In the Orbit of Ometepe

Mid-morning, waking up over some tea, brewed on my camping stove. I find myself on the southwestern shore of a giant island in the middle of a giant lake, Lago de Nicaragua. The sky has been over-filled with clouds all morning, but it can’t seem to make its mind up if it really wants to rain. It will pour for a few minutes and then just as quickly stop again. Tropics. I am sitting under the covered patio of the Hacienda Merida, waiting it out.

This hostel, at the southern end of the little village of Merida, centers around an open air covered restaurant and patio area facing the lake, with some ramshackle dorms and private rooms behind. Next to that is a large building, previously the main house of the hacienda, with the really nice rooms up on a balcony, and a big open room with large hammocks below. Continuing north along the shore there is a small fleet of kayaks, beyond that a big open lot where the coffee beans get laid out to dry, and then the elementary school run by Alvaro, the hostel owner, buzzing with the cries and yells of children half the day.

Just below the kayaks, almost at the lake shore, is my tent, which I slept in for the first time on this journey. There was a certain satisfaction to making use of my mobile casa after carrying it around for over three months, and also a fairly poor night of sleep. An adjustment to sleeping outside, to the unfamiliar sounds of frogs and insects and birds, the rocky, slightly sloping ground. But the main problem was the night security guard. Seemed like every hour he would come over and shine a blazing flashlight straight into my tent, and I would sit up, startled. I made it through the night, and because of the shade of the big tree I’m sleeping under and the overcast skies, it didn’t get hot for awhile, and I was able to sleep in. Just made a request of the hostel staff with regards to the night watchman and his flashlight.

Yesterday I took a bus from Granada several hours south to the city of Rivas, and then a taxi to San Jorge on the lake shore. In the afternoon caught an aging wooden workhorse ferry out to the island, mostly sat out on the upper deck in the sun. As we got closer across the lake, the two volcanoes growing in stature, the magic of this place began to affect me. One volcano is intact and active, Concepcion, one is broken, Maderas, and dormant. Both are stunning in their own ways, and towering, their tops generally covered in clouds. The island is shaped like a figure eight, really just two volcanoes whose lower slopes meet on a little isthmus in between. The word Ometepe in Nahuatl means this: “two mountains”.

On the boat I meet Marie and Leah, two french women in their late twenties, who were heading to the same part of the island as me. Disembarking on the dock in San Jose, a little tiny village in the middle, we were met by a crowd of taxi drivers. Insisting that there were no buses running that day, that it was a fiesta day, despite the fact there was a bus right in front of us, wanting twenty dollars to take us to Merida. Sad to say, I have learned that the taxi drivers of Central America are in general, liars. The bus was indeed running, going to Altagracia, on the north part of the island, but it would drop us at an intersection from where we could catch another bus going south.

At this crossroads we found a little roadside shelter from the late afternoon sun, and underneath, a couple ladies also going to Merida. We waited there the better part of an hour, talking in various combinations of three languages, until the older Nica lady said she didn’t think the bus was coming. She said she was going to hitchhike before it got dark, and given that she clearly knew way more than we did, we followed her lead. So there were were, an odd line the five of us made on the roadside in the middle of nowhere in Ometepe, jungle all around us. Two cars had passed the whole time we’d been on the road, and our prospects seemed remote, but it turned out we didn’t wait long at all.

The very first vehicle that came by, two minutes after we decided to hitch it, pulled over, and it was an SUV that magically had room for all of us, and they were going past Merida. It was a friendly young french couple who had been hitchhiking elsewhere in Nicaragua and so were sympathetic to our cause, but had now splurged for a rental for the end of their trip. They were happy to share in their newfound wealth. We all piled in and rode down the road in unprecedented comfort. As we crossed into the south part of the island, the road turned to dirt, racked with potholes and long stretches of washboard runs. We arrived in Merida just as the sun was setting orange over the lake, people coming in from kayak rides, and it was all quite idyllic.

I checked into the hostel, and as I was staking out a good place to pitch my tent, an old man working as security came up and helped me clear some rocks and sticks. His name was Miguel, and he told me how he used to play baseball and be a volcano guide, but hurt his knee and now can only sit for work. It was very hot and the humidity seemed to be rising with the dark, so I was dripping with sweat by the time my tent was up. Miguel assured me that the rainy season was finished, and wouldn’t rain, so I left the fly off. An oversight that I had to correct in the middle of the night when the first rain started.

Went up to the front desk and got a beer, my first in a week, then took it out to the end of the concrete dock for a night swim. There in the dark I found the french girls from the ferry and the hitchhiking, also drinking beers, and after a lovely dip in the lake we sat and talked in three languages about work and jobs and leaving them. Leah had a fascinating job: she worked at a library of games, which is apparently a normal thing in France. A place where the public can check out all kinds: video, card, board, lawn; with library provided instructions. What a lovely idea. I told her about my love of games, and my interest in their history. Said that my favorite card game, cribbage, was thought to be the oldest currently played card game. She disagreed. It was a french game (of course), either Tarot or Alouette. I took her word for it.

That night I met a group of American English teachers at the hostel. They were teachers in Costa Rica working on tourist visas, and so every three months they had to make a border run, cross over for a couple days, then get another three months when they re-entered. They were going out into the village to a pizza place, and invited me to join. Over a very decent pizza and beers, they told me about the life of an English teacher in Latin America. They’d been doing it for a few years. Weren’t saving any money, but it was enough to live on. After a week in Granada where I was sick in my room most of the time, I felt like I had entered an entirely different, much more enjoyable world.

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A couple nights later, I am sitting in the restaurant, just me and the night watchman, who I’ve talked to about the flashlight, which unfortunately has persisted. I asked him, and he didn’t say anything but bummed a cigarette and nonchalantly said he would try to be careful. Everyone else staying at the Hacienda Merida has gone to bed, but I can’t stomach going to sleep at ten o’clock, even though I know I probably should, since I can’t seem to sleep worth a damn anywhere in these countries. The french girls and the american teachers have moved on, but I am still here. Working on my fourth beer this night. Feels a little gratuitious, and also pretty good. Beer goes down very easily in the tropics. Granted, it’s four beers over four hours, but it’s as much as I’ve had since I went out with Jenny the first time almost a month ago.

The night watchman has wandered off, squirelly fellow. Mosquitoes picking up. I can feel myself changing in some way, under the surface. Maybe I’m growing up, maybe I’m getting old. Felt today like I need to stop traveling, find a place to stop and work for awhile. I had this strong feeling the day before I turned forty that it was time to build something, and it’s hard for me to reconcile that with what I’m doing. I’ve started to think that I don’t actually like traveling. It’s not that I don’t enjoy being in these places, I absolutely do, but the lifestyle of traveling, the being constantly disconnected, passing through, always finding new places to stay, then not staying long, has lost its allure for me. The idea of leaving this island, taking buses to other buses to sleep in hostel dorm rooms, is fairly offensive.

Perhaps this is just the power of Ometepe talking. I like my campsite next to the lake; like that I can take a kayak out and float the day away, hike up on the slopes of Volcan Maderas above. There is a real power to this place, an amazing part of the earth, and I don’t want to leave anytime soon. That said, I haven’t really made it very far in my journey, and I feel this nagging sense of distance calling. It haunts my tranquility, this sense of the thousands and thousands of miles before me.

Took a trip today out in the old fiberglass kayak that Alvaro, the owner of the place, can’t stop talking about. Paddled out into a fairly good headwind current, north along the shore, then cut east after an hour into the center of the hourglass. That’s how my Mom described it. She’d come here a few years back, and seemed to act like this island wasn’t so great. Fixated on the old ferry and the worst roads she’d ever been on, the threat of (the nearly extinct) sharks. But then when I was coming here she said “I think you’re in for a treat on Ometepe.” She was right.

Paddled in where the reeds and cattails of the marshlands between the volcanoes open up into a little swampy river, the Rio Istian, and within, into this strange and sleepy world. Quiet and still in there, floating through the lillies with their lotus flowers, all kinds of birds I’ve never seen before, funny yellow and red caps, long stalk legs that they somehow use to balance atop the lilypad layer. Trying to paddle quiet, sneak up on a caiman, though I never managed to see one. There were other people kayaking, too, but I slipped back in amongst the vegetation and kept my distance. Far back in there, where the trees growing with wide buttressed trunks cast shade over the whole river, I first heard the grotesque call of the howler monkey. A haunting, screaming sound, and I finally saw some late in the day, dressed in black, high up in the trees. I realize this is the first place I’ve ever been where there are wild monkeys.

When the water grew stagnant and thick, and streaks of gold from the sunset were falling through the leaves, I turned back, getting the jump on a group of older gringos on a guided kayak tour, though they passed me again before long (their guide knew a better route) and made it out of the river mouth just as the sun was setting over the lake, pinks and golds and blues and imperial cloudheads. For once Volcan Concepcion, the big volcano, was fully visible, and I just let myself float there as the water turned pink, let it get dark around me as the fishing boats all came in for the day.

Started paddling eventually, against the current again as the winds had shifted since I came up this way, paddled until my fingers started blistering. Pulled up my boat and got a beer and went back down to the dock for my first swim of the day, falling weightless into the embrace of dark waters.

Wanted to get out of the Hacienda — though I like it here it gets a bit claustrophobic after awhile. It’s good for a hostel owner to be around as a source of information and host, but sometimes when they have too much of a presence it starts to feel like you’re being watched. Alvaro says things like, “I noticed you’re not eating at the restaurant much.” He’s stressed about money…got into an argument with a potential volunteer the other day right in the middle of the patio. They thought his deal: twenty percent off the price of lodging for hours work a day was stingy, and it is.

The menu is a bit pricey for these parts and fairly uninspired. So as I’ve done every night, I walked up the rocky dirt road to the pair of restaurants at the top of the village where I take most of my meals. The pizza place that only does pizzas on the weekend, and the Margarita Bar. Tonight I chose the latter, ordered a pescado entero, and a guy who was ordering a beer just at that moment asked if he could sit with me — said he didn’t want to sit alone. Of course I said he could, and we got to talking.

His name was Miguel, 33, maestro of science at Alvaro’s school, studied English five years, but doesn’t speak well. He spoke a slow, formal Spanish, the only problem being that he would clip the vowels at the end of words. Lived in Managua for five years, university, doesn’t like it there. There are things to do, opportunities in business, but he prefers nature. The stars, the water. I understood. Was starting to like this guy, enjoying our conversation despite being exhausted from all the paddling and sun and fading from hunger, but at some point he started in to trying to sell me some land. Kept saying that he had all the documents and papers, that it was a legitimate sale, despite the fact that I showed no interest or ability. I told him over and over that I couldn’t afford to buy his land, and he got frustrated.

My plate of fish came, a feast. I said con permiso, dug in, and he gave up and left me to eat, went to the next table to talk to the funny young Nicaraguans getting drunk and laughing at the next table. I was very grateful for my fish, a delicious tender flavorful whole fish from this lake, with rice and beans and plantains and cabbage salad. For a hundred and twenty cordobas, four dollars.

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Tempestad. Morning tea, looking at the rain falling in sheets. “Lluvia es normal aqui,” says Javier, a young man who works the desk/bar at the Hacienda. Seems like a pretty good storm to me. When I went to bed last night it was just extremely humid, but I had enough sense of weather to put the rain fly up. Not long after lying down, it started to sprinkle, then pour, and kept up all night. For awhile I just had a little dripping and pooling in the corners of the tent, and got a fair bit of mud splatter, but at some point, quite significant waves started crashing against the lake shore and coming down on the tent in big bucketfuls.

I had never considered this possibility when I made camp barely ten feet away from the lake. Tents are not designed to withstand waves, and thus it was a wet night. When it stops raining I’ll have to take everything out and hang the tent up to dry. And the necessity of breaking camp makes me think that maybe I should just leave here, but on the other hand I feel a strong resistance to movement. I’ve been five nights here on the shores of Isla Ometepe, and I am very much in thrall to the power of this place. This island was considered sacred to the indigenous Nicaraguans, a manifestation of the earth mother, and I get it. It is fertile and rich and otherworldly. Time has a dreamy quality here — it feels like I might have been here much longer.

There is the pressing question of my tourist visa. Travelers are given ninety days within the CA-4, that is, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and I am getting very close to the end of that. One confounding issue is that I was given additional time by the immigration officer at the Nica border. Did the math this morning and by one count I have five days left and by another, eighteen. Had a long talk with Alvaro an hour ago about this: he is pretty sure that the CA-4 visa supersedes my tourist card, that the border guy just wanted to charge me some extra money for a card that means nothing. He thinks I have to cross the border within five days or start paying fines.

Learned some more about this Hacienda. It turns out it was once the vacation home of the Somoza family, the dictators who ruled Nicaragua for forty years, as well as the center of their coffee plantation that took up much of the south of the island. After the revolution, it became a collective farm run by the Sandinistas, but eventually fell into disrepair and was abandoned for awhile. Alvaro leased it from the government some years back and founded the school and hostel. Back then there wasn’t much competition, but now there are a bunch of hostels a few miles up the road.

I sit and look at the dock and imagine military boats pulling up, guards escorting the general out of the boat, nervous workers rushing around to satisfy the ruling family’s wants. Cargo boats and barges being loaded with burlap sacks of coffee beans, supervised by officials in short revolutionary caps.

Despite the visa question, if I am honest with myself, I am not in any hurry to leave. Each day has its own adventure. A couple days ago I took a walk out on the dirt road north, and half an hour later when the first vehicle came by I stuck my thumb out and caught a ride on the back of a pickup. There was a crowd back there, all standing and hanging on for dear life as we swerved around the potholes we could avoid and humped over the ones that swallow the road entire. Got down at the crossroads at Santa Cruz, the next village up, then walked south, down and up hills an hour to Balgue. I was basically circumnavigating the base of the volcano. Beautiful country all around, rural and jungle, fruit trees, pigs and chickens and ducks and hunchback cows with pretty eyes, people drying various grains and coffee beans on the concrete slabs in front of their houses. Was going to hitchhike more, but no one passed but motos.

Just past the village, I found the gravel road for La Finca Magdalena and walked up it a mile or so, the lower slopes of the volcano, soaking through my shirt and finding myself short of breath with the climb. The finca was an old coffee plantation, now a ramshackle but charming hostal inn, and behind it was the entrance to Parque Nacional Volcan Maderas, whose protections seem limited given the number of people growing things and ranching inside. I’d come for the petroglifos, and hiked back into the jungle a ways to find them. Thick vegetation, the cries of strange birds, howler monkeys in the distance. There were dozens of carving sites, rusting and broken signs marking some of them. At some point I realized that if there was an interesting looking or significant rock, it probably had petroglyphs somewhere, faint as they might be.

Didn’t find anything that seemed representative, mostly spirals and curlicues, shapes and lines. Well-decorated rocks. Hard to get my head around what might have been the world or mindset in which these carvings were made. Sat there and tried, but that world seemed far away, distant, and the carvings were faded with time and weather. The only thing that really resonated with me was the idea of art, the human need for expression. But it was clear that there was something more to these carvings. A message I wasn’t getting, though I was content just to be in the presence of the ancients.

Yesterday I took a good long afternoon paddle down the coast under cool grey skies. Around Los Islas del Monos, a couple little islands populated by spider monkeys who yelled at me, ran out to the end of branches like they were going to jump in my boat. I don’t know whether they were protecting their territory or just wanted to catch a ride, but I didn’t want to find out, and kept my distance. Further down past the village of San Ramon, to where the island starts to curve away south. Volcan Maderas was unobscured by clouds, and I paddled for hours in its orbit, almost to the end of the island. Got that feeling being away — on the water, floating, the meditation of paddle strokes, found the rhythm that sustains itself, lost it, found it again. Made it back just in time to see the sun disappear across the lake and an evening swim off the docks. Every night a different kind of sunset.

I’ve been going to the Margarita bar almost every night now. There’s no menu, you just go up to the window and ask the señora, “que tiene?” and she’ll tell you. Usually two options, some days three. “Pollo, Cerdo.” I have found you can’t go wrong. Miguel the teacher and prospective land-seller is usually there, along with a cast of regulars, most of them young men, and he bids me a buen-noch (that’s how it sounds), but he’s not friendly anymore. That’s alright. I read a Hemingway short story or two and savor my dinner and pay my money and leave.

Then I’ll walk back in the dark, seeing how long I can make it without turning on my headlamp, sit in the restaurant at the hacienda, have a beer and almost every night find some good people to talk to. Last night it was Erica from Cali in Colombia and her boyfriend Erland, a civil engineer from Norway. She is doing post-graduate research about community responses to violence in San Salvador, and they are taking a couple weeks to see Nicaragua. She told me about a hundred places I need to see in Colombia, and was passionate and proud of her country. We got to talking about the monkeys I kept hearing in the jungle. I asked if they had heard them, and then something struck me. How did these monkeys get here, out to this island?

We started talking about this and we went right down the rabbit-hole. First how monkeys, and a lot of them, would manage to cross a lake that takes an hour by ferry. But then a bigger question dawned on me, which turns out to be one of the great mysteries. How did monkeys, which are originally (we’re talking millions of years) like all simians, from the old world, get to the Americas at all? They had to get here somehow. It didn’t seem like they’d want to migrate across the Bering Strait, like a lot of mammals did. After much speculation and absurd figurings, we looked at the internet.

Turns out no one knows. There’s no fossil trail across North America, the monkeys just appear in South America thirty million years ago. The best theory that scientists have at present, is that they came across from Africa on large floating islands that had trees that acted as sails and provided enough food for them to survive the trip. Seriously. This is the best theory scientists have, which is to say they have no idea.

The two nights before that it was Fenna and Jean-Paul, a Dutch couple who like to play cards. We started out playing Uno, but then I upgraded them to Cribbage. People stay a few nights and then leave. I am the longest-tenured guest at the Hacienda. I wake up in my tent each morning and after I make my tea, decide whether I should take out a kayak or go for a walk. It’s not a bad life, and it will be hard to leave here.