The Best and the Worst of the Beach Life

Surprisingly not too sore after our volcano climb, we all woke up wednesday morning with pleantly of time to spare before the old chicken bus came by on its route to the port city of Moyogalpa on Ometepe. Buses ran surprisingly well in Nicaragua, at least where we were. They were always running and our bus transfers always seemed to go off with out a hitch. This bus was no exception, and was only slightly later than the woman at our hotel had told us.

We arrived in Moyogalpa to learn that one of the ferries wasn't running and we would have to wait a couple hours before the second one left or take our chances on a smaller ferry. It was decided that we would wait and in an effort to get out of the hot sun, we headed for lunch. Lunch was two of the largest pizzas I've ever seen for $5 and although 4 of us tried our hardest, we were unable to eat them all.

Upon arriving back in Rivas, we negotiated a cab and all five of us squished in. Our cab driver navigated over bridges, around bridges and in the ditch along a dusty stretch of road to the ocean. Our destination was Bahia Mahagual but upon arrive at the beach, we learned that the resort we'd been heading for was closed and that we were actually on Playa Madera. No matter, it was a beach with beautiful sand and huge crashing waves. We managed to find two rooms in a beach front building on the nearly deserted beach and set about enjoying the sun and sand.

We spent three lovely days on the beach, sunning and surfing. The waves were a little too large for me, but the others swam and worked on their burns. We were served meals at a little beach shack, where the woman graciously made Jon and I a meat free option each night - deep fried cheese slabs!

On Friday, our last night on the beach (and also our first evening without Maarten), the lovely food shack woman packed up her stuff and headed into town, leaving us dinnerless! We went elsewhere in search of food and ended up at the only other place on the beach, Crazy Daves. We climbed up the cliff from the beach to his house, where we received a strange welcome involving a reenactment of what it sounded like when Dave had thrown a pot out of his house and down the hill. Only a little uneasy we agreed to stay for dinner, which seemed to be spaghetti. We were told we were waiting for a bunch of surfers who had seen Dave "rip a big wave" earlier in the day. Dave was indeed crazy, and regaled us with the same story of his big wave over and over again. One surf movie and a couple beers later, we were starting to wish that we'd never come when we were finally served our spaghetti, although there had been no sign of the surfers. The spaghetti was an interesting creation involving veggies, bread crumbs, an egg and curry seasoning (those who ate meat got the version with ground something in it). We ate as quickly as we could, paid for our over priced spaghetti and hurried down the beach to the safety of our little beach front home to enjoy our last evening by the ocean.