Fourteen volcanoes, eleven active; add one colonial city, with a clutch of pueblos and you have the makings of a ‘Ruta del Significant Somthing’.  What’s pleasing about this touristic designation is that there actually is some physical presence on the ground to substantiate the Tourist Secretariat’s grandiose claims.  We’ve ridden a few of these designations, often ‘Rutas del Intoxicants’, where there’s been little evidence, merely token patches of grapes or some gesture of a cactus agave; whilst others are just plain enigmatic creations, like ‘Roads of the Heart’ or ‘Route of the The Sun’.

‘Ruta Colonial y Los Volcanes’ starts with that fishing launch and a hot black sand beach, backed by Volcán Cosiguina, a long, swaybacked hill that harbours a crater lake but doesn’t meet my expectation of ‘Volcano’, be that living or sleeping.

So the search is on.

Early morning. Woodsmoke suffusing the still air, an empty gravel track, our tyres hunting the smooth line, being overtaken by the very occasional motorbike and the hourly service bus that connects our arrival shore and it’s fisherman’s shacks with the rest of Nicaragua. It’s ‘hard-tack’ dry country that serves as yet another differing, unique initial signature to a new country.

Yet again I’m struck by the fact that these small countries were, for three centuries, Spain’s dominions, then followed just five years as one single independent nation, only to fracture apart along the borders that still exist today. Still, they would have had that common history, heritage, language, and yet they are so diverse. I might have expected that drifting down the Central Americas’ spine that each border hop would be a moment of frenetic activity, followed by an immediate return to ‘same’, back to that which had gone before.

Not So.

Eventually our reverie of silent solitude is shattered when a major road intercedes, an incision that fortunately coincides with a segregated cycle lane. The cycle being more commonly the trike taxi, rather than the wide loaded gringo tourer and so makes for interesting passing; for lane discipline and correct direction of travel is an optional extra.

A series of volcanic hills lie to our left, but none fit the desired Fuji-esque standard.

So the cinder cone search continues.

Then we reach the shores of Lake Managua; and there, across an interruption of grazing stock, banana plantation or dry tropical forest, is a perfect cinder-cone volcano. Volcán Momotombo. Aesthetically pleasing , symmetrically perfect. It even has a steam-plume.

Lago Cocobolca (aka: Lake Nicaragua) will follow and it too has its iconic cone, this time in the conical shape of Volcán Conception. And to prove it’s ‘interestingly active’ status, gives a grumble and burps some ash, which discolours the constantly recurring lenticular cloud on its summit.

Volcán Conception is an island, 30,000 people live under its slopes and as an island with that population, there is of course a ferry service. And where ferries go we need to follow. A day trip to circumnavigate the perfect volcano can’t be missed. We’ve been assured that there is a road right around it, reassured that cars can drive at fifty miles an hour right around it; this from an expat Confederate Flag-flying hotelier who’s lived in the area for seven years.

Standing at the bow as the craft pitches it’s way towards the island mountain, rolling through swells that come in two differing directions, neither of which match with the gusting winds also moving in yet another two differing directions. A complicated chop of water; a complicated weather system that looks to be replicated on the upper slopes. Clouds are constantly forming, then dissolving only to reform again, a roiling mass of atmospherics, that will just as suddenly spawn a solitary cloud that drifts casually away, slowly breaking up in a vast blue expanse.

A cloud-caster, weather-maker mountain.

Maybe there’s something Zen Buddhist in this search for the perfect mountain, for we cycle Conception’s girth: anti-clockwise, once only, not the seven that a stupa’s veneration would require. Still there’s a degree of pleasurable satisfaction, a privilege to watch it transform through out the day as it throws off its nighttime vaporous mantle, to see it from all its changing, always identical silhouettes. For I no longer have that consuming need to see the mountain from its summit, no longer needing to gather it’s ‘tick’, happy to be in it, rather than on top of it.

(As for our circumnavigation road, a little over half is ‘crete monoblock; the rest is a rubble of volcanic scoria, soft sand and polished river stone over which the sporadic traffic skitters at walking pace).