Life isn’t all cake and ice cream in the rough and tumble world of offshore real estate sales.

I discovered as much after a week subbing at a friend’s real estate agency in Nicaragua, in the colonial city of Granada, a favored tourist hangout on the gigantic Lake Nicaragua and gateway to the country's finest beaches: My proprietor friend Gerry hung out his shingle on the main square there three years ago when he began to anticipate, correctly as it turned out, that the region was primed for a real estate boom.

Of course any right-thinking ‘wrongful’ owner wants nothing better than to unload it to some rube.. and fast … before he has to give it away. And that's exactly what happened to Gerry and some other folks like him. In a sort of a paid, 'catch and release' program for real estate, they bought what they thought were incredible beach property deals, just in time to have to give them away.

Gerry's legal troubles started when he refused to go gently into that great good night.

But this column is not about Gerry, or his misadventures, nor even my own attempts to straighten them out on his behalf. Rather, it's about a rather singular island called Ometepe, called by some the largest fresh water island in the world, and where I washed up on shore, Robinson Crusoe-like, after I realized I was barking up a dead horse over in Granada (how's that for a mixed metaphor!).

Whether Ometepe really is or is not the largest such isle is a matter of debate: I saw two signs on the island which claimed (variously) that it comprised 8,600 square kilometers, and/or 734 square kilometers.

The island is beautifully forested, with countless species of fruit trees including a delicious type called mammon which I had never discovered before. The ambient scent of fresh guava and plumeria is intoxicating, and when the jungle runs out one encounters waving fields of soft green pasture grass, finely-grained sand beaches, fascinating marshes, petroglyphs and even prehistoric plants that are extinct everywhere else. All of this unfolds within a soft, undulating climate that is alternately wet and dry but never too much of either.

There’s even a lot to do: Mountain biking (the island has an excellent paved ring road), hiking, mountain climbing, exploring, swimming, bio treks, Spanish classes, even pubbing. Yet for all this, Ometepe offers what I consider to be one of the few true-blue escapes from the modern world. A place where one may just as comfortably sit and contemplate one's navel for a week, a month, even a lifetime. Indeed, the days and weeks have a way of slipping surreptiously past one's conscious mind. Located conveniently (for some) in the middle of the adventure traveller’s Central American itinerary, the island is an hour by boat from the mainland and another hour from Granada.