At the Ben Linder Cafe in León, Nicargua.

We did climb Volcán Masaya. Although we didn’t have to. Most people drive or take a taxi up to the rim. The park rangers were evidently concerned for our safety because they followed us on foot at a not too descrete distance. Lucky for the guy going up they tag teamed it and a pickup would drop a guy off a few hundred meters ahead of us. He’d wait for us to pass before following along behind. His radio squawking. “Si, los veo!” We thought we lost him for awhile when we passed a couple walking down. Unfortunately, we picked up their tail around the corner. We asked them why but they totally denied it and told us they were only there to answer questions. Finally, on the way down, we gave up and got in the back of a ranger truck.

The crater continuously billows smoke and noxious fumes which burn the nose. There are kelly green parrots living down there and flying around in it.

There seem to be few places in Nicaragua where there isn’t a volcano towering over you. On Isla Ometepe there are two. Volcán Concepción (foreground 1610m) and Volcán Maderas (background 1394m). Concepción is active and has erupted relatively recently (1957) but Maderas is extinct and has a lagoon in it’s crater. They touch tangentially forming the distincted shap of the island. You probably already learned all that from the wikipedia article if you clicked on the image from the last post. You can tell the place is special just by looking at a map.

We didn’t climb them because the massive amounts of rain made the roads and trails very muddy. We talked with several groups that turned back halfway. Also, the peaks were totally shrouded in fog, so we wouldn’t have been able to see anything from up there anyway. Sour grapes and excuses. We did make it 500m up Maderas to see the waterfall.