Ometepe Island 🌋🏞️🌈

We spent two days on the beautiful island of Ometepe. This is located in the middle of the largest lake in Central America. It is the largest volcanic island in a freshwater lake. The two volcanoes are the still active Concepcion and the extinct Maderas volcano.

Our journey to Ometepe went from San Juan del Sur with the chicken bus (old American school buses) to Rivas/San Jorge and from there with the ferry. The view of the island from the ferry is impressive, with the two volcanoes 🌋 and the green landscape.

We only had one full day on the island, in which we rented a scooter and drove around the entire island. The landscape of Ometepe is truly impressive. Some of the streets were very adventurous 🙈 the streets themselves but also the animals that suddenly stood on the street or crossed it (horses, pigs, cows, dogs, chickens...)

We also dared to jump into Lake Nicaragua, although we had read in advance that bull sharks live in the lake. The only freshwater lake that is home to them.

According to a legend, the Indians who lived on Lake Nicaragua sank their dead in the lake and left them to the sharks 🦈. Because the sharks were sacred to the Indians. As a result (so the legend goes) the sharks could no longer distinguish between buried and living people and became dangerous man-eaters. In fact, bull sharks are among the most dangerous shark species. Well we survived 😌

That's why we had an involuntary encounter with the police in the evening 👮🏽🙈We wanted to go out for something to eat and since our hotel wasn't that far from the center and we still had a scooter, we came or rather Benny (he didn't want to destroy his hairstyle 😜). ) to the glorious idea of not wearing a helmet. No, fun, I didn't want to walk, I wanted to take the scooter and then Benny was like, "But then only without a helmet!! 😉" You have to say that almost nobody wears a helmet here, except the tourists 😃

And we were promptly stopped right in front of the restaurant where we wanted to eat anyway. We hatched a plan to get past the police after dinner. Benny had a helmet in his scooter and I just walked a little further. Nothing came of it because our scooter was gone 🙈 we asked the restaurant and they said it was definitely with the police. So we went to the Ometepe police headquarters. On the way there, someone suddenly called Benny's name, the woman from the scooter rental company. She saw the police taking her scooter away. Blessing in disguise. She paid the ticket (driving without a helmet: $25), we were able to give her the money and had the scooter back.