next destination. Ometepe is an island in the middle of Nicaragua lake that was formed by two volcanos erupting. Very picturesque. We packed and got out of there pretty quickly to hop on a chicken bus to Ometepe. This journey consisted of 1 chicken bus, 1 taxi and 1 ferry. On the way we meet a lovely brother sister duo Melin and Julian who joined our little group. The journey was fine up until the ferry when everyone's hangovers decided to kick in. Pacha Mama's wifi had been terrible so we didn't have a hostel booked and proceeded to wander around looking into a few hostels. None looked great in condition, none had kitchens and one random guy tried to take us to a "good eco hostel" but it was down a weird ally so we bailed. He then followed us until we chose something which was weird. With none looking great lisa and I picked one off the 1st places, deciding the pool made up for the lack of kitchen. As the port town was lack lustre we decided to head to a eco hostel on the other side of the island. So just enjoyed our evening watching the sunset and then drinking beers in the pool. We also ran into Pete a guy we had meet in Puerto Viejo, he had also been in San Juan with Melin and Julian so joined us to chill for the evening. 

In the morning we hopped on one bus to take us to El Zopilote hostel then had a 10 minute hike up hill with our bags to a sprawling super 'rustic' hostel. We rented scooters from the hostel and headed out to go to the local spring/pool/swimming hole. Turns out it was closed for maintenance so we went to eat instead.  

Fuelled up we went in search of a nice sunset spot. Unfortunately the tarmac ran out half way around one volcano and the road turned very uncomfortable with little stones everywhere. Our map showed beaches, however when we got there it wasn't a beach. Literally someone's house and business just backed out onto the water. Although they were fine with us staying there was no where to sit so we tried again. This time more successfully there was no beach but space to chill and it wasn't someone's private land.

Due to the bad road and us needed to hand back the bikes at 6 we had to leave what was a stunner of a sunset half way. I was on the back of Rads bike craning my neck backwards to still watch 😂. The hostel had a pizza night that evening, it was actually super good pizza and we we're all stuffed!

The weather was pretty bad for us in Ometepe so we decided not to hike either of the volcanos as it would most likely be an unhappy hike. We also had our bikes re-delivered for a second day. Our plans were to go to a waterfall however, that was quite far down the bad road with a longish muddy hike and with the bad weather decided against it. As we had missed the swimming hole/pool/spring thing we went to check it out. Honestly it was a man made pool filled with fresh stream water, refreshing/freezing but not what any of us expected. Again we headed off in search of food, so far the food on the island had been terrible, bar the pizza, this meal made up for it. Especially for Melin and Barry who ended up with a whole fish to our 1 chicken breast, for only 3 dollars! We all decided to leave the next day. Lisa and Barry had a flight coming up soon to Colombia so they would skip Granada our next town and head right to Leon for some adventure! However Melin and Julian were sticking with us! Stay tuned I am catching up with these!