Liberia

so we are in costa rica right now, but this is a picture of this island we hung out in yesterday. it is a volcano in the middle of lake nicaragua. pretty cool, huh? the tourist brouchers boast that it is the world-s only freshwater lake with two volcanoes in the middle. this is a picture of the bigger one. we took this ferry out to the island, and they totally walked our bikes onto the boat on this plank of wood. i kept thinking, "what if my bike falls in the lake...." but they were totally pros at walking the plank. lake nicaragua is huge. i think at one point FDR wanted to put the canal there, but it ended up in panama instead. appearently there was some kind of celebration on the island, and we ended up in the back of this pick up truck on the way to see a rodeo. it was a pretty ghetto rodeo, but i thought it was super cool anyways cuz i-ve never seen a rodeo before. the bulls weren-t particularly tough, and the guys just stayed on until the bull stopped bucking around, and then they-d hope off. all the young macho guys would crawl underneath the chainlink fence, and then when the riderless bull came charging around they-d climb up to the top so that the bull didn-t crush them. also, everyone in the "ring" was drinking tons of beer. some of the bulls were cows, and the anouncer called them, "vaca ferocisima", which means totally ferocious cow. we-ve passed a lot of cows on this trip, but i-m not sure i-d catagorize any of them as totally ferocious.
Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the americas, and when we crossed the border from honduras to nicaragua, this is what the road looked like. then the next day it rained, and it got even worse. this is a picture of erik avoideding potholes near a semi. the road was so bad that we were going faster than the semi trucks. after a while, the road surface got better. this computer loads photos really well, so i-m just going to post some more.