Isla de Ometepe

Last weekend Maggie, Hannah, Sara, and I went to Isla de Ometepe.  This was the only Nicaraguan site in my (dad's) Lonely Planet Top 500 Places in the World book, so I had high hopes.  The entire island consists of two volcanos rising up from the middle of Lake Nicaragua.  It is all very undeveloped with few tourists and no cities.  Transportation is not simple, and all its wonders are natural ones.  The best way to get around was by bike or by jam-packed-in-the-way-only-third-world-countries-know-how 'chicken buses.'

Walking through plantain forests from one part of the island to another

We biked to Ojo de Agua, a swimming lagoon in the rain forest at base of volcano.
Unfortunately it's becoming less and less secluded in nature with the advent a poolside restaurant

Walking along the beach, when we came to this super green pasture with horses and bubbling creeks

El Volcan Maderas

Know your earthquake emergency plan!
We also had a what-if-lava-starts-flowing-down-this-road emergency plan

We started out at 5 am for an intense guided hike (only to the half-summit) of the active Volcano Concepción

View as we scrambled up boulders of volcanic rock

Discovering our favorite bakery

We attended a baseball game in Altagracia, the small town where we were staying on the island.  In Nicaragua, baseball is actually more popular than soccer (even though some of the players were wearing soccer cleats and even soccer jerseys).  The games are usually free, and teams from different parts of the island or the mainland will play each other.  Only one of the teams we saw had real jerseys; the other team sort of all just wore blue.  One of the catchers didn't have a chest protector, and almost none of the players had batting gloves.  Stray dogs would wander onto the field from time to time during the game.  The atmosphere was still very exciting and reminded me of summers at home.  In between the double header, all the kids and teenagers (only boys, heaven forbid a girl should've tried to join) run out on to the field to catch balls hit by the players.  (Side note: I tried to convince the hostel owner that I loved baseball because I played softball so much, and he said "Oh, but the girls don't play the sport with bats, right?")  One of the little boys collapsed in the outfield, and it took a minute before eventually the players went out to check on him.  Once roused from his faint spell, he hopped right back up to chase after more balls.

The experience was tainted when we had to leave early because a group of men kept staring at us, surrounding, and making sexual comments at us, pretty typical of my time in Nicaragua so far.  If I had been a male traveler, even if still white as can be, I could have easily sat with the men, talked up the sport with them, and learned something about their lives; there's very little hostility against foreigners.  Instead, being a womyn, I was looked up and down by most men there, shouted "hello sexy" at, and whistled at, eventually feeling so uncomfortable even in a group of four that we all had to leave.  Going on weekend trips as a group of four girls, our Nicaraguan friends will often comment, "You girls are going alone?! Are there any men coming?"  It's not that it is really any more unsafe without a male escort when we're in a group, it's just that it is a bit socially radical.  It's as if they are asking us, "How will you make decisions on your own?  Why would explore on your own?"  Independence is not characteristic cultivated or valued in womyn here.  Men catcall groups of womyn ten times out of ten if there's no man with them.  One man present and a group of womyn will get never get catcalled.  Society allows an independent womyn to be overly-sexualized and mocked on the streets, but an escorted womyn is different since she's under the realm of another man.

In the central plaza of Altagracia; strikingly beautiful and capturing the essence of the island