The petroglyphs of Ometepe

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We managed to check our of our dungeon room and into the much nicer Villa Paraiso in the morning. It was about 1000 times better and only $21 vs $20 next door.

We borrowed some bikes and went for a ride along the smashed up, rocky dirt road. The people on the island (and Nicaragua in general) are very poor and live in very basic conditions. They wash their clothes on rocks either in the creek or the lake, and live in simple shacks. Their farming is all done by hand with no machinery. We saw one farmer walking along with a pole poking holes in the ground, while others followed him dropping seeds in. Because it is so tropical, things grow very rapidly and you constantly see people hacking away at the vegetation with machetes.

After our bike ride we went on a horse ride tour to see the petroglyhs. We were a little concerned that the horses would be malnourished, walking skeletons like some of the ones we had seen previously. We had said to ourselves that we wouldn´t ride horses that were in that condition. Fortunately, the horses were in good shape.

We rode along the beach, where we saw a farmer take his herd of cattle to drink and go to the toilet - just along from where I swam the previous day... The ride was leisurely and after the beach we headed up along the dirt road and onto a small track. Horse riding seems like such a lazy thing to do, since we could easily walk as fast as the horses were going.

We got off our horses and Julio, our very quiet, spanish-only speaking guide showed us around the petroglyphs, which are rock carvings from about 1500 years ago. Some were protected under small structures with rooves, and others were just sitting out with some cattle near a barn.

We returned to Santo Domingo and did the very short canopy tour there with Magella and Fiona, two Irish girls from the petroglyph tour. They had done an amazing amount of travel over the last 10 years, visiting almost every corner of the planet.

We discovered that somehow in the last 24 hours, we had lost our Lonely Plannet guide-book somewhere. This was too bad since we had become quite reliant on it for advice on where to go, where to stay, etc.

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