There are Better Things on Ometepe than Tarantulas

Since I have thoroughly smeared the good name of Ometepe in your minds with my story about a big spider, I figure I owe it to the place (described by my guidebook as a place for fairytales) to show you its finer qualities. 

Ometepe is an island in the middle of Lago de Nicaragua.  It's made up solely of two volcanoes, Concepcion and Madera, so when you see the island from a distance, it's two cones rising abruptly out of a large body of water.  It's very dramatic and makes good pictures, particularly when you have a wind farm in the foreground:

You have to take a ferry to the island.  When you start off, the view is something like this (Concepcion on the left and Madera on the right):

As you get closer, it looks more like this:

And if you climb 1000 meters of Concepcion (that's 3000 feet), it looks like this:

And if you turn around and look back at 3000 feet, this is what you will see:

And on the hike back, you may get a better view than I did of one of these (Kapuchan (sp?) Monkey)

I climbed Ometepe with a tour group that consisted of 7 Australians, a Canadian, and our Nicaraguan guide. Our guide's name was Luiz. He's 20 years old and is applying to do a 2 year tourism program at Georgetown University in the fall of 2011.  He would only allow us to climb up to 1000 meters because Concepcion is an active volcano.  It has erupted twice in the past 2 months, once just hours after Luiz finished guiding two Americans who insisted on going to the top. Crazy Americans. During our hike, Luiz got a call from the tour office in Moyogalpa letting us know that all was calm and it was OK for us to go above the treeline to our 1000 meter goal.