Discovering the World Sans Valise: Discovering Ometepe, an island of Lake Nicaragua - Daily life, coffee plantation and petroglyphs

From (Paradise) Surfing Turtle Lodge, we decided to go to the island of Ometepe. Locals go to the island for the week end or for longer vacation. The island is not very developed and many tourists do not take the time to discover it. We do like these types of "non touristic" places. They are wonderful places to observe daily life of locals.
We took a minivan from Leon with a few other travelers to go to San Jorge (near Rivas). From San Jorge, we caught a ferry to Ometepe island.

View form the dock - It is presidential election time here too (same voting day as in the US)! Daniel Ortega against ??? What happened to the opposition?

We got onto the ferry, During the ferry ride, we had a beautiful view of the two volcanos of the island: volcan Concepcion and volcan Maderas. We arrived in Moyogalpa and took another minivan to our hotel located on Santo Domingo beach.

The next morning, we decided to visit a coffee plantation: la finca Magdalena. We took the "chicken bus" (local bus) to get there and walked another mile to get to the plantation. Not only did we learn about the art of growing coffee, we also saw beautiful petroglyphs on the property. Petroglyphs are images created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, or abrading, as a form of rock art. This work on stones was created about 3,000 years ago (see pictures below).

As we walked to reach the plantation, we witnessed people's daily life.

There are beautiful horses in Nicaragua and many particularly on this island. They are left to eat along the roads. They are also moved from place to place, so we kept encountering them along our path.

The ATM machine is well guarded :))

Here comes our chicken bus.....so fancily decorated! 1$ for two for a 30 minute ride on the bus - Unbeatable price. We even had video entertainment on the bus, close to R rating.