Day 62 - Isla de Ometepe

OMETEPE ISLAND (04/03/09)

The beautiful and remote Island of Ometepe is home to many unusual and diverse forms of wildlife. On our first morning there we got up at dawn in order to see the morning activity. These attractive blue birds were very common on the island.

The main reason for our early start was to see the Cappucin monkeys who lived in the trees next to our hotel.

They were very cheeky. This one looks very worried about the fact that it was stealing the flowers out of the hotel garden.

Some of the monkeys allowed us to get very close.

A mother and baby perched on a large boulder of volcanic rock.

These are the 2 best tour operators we have had in Central America. Well if not the best definitely the most trustworthy!

The birds decided to join us for breakfast. Apparently sometimes they are bold enough to steal food from peoples plates.

After breakfast we (Adam!) decided to go mountain biking. On the relaxing first 5th of our journey we saw this day old foal.

Lake Nicaragua. It looks like the sea but the trees give away that it is fresh water.

Liz is still looking quite cheerful here. As it turned out the track was 40 hellish kms of pot holes, rocks, steep slopes, dust, burning sun and very few shops to buy water.

The track was a loop around the smaller of the two volcanoes making up Ometepe, Volcan Maderas. Most of the scenery was banana plantations like this.

We encountered many locals on our trip around the island, most of which were probably quite suprised to see these two crazy gringos on bikes!

One of the many, many pauses for breath and water.

Every time we turned a corner we were met with a sight like this or steeper. Towards the end we were just having to push our bikes up these very slowly.

Due to the fact that most of the way round there was very little shade the intense sunshine became a bit of a problem. This is Liz´s solution to nose sunburn! Much to Adam´s amusement he was saying "elle es bandito" (she is bandit) to the locals we passed.

We both wished we could join these two horses playing in the cool lake.

Adam drinking some of the eight litres of warm water consumed that day.

As we got nearer home we were greeted with the sight of the larger Volcan Concepcion.

Liz taking a photograph of herself purely to check out the sunburn!

Another spectacular view of the almost perfectly conical Volcan Concepcion. Near the top left of the cone the small black dot is a dragonfly who wanted to be in the picture (if you double click on the picture for a larger version you should be able to see it).

Not looking half as EXHAUSTED as we felt, we were home at last and NEVER again will Liz go on an "easy mountain bike ride" with Adam!!