Virtually the first thing I laid eyes on in Nicaragua was Isla de Ometepe.
Besieged by taxi drivers at the dusty, hectic border, I caught a ride with a college-aged American backpacker and her Australian surfer paramour. They would take me to the surfing colony of San Juan del Sur and their party hostel — called the Naked Tiger, of course. But I was staying somewhere a little quieter.
We set out on the well-groomed highway, lined by white wind turbines and a dry green landscape, when I looked to my right and saw Ometepe. Ten miles across Lake Nicaragua, a lush, green mountain — no, a volcano — rose from the waves. And just to the left of that, an even more dramatic, scarred peak was capped by white clouds, as if it was erupting. These were the volcanoes Maderas and Concepcion, together forming an island.
"Yeah, that's Ometepe," said the surfer in his Aussie hippie drawl. "Whenever I need to get away from the party, I just go to Ometepe, and it's so relaxing."
A double-volcano island in the middle of the world's 19th largest lake? As an enthusiast of strange islands, I was so there — but first, I would spend a week on the Pacific coast.
When I first received the Facebook invite to join my old friend Gretchen, now a yoga instructor in New York, on her seven-day yoga and surfing retreat near San Juan del Sur, I was skeptical. I knew little about the Central American country, except that when I was in grade school, the U.S. funded a covert war against the ruling Sandinistas there (remember Oliver North?). I had seen social-media photos of people doing yoga poses on tropical beaches, but I never thought I would be one of them. Plus, I'm a restless traveler, so I didn't love paying a package price to be confined to one place for a week with a group of mostly strangers.
Yoga on the beach in a developing country with a bunch of Brooklynites? It sounded like the recent surfing episode of HBO's "Girls."
Then I looked at the map and realized that San Juan del Sur is central to the Pacific coast, Lake Nicaragua and the historic city of Granada, and that I could get there by flying to Costa Rica. Maybe I could make some friends and retreat from the retreat to go on a few adventures.