Poverty and Paradise: Travels in Nicaragua

Copyright © Mark Moxon 2024

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This version was compiled on 30 March 2024

This work has been released under the Creative Commons licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). This means you are free to distribute this work to others as long as you retain this copyright notice, do not use the work for commercial purposes and do not alter, transform or build upon this work. For more details please read the full licence.

Front cover: The northern coast of Little Corn Island

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Preface

This book is a collection of writing from the road, covering a one-month trip I made to Nicaragua in 2014. This was part of a larger, six-month journey that took me through Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia during 2013 and 2014.

The travelogue for all these countries and more can be found on my personal website at www.moxon.net, where you can also find travel tips, recommended journeys and further free books for you to download.

I’ve released this book and its companions via a Creative Commons Licence, which means you are free to distribute it to everyone and anyone, as long as you distribute it on a non-commercial basis and make no changes to it. If you know someone who might like this book, please pass it on; I make no money from it, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading it and recommending it to their friends.

Finally, please be aware that this book attempts to be humorous every now and then, so there’s a slight chance that it might cause offence to those who think my sense of humour is as amusing as a puddle of mud. On top of this, some parts will be out of date – which is why each article is dated – and others will betray the naivety of a traveller who discovered his way in the world by throwing himself into it headfirst. It is, however, an honest account of how I felt as I travelled through Central America for six months, and as such, I hope you enjoy it.

Mark Moxon

June 2014

The West

Playa Esteron to León

Written: 20 January 2014

There are quite a few ways to get from El Salvador to Nicaragua. The cheapest, and the slowest, is to take multiple chicken buses, first to the border of El Salvador and Honduras, then across the southern tip of Honduras to the border with Nicaragua, and then from the Nicaraguan border to your destination. You do meet people who have done this, and it’s... well, it’s an experience. We even met someone who witnessed one of the Nicaragua-bound chicken buses roll off the road, as it had so much luggage on the roof that it couldn’t cope with the way the driver was throwing it around the road. Miraculously nobody died, but we chose not to go by chicken bus.

You can also take the slightly more luxurious pullman bus service, which at least keeps the same bus all the way into Nicaragua. It also squeezes fewer people into the vehicle, and even fewer chickens. But there are plenty of stories of pullman buses being held up at the Honduran borders for three hours or more, as immigration officials check every single passport in bureaucratic detail, just to make the point that they’re in charge. We chose not to go by pullman bus.

There’s also a handy tourist shuttle that goes from Playa El Tunco to León in ten hours straight, and because it’s a smaller shuttle bus, it’s reasonably quick and provides a door-to-door service. This is the most popular approach and we could have picked it up at Playa Esteron, but it does mean being stuck in a small bus with a bunch of school-age backpackers for an entire day, which is something that, frankly, we could do without at our age. We chose not to go by tourist shuttle.

Luckily there is another route that skips Honduras altogether. It avoids buses and shuttles, it takes you off the well-worn backpacker trail, it has wonderful views all the way, it’s quicker, and I can’t recommend it enough: it’s the boat from La Unión in eastern El Salvador to Potosí in western Nicaragua, crossing via the picturesque Golfo de Fonseca. We chose to go this way, and what a good idea that turned out to be.

Across the Great Divide

Frankly, I’m surprised that this isn’t the most popular way of getting into Nicaragua, though I suspect that it’s because the Lonely Planet implies that it’s a relatively unreliable route and isn’t the cheapest method. True, your plans can be scuppered by bad weather, but it’s not that expensive for what you get; La Tortuga Verde in Playa Esteron provides a complete service from the hotel to the launch, and the more people there are, the cheaper it gets. There were four other people who were interested in taking the boat – Neil and Bronwyn, a friendly couple from Australia whose company we’d very much enjoyed at the hotel, and a couple of quiet Scottish girls – so the price dropped to US$65 per person, which we thought compared pretty favourably with the US$45 per person price of the tourist shuttle. This would get us all the way to Potosí, from where we’d probably have to take a couple of chicken buses to get to León, our destination for the day.

It couldn’t have been easier. The hardest part was getting up at 6am, because the winds were playing up and they wanted us to get an early start on the crossing. We’d met a couple from Manchester who had come the other way, and they’d been holed up in Potosí for a couple of days as the port had been shut while strong winds ravaged the gulf, but part of the Tortuga Verde deal is that if the boat is delayed, you get to stay in the hotel for free until it goes, so we weren’t too worried. In the end everything went swimmingly.

The hotel’s pickup took us to the sweltering port of La Unión, where we went through immigration and grabbed our last pupusas for the foreseeable future, and a few minutes later we wandered down to the end of the pier and hopped on the launch. We’d heard that you have to wade through disgusting sewage-packed mud to get to the boat – so the advice is to pay someone to carry you across for a dollar – but the tide must have been in as the boat came all the way to the dock. For the first time ever in Central America, the crew made us wear lifejackets, and with a flick of the rudder we turned and headed southeast, towards a horizon studded with distant volcanoes and the pure blue of a cloudless sky.

The first half of the trip was delightful. Neil had been worried about taking the boat as he gets terribly seasick, but the water was as flat as a pupusa and the islands of the gulf slipped by smoothly. To our left was Honduras, to our right El Salvador, and ahead Nicaragua, and we passed small fishing launches, tiny villages, pelicans flying low above the waves, and at one point a friendly dolphin who swam past and flashed his dorsal fin at us in the sparkling sunlight. It was quite dreamy, and Neil was coping fine.

It was a different story when we reached the Nicaraguan mainland about an hour-and-a-half into the two-and-a-half hour crossing. We skirted the northeastern coast of the Cosigüina Peninsula to reach Potosí, and because the wind was also coming from the northeast, we had to sail across a proper surfing swell. The captain killed the speed before he killed us, and we lurched from side to side like schoolchildren in a fairground ride while I stared at the horizon and Neil relied on the travel sickness pills he’d taken before we left. In the end we both survived fine, but we did get soaked by the salty spray of the Golfo de Fonseca, and it was pretty tiring holding on for such a long time as we rode the bucking bronco into Nicaragua.

At last the pier at Potosí came into view, though as it’s a huge affair that towers from the beach and is only suitable for large ships, we had to pull up onto the beach. The pier was crowded with a group of tourists, but this didn’t faze the crew, who were clearly experts at parking the boat in choppy surf; it didn’t take them long to drop anchor out in the surf and to back the boat up onto the beach, where we jumped off into the sand, grabbed our bags and walked up to the dusty and bedraggled immigration office. We got our passports stamped, paid the visa fee, and discovered that the group of tourists on the pier were waiting to take the same boat back the other way... and what do you know, they’d arrived by tourist shuttle, and that shuttle was sitting there, empty and about to head back to León.

So we negotiated a good price for a direct lift to León – US$7 per person – and settled back in comfortable air-conditioning with soft seats and an entire seat row each. For a mere US$27 extra per person, we’d managed to trade ten hours of tourist-shuttle hell with two hectic border crossings, for a beautiful boat trip with one sleepy border crossing and a spacious León-bound shuttle all to ourselves. We did indeed choose well; what a great way to arrive in a brand new country.

León

Written: 23 January 2014

Bloody hell, León is hot. Sure, it’s a dry heat without a hint of moisture in the air, but the sun beats down without mercy and the breezes are hairdryer-hot, and as you walk around the colonial streets of Nicaragua’s capital of political intellectualism and poetry, you can practically hear the walls panting. How anyone manages to survive in this furnace of a city, I don’t know, but any plans we’d made soon evaporated in the stifling heat as even mad dogs and Englishmen waved the white flag and ducked inside for a cold drink.

The main plaza of Parque Central seems to be the proverbial top shelf of this fan-assisted oven of a city, despite a handful of trees and a wide open space that you would assume would be light and airy. Instead the sun pounds down on some wonderful colonial architecture, from the faded grey-white of the Basílica de la Ascuncíon cathedral – the largest in Central America – to the clean Spanish lines of the orange Bishop’s Palace. Indeed, there’s excellent architecture all over the city, from the magnificent churches and museums to the crumbling colonial houses that pepper the streets. If it wasn’t so damn hot, this would be an urban walker’s paradise.

We managed to explore a reasonable amount of the city centre before succumbing to the heat. The highlight was a trip up to the roof of the cathedral, from where you can see across the whole city and to the stunning volcanic peaks beyond, but this is no ordinary roof terrace. For 50 córdobas per person, a slightly glum girl takes you up a series of winding staircases to the top of the building, where she points across a curved roof to a small tower with a balcony. The only problem is that you have to tightrope-walk along the apex of the curved roof, which falls away to either side and into what looks like oblivion (though there are wide gutters on either side, so you probably wouldn’t fall to your death if you slipped... probably). For anyone who gets vertigo – like Peta, for example – this is the ultimate test, particularly as there’s only one way back from the tower: the way you came. Health and safety has yet to reach this part of the world, and doing it in the head-spin of the stifling heat of the city centre only adds to the thrill.

Luckily León is also home to lots of enticing restaurants and bars for when the heat gets too much. Indeed, the Parque Central is one of the few plazas we’ve come across with a restaurant that spills out into the square, rather than huddling beneath the dark colonnades. And even though the backstreets have the usual thin, high pavements that you find in most Spanish colonial towns, which tend to prevent life from spilling out into the streets, it’s easy to wander along and look inside the shops and bars, because instead of hiding everything in the distant courtyards you find in places like Antigua, they instead have high ceilings and large windows to let the air in, so you can see what’s going on from the outside.

This means you can also look out from beneath the whirring fans of your chosen hidey-hole, making people watching not only possible, but fun. And there’s a lot going on in the streets of León, especially when the sun fades away to leave the colourful walls radiating heat like the world’s biggest storage heater. On our first night, we holed up in a restaurant and watched an astonishingly drunk man stagger from bar to bar, taking one step forward and two sideways in his attempts to find his way into the karaoke joint on the opposite corner. The staff patiently turned him around and pushed him on his way, but after staggering away, he’d eventually turn around and fall back through the doorway, until the staff fished out a large stick which they used to poke him away, gently the first two times, but slightly more suggestively as he failed to take the hint.

After being turned away for the umpteenth time, the drunkard noisily threw a beer bottle at the waiters, missing by some distance, and turned his attention towards the restaurant where we were enjoying some of the spiciest chicken wings in the world. Unfazed by the traffic whirling through the junction between us, he staggered in the front door and came right up to our table, which was just inside the front door of the restaurant. He grunted drunken nothings into the spaces above our heads and pointed noisily at our plate of wings before a waiter ran over and whisked him back out again, apologising profusely as we smiled that it was fine and not to worry, that this was life and what can you do? Luckily a man walked past the door with a tray of street food balanced on his head, no doubt heading for the excellent food market round the back of the cathedral, and the drunkard locked his sights on this new target and staggered off towards the man and into the depths of the hot night. We would see him the next day collapsed in a doorway in the main plaza, dead to the world like the dogs panting in the meagre shade of the nearby trees.

We’d had plans to explore more of León, and had considered taking a bus to the ruins of the first attempt to build the city, which were buried in ash from nearby Volcán Momotombo in 1610. But we just couldn’t function in the heat, and the fans in our hostel room served only to recycle the stifling air, sucking the moisture from our skin and shrinking our brains until they rattled inside our skulls like desiccated walnuts. We did manage an excursion to climb Volcán Telica, which was well worth the effort, but we spent most of the time hiding indoors, mainlining cold fruit smoothies and iced water while planning our escape to Estelí, in the much colder northwest of Nicaragua.

It was even too hot for Peta. Need I say more?

Volcán Telica

Written: 22 January 2014

If you like volcanoes, as I do, and you like walking, as I do, then it’s hard to visit the area around León without climbing at least one of the peaks in the nearby Maribios chain. The problem is choosing which one, as there are an awful lot of volcanoes along the spine of southern Nicaragua.

Most travellers tend to head for 726m-high Cerro Negro, a small but relatively new cone that only appeared in 1850, and which is almost pure volcanic ash; as such it is a popular venue for the new sport of volcano surfing, where you ride a modified snowboard down the steep slopes of an active volcano, getting volcanic ash in every orifice, if reports are to be believed. We’d talked to people who’d done it and they weren’t that impressed, comparing it unfavourably with boarding down snow and sand, so it was an easy choice for us to avoid the hordes and instead head for the 1061m-high Volcán Telica, some 30km north of León. The attraction here is that you get to peer into the crater of a still active volcano and look at the hot, glowing lava at the bottom. Count me in!

We set off in the afternoon as part of a group of eight, and getting there was a journey in itself. Four of us sat on the back of the flat-bed truck (with the other four inside), and after whizzing along the highway with the hot wind in our faces, we turned off onto a dirt road and the fun really began. My back isn’t too good these days, and after a few minutes of bumping and grinding along the dirt track, I realised that the rickety wooden benches down the side of the truck weren’t going to give me the support I needed, so I stood up and looked the track full in the face. Eventually we all stood up, and had to duck and dive in unison as we ploughed along an increasingly potholed road beneath low-hanging branches that kept us on our toes. It was a thrilling ride, and by the time we arrived at the road end, halfway up the volcano’s slopes, my hair looked like an advert for gravity-defying hair gel and I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face.

The 40-minute walk up the northern slope of the volcano is relatively easy, and we stopped a lot as the heat from the sinking sun was still fierce, so it didn’t take us long to reach the crater rim. You can see smoke billowing from the summit from miles away, but I hadn’t been expecting the roar of jet engines that hits you as you approach the knife-edge of the crater. As you slowly sidle up to the lip of the crater, a 700m-wide vista opens up beneath you, shrouded in sulphuric clouds of noxious gas that pump up from the 120m-deep chasm beneath your curled toes. It’s an exercise in barely controlled insanity to creep towards the edge, and although the clouds hide the bulk of the crater, the immensity is breathtaking – quite literally when the wind changes and the sulphuric stench of the bowels of the earth blows up into your face.

Awestruck by the crater, we walked east to a viewpoint from where you can look all the way along the east-west Maribios chain of volcanoes, some of them still active, some of them quietly reclaimed by greenery, but all of them serenely beautiful in the dusk light. For the sunset we stomped over to the southern slopes, where the southern plains of Nicaragua open up beneath your feet, with the Pacific Ocean glowing in the distant sunlight as a small horde of tourists appears out of nowhere to share the sight of the sun sinking into the sea.

On the way back to the car we visited the crater rim again, this time on the southern edge, and peered into the depths of the volcano, the jet engine noise as strong as ever. But this time, with the sun down and the stars beginning to poke their way through the night sky, the heart of the volcano glows a hellish red, and you can make out the hot holes through which the clouds of gas howl. It’s unnerving to be perched on the thin lip of such a massive crater with certain death lurking below; this is not a place to linger for a long time.

As we wound our way by torchlight back down the way we came, the stars put on a beautiful show, and under their warm glow we climbed up into the back of the truck, ready for the journey home. This time the stand-up drive was even more thrilling, heading down a dark desert highway, the cool wind in my hair, the warm smell of volcanoes rising up through the air... and ducking the branches as they jumped out of the darkness. And when we arrived in León, the driver took us to our individual hotels, so we got a fascinating tour of the town at night from the back of a flat-bed truck, where light spilled out into the streets from the pool halls, bars, restaurants and shops, lighting up the locals as León shook off the heat of the day and started gearing up for a night on the town, while we went home to sink into a well-earned and very cold bottle of beer.

Estelí

Written: 26 January 2014

It’s weird, but sometimes when you’re travelling, you end up in places that through no fault of their own, you simply don’t like. First impressions count for a lot in this game, and by the time we’d stepped off the bus from León and taken a short taxi ride to our hostel, Peta had decided that the northwestern town of Estelí just wasn’t for her. There wasn’t anything tangible that she could put her finger on, but she really didn’t like it; it scared her and gave her the heebie-jeebies from the instant we hit the main highway that runs along the eastern edge of town.

It only got worse when we checked into the Sonati hostel and found that they’d mislaid our booking, could only give us two nights instead of the three we’d asked for, and that we’d be spending those nights in a dark and depressing room with just one window that looked out onto an internal corridor lit with strip lights. Too tired to argue, we dumped our bags and wondered what on earth we’d done wrong.

Of course, none of this was Estelí’s fault. It isn’t a pretty place, that’s for sure, and its streets are fairly gritty, with broken pavements, lots of dust, some fairly drab architecture and not a lot to attract the average visitor... but it’s not a tourist town, it’s a working class stronghold full of farmers and socialists, so it’s a bit unfair to expect it to be particularly attractive. And yes, the locals have a tendency to stare at you a little too much, and even if you smile at them, most of the time they don’t return the compliment... but then again they weren’t exactly grinning from ear to ear in León, so it’s probably just that we’ve been spoilt by the incredible friendliness of the Salvadorans, after which most places would appear a bit dour (not least our home city of London, which is famously cranky). And OK, the main traveller enclave near the Luna hostel is a bit irritatingly tofu, if you know what I mean – the fact that the tourist agency there is called Tree Huggers says it all, really – but it’s all about community programmes and cooperatives round here, so it’s obviously going to feel a bit ‘mwah-mwah’ and self-righteous at times. Just because it attracts irritating people, it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it.

But in the end we were quite pleased the hostel had lost our reservation, because we didn’t fancy hanging round any longer than necessary. After assessing the situation, we quickly booked a day tour to the nearby canyon in Somoto for the following morning, went out for a disappointing meal at a recommended Cuban restaurant – where the food was astonishingly tasteless, and therefore a pretty authentic version of Cuban cuisine, in our experience – and decided we’d hit the road the day after the canyon visit and head for Matagalpa, which sounded rather nicer.

To its credit, Estelí did come up trumps on our final night. Our hostel turned out to be as awful as we’d feared; it was like sleeping in a hospital, and the echoing corridors, astonishing traffic noise, endless dogs barking and grotty kitchen – which came complete with cats rifling through the litter bins and cockroaches running across the work-tops – really got to us. So it was a massive surprise that the restaurant we picked for our second and last night, the strangely named Pullaso’s Ole, turned out to be the best steak restaurant we’ve visited on this trip, by absolutely miles. Steak is big business in Central America, sandwiched as it is between the United States and Argentina, two countries that are obsessed with a decent cut of beef, but so far, the steaks have been decidedly disappointing. We had a pretty good one in León, but Pullaso’s Ole really pulled out all the stops, and the meat was beautifully cooked and simply excellent, and washed down by a glass of house red that was spectacular.

It was a bit too late in the day for us to start falling in love with Estelí, but it was good to leave with at least one positive memory.

Cañón de Somoto

Written: 25 January 2014

When you travel through Central America, you notice certain themes recurring. Perhaps if I list what we’ve visited on our trip so far, you’ll see what I mean: so far it’s been beach, diving, Mayan ruin, colonial town, Mayan ruin, colonial town, cave diving, diving, beach, diving, diving, Mayan ruin, cave, Mayan ruin, colonial town, Mayan ruin, waterfall, lake, colonial town, lake, volcano, beach, capital city, colonial town, volcano, colonial town, colonial town, lake, ex-war zone, beach, beach, colonial town and volcano. Or, to reduce that to a list of unique experiences, in almost exactly three months of travel, we’ve visited just ten types of location, as follows:

- Colonial towns (8)

- Beaches (5)

- Diving (5)

- Mayan ruins (5)

- Lakes (3)

- Volcanoes (3)

- Caves (2)

- Capital cities (1)

- Ex-war zones (1)

- Waterfalls (1)

You can perhaps understand, then, why it’s a thrill to come across something that isn’t a colonial town, or a beach, or a Mayan ruin, or any of the other types of attraction that we’ve been enjoying in Central America. Welcome to Cañon de Somoto (Somoto Canyon), which according to the guidebooks is an ‘unmissable experience’, but even more importantly, is not on the list above.

Enjoy the Silence

‘Unmissable’ is perhaps a generous billing, but the 4km trek through Cañon de Somoto is certainly a fun way to spend the day. Most people arrange their trip in Estelí, as Somoto town is pretty small, so the day starts with a couple of hours crammed on the chicken bus to Somoto, followed by another chicken bus journey to the canyon itself (which is just off the Pan-American Highway). We were met off the first bus by a tall local called Henry, whose family runs the most recommended guide company in the canyon area, and he took us to his family home just next door to the park entrance, where I swapped my hiking boots for a pair of Henry’s wet shoes (Peta already has a pair of water-friendly trainers) and put on a life jacket. And so our group of some 16 tourists set off west along the main road on foot, carrying nothing other than cameras, water bottles and a sense of anticipation.

Or, I think there was a sense of anticipation, because our group was a bit strange, to be honest, and I never worked out what any of them were thinking. It’s a common complaint these days that younger travellers don’t seem to talk to each other as much as they used to, which most people seem to blame on the internet and the advent of the smart phone; it’s certainly true that when they gather together in hostels, younger travellers tend to fish out their iPhones and instantly sink into Facebook, which does make starting up a traditional sound-based conversation a bit tricky. Whether or not this is true, our group was notable in its inability to generate any kind of group bonding, and even though we tried smiling at people and starting basic conversations, they all fizzled out pretty quickly (if they ever started at all) and the whole day passed without anyone so much as breaking the ice. It was most odd; even the oldest couple in the group – two French ladies of an age that was tricky to determine due to their addictions to plastic surgery and cigarettes, but which clearly exceeded our own – didn’t want to talk, probably because we were English. We even switched to French out of politeness, but that didn’t work, so we gave up and joined the sullen silence that pervaded the group.

Luckily our two local guides were much more friendly, so we chatted to them instead as we walked the 2km to the canyon entrance, while the younger crowd shot ahead in their silent competition to be the first to get to wherever we were going. The canyon is slowly being carved out by the River Coco, the longest river in Central America, though as this is where the river starts, the first section of the canyon is relatively tame. We started by walking through ankle-deep water through the first hundred metres or so, treading carefully because it’s easy to twist an ankle when you can’t see the rocks beneath the water, and yelping every time the water level reached the height of the crown jewels.

Soon enough the river gets too deep to wade through, so we literally took the plunge into the surprisingly cold water as the sides of the canyon rose higher and got closer together. At its highest point, halfway through the hour-and-a-half scramble through the canyon, the walls soar some 100m into the air but are only 5m apart, and the tops of the cliffs are dizzyingly coated in a carpet of orchids. At this time of year they’re like little green spiders clinging to the cliff, but when they bloom with their vibrant blue flowers, it is, according to our guides, a spectacular sight.

Walking Back

The journey continues with more floating, more rock scrambling, and at one point an obligatory jump from the side of a waterfall into the deep water below; you can choose the height of your jump, from 1m up to 8m – Peta went for 4m, while 5m was enough for me – and after that thrill there’s an optional 10m jump (which Peta and I both declined). Meanwhile, the guides show off by jumping from a 20m-high ledge into the deep water, a height that is now forbidden to tourists after a German visitor, acting alone and without a guide, broke his back after misjudging the 20m jump. One of our group misjudged the 10m jump and ended up with a backside the colour of sunset, though at least his back was intact.

Eventually the canyon starts to widen again and it’s back to the rock-hopping, before the route comes out at a small pebble beach where two rowing boats ply their trade, ferrying tourists in and out of the canyon. By this point we were shivering quite freely and had completely numb fingers, so it was a delight to throw off the life jackets and wring out the T-shirts while the sun baked our heads on the short boat ride to the eastern canyon entrance. Indeed, the 45-minute walk back to Henry’s house was an exercise in pins and needles as feeling slowly came back into our limbs, though the views were lovely as we forded the Coco a couple of times and walked back the park’s main entrance.

Lunch at Henry’s house was an oddly silent affair, and even the hair-raising ride back to Somoto in the back of a flat-bed truck and the scramble to grab tickets for the express bus to Estelí failed to spark any meaningful communication within the group. So before we knew it we were back in Estelí – not our favourite place in the world, it has to be said – and while we were glad that we’d explored Cañon de Somoto, we were even more glad to be heading east the next morning. And hey, that’s one more type of experience for the list: canyoning... tick!

Matagalpa

Written: 29 January 2014

Matagalpa is a pleasant spot. Green mountains rise around the edge of town, hiding their tops in low clouds and making the town feel as if it’s being cuddled by the landscape, and the main square is leafy, open and, as per usual, dominated by a huge white cathedral. There’s a coffee museum, there are loads of cafés selling the local brew, and there are even some really good restaurants; indeed, the Italian restaurant in a small side-road just behind our hotel serves up a genuinely delicious pizza, cooked properly in the Italian style rather than the more common and more depressing (failed) attempts at American pizza that we’ve had to get used to throughout Central America. This is a first; thank you, La Vita é Bella.

We didn’t do a lot except wander round town and go on a coffee tour and a chocolate tour. We did try a local Nicaraguan restaurant called a ‘steam table’, which I’d hoped would be like the steam cafés in Kuala Lumpur, but which turned out to be nothing more than a dull, factory-style canteen selling food that genuinely tasted like it had been beamed here straight from a 1970s school. There was no steam to be found anywhere, but they did sell an utterly disgusting drink, which the menu simply referred to as naranjilla refresco natural (‘natural orange drink’), and which we both found to be completely undrinkable; it tasted like sour milk with a fake orange flavour, and made both of us wince every time we sipped it (which we stopped doing after a while). We shan’t be darkening the doorway of any more steam tables, that’s for sure.

But the biggest surprise was my camera. Back in Lago de Atitlán in Guatemala, my camera developed a bit of a problem: a big bit of fluff managed to find its way into the lens, so every time I zoomed in to a certain level, I got a big black splodge at the top of the picture. I soon learned to zoom out slightly and to crop the resulting photo on my Mac – so you shouldn’t see the fluff in any of the photos on this site – and when I accidentally dropped the camera a couple of days later up the Indian’s Nose, the bit of fluff jumped over to the left-hand side of the photo, where it’s been lodged ever since.

I’d given up on ever getting this problem fixed, but I didn’t realise that the coffee farmers of Matagalpa have a latent talent for fixing cameras. When we’d finished our tour of the coffee plantation and went back to the farmer’s house for lunch, I left my fleece on the outside wall with my camera wrapped up in it, and went inside to eat. As I sat down, I noticed out the corner of my eye that the matriarch had gone outside, picked up my fleece and was heading back to the house with it tucked under her arm. As she walked nonchalantly across the concrete patio, my brain sluggishly started to form the thought, ‘Hang on, my camera’s inside my fleece, and she doesn’t know it... noooo!’, and sure enough, I soon heard the sickening crunch of delicate electronics hitting concrete from a height of a metre or so.

‘Ah,’ I thought, and kept quiet as the matriarch picked up my camera, shrugged and quietly put it and my fleece onto a chair just inside the door, presumably hoping nobody would notice.

I assumed that my camera would be completely dead, but no, far from it. Not only is my camera still working perfectly, but the bit of fluff has completely gone, knocked into some dark corner of the camera’s innards by the concrete floor. So a big thanks to you, the farming community of La Corona, for fixing my camera. I now know where to come when it goes wrong next time...

From Bean to Cup

Written: 28 January 2014

I remember visiting Darjeeling during my trip to India back in 1998, not just because of the wonderful views and mountain air (which were excellent and a welcome change from the sweaty plains of the subcontinent), but because it was my first introduction to the way that tea is made. Up to that point I’d been perfectly happy with a good old cup of builder’s tea, but as soon as I discovered the delights of Super Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe, I was hooked. Ever since then I’ve looked out for and enjoyed good quality tea (though that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a nice cup of PG Tips, of course; I’m no tea snob).

After visiting Matagalpa, I think the same thing might happen with coffee, because this is one of the four main centres along the Nicaraguan Ruta de Café (the others being Jinotega, Estelí and San Raphael del Norte). Nicaragua is the 12th biggest coffee producer in the world and is known for producing high quality coffee, so we eagerly booked ourselves on a day-long coffee plantation tour through Matagalpa Tours (who provide English-speaking guides, a bit of a must with our dodgy Spanish). The following morning we were picked up by our guide, José, and our driver, Juan Ramon, and we headed off through the light rain to the coffee-growing community of La Corona, and into a whole new world of coffee appreciation.

Growing Coffee

The little settlement of La Corona, a few miles to the northeast of Matagalpa, is home to a cooperative of small coffee farms, and we bumped our way along dirt tracks to visit one of them and to learn about how coffee is grown. There we met Karla, one of the six children (five daughters and a son) of the farm owners, who themselves had met while picking coffee. Karla talked us through the process of growing coffee, with José interpreting, and it turns out that an awful lot of effort goes in to producing your morning brew, from the bean all the way to the cup.

Coffee plants in Nicaragua are grown from specially selected coffee beans of the arabica strain (of the two main strains of coffee, arabica and robusta, this is the higher quality strain). Beans destined for the nursery are picked from the middle section of the coffee plant, and from the middle part of the branches in that section. They are picked when they are ripe, at which point they look like red berries (they’re called ‘cherries’ at this point); if you peel off the skin, which is not unlike thick grape skin, then there’s a clear pulp underneath that’s not unlike the inside of a firm grape, or a lychee. Inside the pulp you can fine two identical coffee beans, which look a bit like slime-covered peanuts. You can peel ripe beans and suck off the pulp, and it tastes sweet, though there’s no hint of any coffee flavour at this point. There is caffeine, though, so sucking coffee cherries is a mild stimulant that pickers will use to keep them going through the day.

To get beans that are suitable for growing, 100 beans from the same plant are put in water, and if more than five beans float, then all that plant’s beans are rejected. Otherwise the pulp is carefully removed from each bean and the beans are left to ferment, which removes the rest of the pulp, and they’re then washed, dried and stored for up to four months before being germinated and planted. When the seedlings are a couple of inches high – at which point they are called ‘matches’ because the bean casings get pushed up to the top of the seedlings, like a match head – they are removed from the soil, and only those with single roots are kept. These are then planted and watered, and after three or four years the resulting plants are mature enough to start producing their own coffee beans.

Interestingly, the better coffee plantations in Nicaragua look more like forests than fields of crops. Karla’s farm grows coffee that thrives in shade, so they also plant bananas, cocoa and other tall trees to provide shelter from the sun. This also provides a secondary crop for the farmer, as well as producing a higher quality coffee (shade-dwelling coffee plants tend to produce lower yields than those grown in full sunshine, though the coffee is better). They also recycle the water that’s used to wash the beans, they only use organic pesticides, and they reuse all the by-products of the farming process; these are just some examples of what farmers have to do to get accredited by the schemes that ensure higher prices for their crop, such as the Rainforest Alliance, Starbucks, UTZ or Fair Trade.

Harvesting the Beans

Coffee plants are harvested once a year, though the plants flower two or three times a year. Each flower produces one cherry, and all the cherries have to be picked, even if they aren’t good enough to be used, as otherwise the flowers won’t regrow. Ideally coffee cherries are picked when they are ripe and red, as these are easiest to process, though cherries can also be picked when they are green; the taste isn’t affected, but green cherries have to go through an extra fermentation process before the skin can be removed.

On the farm we visited, the cherries are picked by hand, using a twisting motion that leaves the stem behind, ready to flower again. Workers strap woven baskets to their stomachs and drop the berries in as they pick them; they get paid 30 córdobas per basket (about 70p), and an average worker will fill five or six baskets a day (though some manage up to 12, while others only manage two or three). They work an eight-hour shift and get paid twice a month for the amount they’ve picked, and when they’re not picking cherries, they’re sorting them out into red and green, and picking out any dead or diseased cherries. It’s a hard life for little reward.

Once picked, the cherries are put through a four-step process (in the ‘wet mill’) to produce a coffee bean that’s suitable for the next stage (the ‘dry mill’). First, they are put into water where bad cherries float to the surface and are discarded; next, they are fed into a de-pulping machine that strips off the outer skin (which is then used for fertiliser); then they are pumped into fermentation vats, where they ferment until the pulp is dissolved; and finally, the beans are washed thoroughly in a special channel which not only removes the fermented pulp, but also separates the beans according to quality: the best quality beans are heavier and therefore don’t wash away so easily, while the lower quality beans are lighter and wash away first.

These bags of fermented coffee beans, which stink to high heaven, are then sold to an agent, who sells them to the dry mill to prepare for export. The farmer might sell a bag – which contains four buckets – for US$50, which the agent sells on for US$200, and which the dry mill exports for US$1000. The farmers are clearly not the winners in this game, which is one of the reasons Fair Trade exists, to ensure that the farmers at least get a relatively fair price.

Dry Roast

After a pleasant lunch on the coffee farm, we drove back through Matagalpa to visit a dry mill. You see these dry mills all along the main roads in this part of Nicaragua; they are huge, flat, open spaces with coffee beans covering every flat surface, as far as the eye can see. The dry mill that we visited, Beneficio Los Piños, has four distinct areas of drying beans: the best quality beans are in the hybrid area, where speciality strains dry on their own concrete patio; then the first quality beans cover a larger concrete area, drying in carefully raked rows directly on the concrete; just below that is the second quality area, where the yellow beans dry on large plastic sheets on concrete patios; and finally there’s the lowest quality area, where dark brown piles of damaged beans and dried cherry skins steam away on plastic sheets on grass.

The difference between the different qualities of beans is striking. The hybrid and first quality beans are all perfectly formed, with the classic coffee bean shape and a uniformly light yellow colour; the second quality beans are a little smaller and a bit more misshapen, and the piles contain quite a few damaged beans; and finally the lowest quality pile contains a handful of mangled beans (which go to make instant coffee) and bean husks (which the Nicaraguans use for their own coffee, as this is the only way to make it affordable for the locals).

The final part of the dry mill process is to remove the thin layer of yellow skin from the bean (known as the ‘parchment’), and to dry the bean even further until it is ready for exporting. This is done by machine, first by a gargantuan rotating drum that has hot air blown through it; the beans are fed into this drum and bounce around for 24 hours, which dries the parchment and reduces the humidity in the bean right down. Next the beans are fed onto a vibrating conveyor belt that removes the now-dry parchment and separates it from the beans, and finally the beans are sorted into different sizes, and then by colour (which is done electronically, though this used to be done by hand).

The beans are then ready to export. Nicaragua doesn’t export roasted beans, as the aroma gets lost in transit, but luckily for us, Beneficio Los Piños has its own on-site laboratory where they test the quality of the beans. The only way to do this is to drink coffee made from those beans, so after touring the factory, we stepped into the small laboratory and into the wonderful smell of roasting coffee.

The chief tester, Alexander, showed us how it’s done. He spends his days gathering samples of beans from the concrete flats, drying them himself and removing the parchment. He then roasts the beans in a small roasting oven, grinds them up in the grinder, puts the results in the bottom of a white cup, pours on hot water, and waits. He has a round table in the lab that rotates like a table in a Chinese restaurant, so on busy days he will lay out lots of samples, spinning them round to compare tastes. For us, he just picked out one sample, and demonstrated how you first break the froth on top to let out the aroma, bending down close to the cup to get the full effect. Once the aroma has been noted, you scoop off the froth and discard it, wash your mouth out with hot water, and then take a spoonful of coffee and suck it through pursed lips with a loud whooshing sound, before swilling it around and spitting it out into the bucket under the table.

‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘You can taste the chocolate notes in there. Give it a go.’

To be fair, I couldn’t taste the chocolate notes, but the coffee certainly tasted good, even though my attempts to emulate Alexander’s whooshing noise ended up sounding more like a pig with a head cold.

And with that we hopped back in the car and went back to the hotel, swearing never again to drink instant coffee.

The Chocolate Factory

Written: 29 January 2014

Apart from coffee, the other thing apart that Matagalpa grows in the luscious hills around town is cocoa, and where there’s cocoa, there’s chocolate. To be honest, Nicaragua isn’t particularly famous for its chocolate, and while the locals do eat and drink it, it’s pretty grim stuff for those of us who are more used to organic chocolate with lots of cocoa content. Local Nicaraguan chocolate is more about sugar than cocoa, and it’s pretty disappointing.

There is one place in Matagalpa that bucks this trend, though: El Castillo del Cacao. This small, Dutch-owned factory makes just 700 bars every two days, all by hand, and it prides itself in using 100% organic ingredients and in producing what we would consider proper chocolate. It also does tours; how could we resist?

The tours at the factory itself are only in Spanish, so we booked a morning tour through Matagalpa Tours, the same people who ran our coffee tour, so it was no surprise to find that our hosts were yet again José and Juan Ramon. José brought the same caffeinated enthusiasm to chocolate that he’d brought to coffee the day before, and in a couple of hours at El Castillo we learned all about how to make chocolate from the raw ingredients. Here’s how it works.

From Bean to Bar

Like coffee, chocolate starts off as a raw bean, this time the cocoa bean. Cocoa beans grow in large pods that tend to bud off the trunk of the cocoa tree, and when they’re ripe, the pods are harvested and cracked open to reveal lots of cocoa beans, all surrounded by a pulp. The beans are left to ferment in a long, wooden trough, which dries out the pulp, but unlike coffee beans they aren’t washed, but are instead laid straight out to dry in the sun.

Once dried, the beans are ready to head to the chocolate factory, where they are roasted for two hours at 150°C, and sampled every 15 minutes. José took us into the roasting room, and even though the oven wasn’t operating at the time, the smell of roasted cocoa was divine; indeed, there were some roasted beans still in the tray, and they tasted delicious.

After roasting the beans are left to cool for two hours, and then they are ground by hand using ancient-looking grinding stones made from volcanic rock. This separates the bean’s skin (the parchment) from the bean itself, and this mixture of crushed bean and skin is put into a machine that separates the two by blowing air through the mixture; the heavier seeds fall down while the parchment is blown away. They used to do this by hand, in the same way that rice is winnowed by hand in places like Indonesia, but the machine is much more efficient.

The parchment goes off to make fertiliser – though the owner is experimenting with making a chocolate tea from it, which could be interesting – and the beans are then put into the grinder, four times. The first two times the beans are ground into powder, but for the third and fourth grindings, it turns into a liquid as the oil stored in the beans gets released. Some factories extract the oil and sell it separately, adding fats like butter or milk to take its place, but at El Castillo they are proud of the fact that they leave the oil in the chocolate, as it means their product contains just two ingredients: cocoa and sugar.

Talking of sugar, the next stage is to finely grind the chocolate up with organic cane sugar for two hours. The machine that does this is a round drum, full of liquid chocolate that looks hypnotic and smells divine; this is the river of chocolate from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in miniature, and José fished out a couple of short wooden sticks so we could have a taste. At this stage you can still detect the sugar granules in the mix, but it’s definitely recognisable as chocolate.

If we thought the sugar mixer was hypnotic to watch, it was nothing compared to the flavour mixer. This is where they mix in the other ingredients, such as rum, cashew nuts, orange peel, more sugar, coffee, or more cocoa seeds (or ‘nibs’ as they’re called if used as a raw ingredient). The mixer combines a rotating flywheel, a chocolate spout and a trough full of rich, dark goo that gently turns into itself like a chocolate lava flow. At this stage the chocolate is even finer, and it tastes divine.

Once the ingredients are thoroughly mixed in – again, after two hours in the mixer – the chocolate is poured into moulds and put on a vibrating shelf that knocks all the air out of the mixture, so that the final bars will be structurally sound. Then it’s into the fridge for – you guessed it – two hours for the chocolate to set, and the final product is packaged by hand into a heat-sealed foil wrapper with a paper label.

The result is a chocolate bar that’s clearly hand-made. The texture is still slightly unrefined – you can feel the granules of cocoa and sugar on your tongue as it melts – but the taste is clean and simple enough for you to taste the individual ingredients of cocoa, sugar and (in the unflavoured versions) absolutely nothing else.

It also goes rather well with local Matagalpan coffee, as we discovered at the end of the tour. Interestingly, this chocolate doesn’t sell to Nicaraguans, as it’s too expensive; the growing process is complicated and difficult, so cocoa beans sell for a premium, and that’s why local chocolate is so low in cocoa content. Chocolate bars with 50% or 75% cocoa content are far too expensive for the locals to buy, at US$1 for a standard-size bar, so the only market for El Castillo’s products are the tourists that visit Matagalpa, and who shop in the few outlets that stock their products. This is, quite literally, a cottage industry, with the chocolate being produced in a small breeze-block building behind the owner’s house. They are trying to get accredited so they can start to sell their chocolate abroad, but for now this is a purely Nicaraguan industry (apart from one outlet in neighbouring Honduras).

If Nicaraguan chocolate takes over the world, then this is where it started...

Granada

Written: 3 February 2014

Granada, the most popular tourist attraction in Nicaragua, is a very strange place. On the surface it’s a picture-perfect colonial town on the shores of Lago de Nicaragua, with cathedrals silhouetted against pure blue skies, horse-drawn carriages plying the streets, and plenty of restaurants and watering holes. As far as tourism is concerned, Granada ticks all the boxes.

It isn’t all smiles, though. Sit down for a beer in one of the bars along the tourist enclave of Calle La Calzada and look around, and you’ll see child labour, hard drinking, prostitution and thievery, all threading their nefarious ways through the oblivious American tourists. The 2003 travel book 1000 Places to See Before You Die says of Granada:

Lack of tourism has helped keep both Nicaragua’s natural environment and its heritage intact. Nowhere is this more evident than in Granada.

I rather suspect that in today’s Granada, the complete opposite is true, as a tide of tourism rolls into the city and encourages a side of Nicaragua that is considerably less appealing than the tourist board would have you believe.

Personality Disorder

Granada is physically attractive, there’s no doubt about it. The Parque Central is utterly charming, and is the cleanest and crispest colonial plaza I’ve seen in the whole region; squint as the sun sets, and you could easily kid yourself that you’re in Spain rather than the poorest country in Central America. As with most colonial towns, it’s all about the churches and the plazas, and Granada has plenty of options, from the crumbling Iglesia de la Merced (whose tower you can climb for a classic view over the city) to the sparklingly clean white-and-earth tones of the cathedral’s new paint job. You can’t help clicking your camera every time you turn a corner, and there are lots of corners in this grid-based city.

It was hot when we visited, too hot for us to explore on foot, so we took an hour’s ride in a horse-drawn carriage to see all the main sights. They are delightful. We then walked down to the lake shore and explored the rather downtrodden Centro Turistico park to the southeast of town, and yes, if you ignore the tired tourist park with its ugly restaurants and piles of litter, it is all very pretty. We also met up with Pamela and Matteo, whom we’d last seen in Suchitoto in El Salvador; they’d gone on to Honduras and the Bay Islands, but the weather had been terrible and they found Honduras to be scary and dangerous, so they’d come back to Nicaragua and got in touch when they reached Granada. We teamed up with them to go on an hour-long boat ride to Las Isletas, a collection of hundreds of beautiful islands to the south of town, where millionaires’ houses perch on the rocks that were thrown from the nearby Volcán Mombacho that dominates the skyline to the south. Yes, physically, Granada does the job; it is an attractive place, no doubt about it.

But it’s the personality of the city that’s the problem. Yes, the buildings are lovely, but it’s hard to warm to the locals here, and after a few days, we just found it wearing. Take a seat at one of the tables in the main tourist drag, and you’ll be subjected to a constant stream of jaded men, women and children trying to sell you anything from hammocks to cigarettes; it’s polite to say ‘No, gracias’, but it soon becomes a chore that neither party enjoy. Sit there for long enough, and a group of children will come along and perform La Gigantona, which involves extremely loud drumming; a 3m-tall costume of a women with a young man inside, twirling and jiggling up the street; a child in a squat costume with a large head who spins round and round; and after the drumming has stopped, a gaggle of disinterested children coming up and asking for money. The first time you see it, it’s quite good fun; after it’s gone past for the fiftieth time and totally disrupted your evening, it’s harder to be charitable, especially as the children stay up late at night to perform this endless tourist cash-trap, and end up handing the money over to a Fagin-esque figure who, out of the glare of the main tourist trade, berates them for not dancing properly, and drives them on to keep dancing, way past any sensible bed time for a child. It’s all a bit unsavoury.

Then there’s the guy who will befriend you in the park by the lake, ask you where you’re from and how long you’ve been here, before brazenly saying, ‘Give me money,’ in a tone of voice that says, without ambiguity, that you are nothing more to him than a walking wallet. Or the child who sits down at your table and asks you for money, telling you that he has no parents and sleeps rough in the square, despite clear evidence to the contrary in the shape of his perfectly washed and ironed clothes, clean hair and good shoes. Or the scarred and battered man who points to your friend’s cigarette packet and says, ‘Give me one,’ and when you politely shake your head, he says, ‘I am Honduran, give me a cigarette or I will cut you, I will see you and I will cut you, give me one now,’ before the waiter idly standing a few feet away finally comes over and pushes him away. Or how about the guy in the backwards baseball cap who tries to steal your wallet by bumping into you and slipping his fingers into your trouser pocket; when he tried it on me, he discovered that I always close my pocket with two interlocked safety pins for just this eventuality – he wasn’t pleased and spun round after bumping into me, brazenly giving me the evil eye and shouting at me, rather than just slipping into the crowd like a more intelligent thief would do.

Or how about the poor American boy we met in the bank, who that morning had arrived from the north of the country; on the bus into Managua he’d been befriended by a lovely old woman and her daughter-in-law, who had said that they were going on to Granada and were being picked up by her son and husband, so would he like a lift into town? And as soon as he got in the car, the old woman sat on his lap while her son pulled out a knife, held it to his throat, got him to reveal his pin number and hand over his cash and cards, and then cleaned out his bank account. The moral of the story? Trust absolutely nobody round here.

It isn’t just about touts and thieves, though; it’s the little things, which would normally be minor inconveniences, but which come thick and fast in this town. Like the park attendant who, seeing that we were sitting on a bench in an almost empty park, stopped on his bike, picked up a nearby sprinkler, and stuck it in the ground right in front of our bench, so we had to get up and move. Or the lady at our hotel, who seemed genetically unable to crack a smile, despite our very best efforts to be nice. Or the waitress at the coffee shop who, when we asked, said that yes, the iced coffee came with milk, which it then didn’t, and when we pointed out that she’d said it came with milk, she just looked at us with forlorn stupidity and said, ‘Oh, yes, sorry,’ before saying that they didn’t have any milk anyway, and still asking for a tip.

Or how about the American restaurant owner who asked us how our meal was, and when we said that it had been nice but the curry had been far too hot to eat, he sat there and noisily blamed his staff for being useless and not knowing how to cook, shrugging and saying, ‘Well, this is Nicaragua.’ Meanwhile, he just sat outside the restaurant, chatting with his friends and totally failing to do anything like, say, training his staff properly.

But the most unsavoury moment came as we sat in the tourist street, enjoying a beer with Pamela and Matteo while the Superbowl final erupted on televisions all along the road. A seriously drunk tourist, who could hardly stand up he was so battered, kept staggering after one of the street urchins, bending down to joke with him and putting his arm on his shoulder in a manner that instantly set alarm bells ringing in the paedo-paranoid psyches of us watching westerners. Nobody said anything until another of the local touts, who seemed to be unable to speak, saw what was happening and warned the drunkard off the little boy, using the power of sign language to make it clear that this was not OK. The mute tried to explain to the barmen that something dodgy was going on, but they seemed uninterested, and it was only his persistence that eventually put the drunkard off trying to make friends with the boy. I guess there are plenty more fish in the sea, when there are children on the streets and money in the sex tourist’s pocket.

So Granada may once have been a place where Nicaragua’s lack of tourism kept the natural environment and its heritage intact, but I’m not sure that’s the case any more. For me, the beauty of Granada really is only skin deep.

The Caribbean

Flying to the Corn Islands

Written: 4 February 2014

There are two ways to get from central Nicaragua to the Corn Islands, the tiny pair of idyllic Caribbean hideouts that live some 70km off the eastern coast of the mainland.

The first option is to take the chicken bus from Managua to El Rama, which is supposed to take five hours for an express bus, but which almost always takes longer. You then need to get onto a boat to Bluefields, which can take up to seven hours (though there are faster express services if you time it right).

Then you probably need to wait a day or two for the next boat to Big Corn Island, which should take somewhere around six hours, though we met a girl who’d spent twice that on a boat journey from hell where even the locals started praying for deliverance from the monster waves. This journey is the stuff of legend, and we met a Frenchman in León who said it took him five days of travelling to get from Managua to Big Corn, by which time he had to turn around and go straight back, as he’d used up all the time he had left in just getting there.

The second option is to fly, which takes about an hour and 20 minutes. Not surprisingly, we chose this option, as indeed did the Frenchman on his return journey. Sometimes less is more, especially when you’re talking about time that you could be spending on a Caribbean beach.

Island Air

Even with the flight option, it still sounded like a bit of an effort, having to deviate miles from our planned route south to Costa Rica just to visit a couple of islands, but we needed a bit of a break from the unpleasant hassles of Granada, so we thought we might as well see what was involved. In the end, it was relatively easy to arrange a quick side-trip to paradise; I bought two return flights from the La Costeña website with no more than a few clicks, I booked an airport taxi through our hotel in Granada, and Peta managed to make a couple of hotel reservations on Little Corn Island that would see us through our visit. All we needed to do now was to get there in one piece.

The first step was easy, and the taxi picked us up from our Granada hotel on time and whisked us away to Managua airport in just under 45 minutes (though with the taxi radio tuned to disco hits of the 1970s, it felt rather longer, particularly when the Bee Gees segment kicked in). In the domestic terminal – a small building to the right of the main international terminal at Managua – we handed over our passports and checked in our bags, but before he gave us our boarding passes, the man behind the counter pointed to the scales and said, ‘OK, now can you please get on there?’ So we jumped onto the scales ourselves, one at a time, clutching our hand luggage and trying not to look at the readout (three months on a Central American diet of cheese and beans is no way to get thinner, I can tell you).

The reason that they weigh absolutely everything on the flight to the Corn Islands, passengers included, is that the planes are tiny; they only have 14 seats and one propellor, so that’s just four rows of three passengers, plus the pilot and co-pilot. You might be able to get away with averaging out the weight of the passengers on a jet plane, but when you’re flying across a country in a tube that’s no bigger than a small minibus, size matters, and it’s this size that makes the experience so unique.

Flying as a passenger in a 14-seater plane is like being shrunk, digitised and injected straight into a flight simulator on your PC. There’s no partition between you and the pilot, and you can see out of every window, including the front, as well as being able to look at every dial and screen in the pilot’s dashboard. We were the last to board the plane, and there were only two seats left, one at the back and one right at the front; Peta kindly sent me up front, so I had the same view of the flight as the co-pilot, though without the groovy aviation sunglasses that our Nicaraguan crew were proudly modelling.

It was amazing, all the way from the juddering take-off right through to the landing on Big Corn Island. When you’re in a small plane, you really feel the clouds flying past you at 9400 ft, and the 360° views are astonishing. Not long into the flight the captain flicked on the auto-pilot and settled back with his newspaper, but although it was just another day in the office for him, I was riveted for the whole 80-minute flight. I particularly enjoyed watching Big Corn slowly appear out of the ocean towards the end of the flight, gradually morphing from a green stain on the horizon to an island with buildings and beaches; and then, as the plane banked to the left, there was the obvious straight line of the runway along the backbone of the island, which grew larger and larger until, there we were, aiming for the centre line as houses flew past on either side. The landing was smooth and applauded, and before long we’d pulled into the airport, grabbed our bags and hopped into a taxi to the harbour, still buzzing from the flight.

The Public Panga

Big Corn Island is a proper Caribbean island, but Little Corn Island is a proper Caribbean paradise, so we decided to head straight for the smaller island. The only way to get across the 12km divide between the two islands is by public panga – a panga being a large, open speedboat with powerful engines and a liberal attitude to passenger comfort – and we’d heard some nasty horror stories about the panga and rough seas, which worried me a bit with my propensity for seasickness. Luckily the weather was pretty pleasant as we took our seats among the 40 other passengers on board and put on our life jackets.

We’d paid a dollar tip to the boat man to get good seats – which he said were in the middle of the boat – but as if to show that there was nothing to worry about, two of the crewmen stood proudly on the very front of the panga, holding on to ropes attached to the bow as the engines revved up and we shot out from the protection of the harbour, past the coral reef and out into the ocean swell. As we ploughed through the waves, we did take off a few times and those sitting at the back of the panga got soaked while those at the front left their seats every time we hit a big wave, but compared to the trip in windy weather, we all got off lightly.

We were met at the pier on the western shore of Little Corn by a crowd of locals, some there to meet passengers with bookings, some there to find accommodation for passengers without bookings, and some just there to see who’d arrived. Among the crowd was a man from our hotel who was cheerily waving a sign with our names on it, and after he put our bags in a wheelbarrow, we followed him along a forest path through the middle of the island, as he took us to the eastern shore. And then, after ten minutes of weaving through the palm trees, we heard lapping waves, and the corn-blue Caribbean opened up in front of us on the other side of a pure golden beach, and suddenly all the effort made sense.

That first piña colada tasted really special, I can tell you...

Little Corn Island

Written: 14 February 2014

We unashamedly fell off the budget bandwagon in Little Corn Island, and it was absolute bliss. So far on this trip we’ve had one splurge – Christmas on the beach in Guatemala – but we’ve generally stuck to a reasonable budget, because if you spend too much when travelling, you tend to get pushed away from the very culture that you’ve come to experience. But after three months of eating fairly dreadful local food, getting numb limbs on hard mattresses, wincing as the chicken bus goes over yet another pothole, and lying there, wide-eyed as the early-morning dog-and-cockerel dawn chorus starts up yet again, we figured we needed a bit of a holiday.

And Little Corn Island is about as perfect a holiday destination as you’re going to find anywhere. Lying 12km to the northeast of Big Corn Island, which itself is 70km off Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, Little Corn Island is billed as being like the Caribbean from 50 years ago, and it’s easy to understand why. At just 1.1 square miles, Little Corn has no roads or vehicles – not even golf carts – and there’s no more than a handful of concrete footpaths where locals push hand-carts and wheelbarrows as transport. There’s only intermittent electricity, with the village generator working from 2pm to 5am each day, and as it’s been known to break down for three weeks at a time, you can’t rely on it (which is why the better hotels have their own generators for backup power). There’s no airport, so everyone has to come in by boat from Big Corn Island, and if the weather is playing up, you can get stranded for days. It’s properly remote.

The island has just one small village with about 1000 inhabitants, with about another 300 tourists in residence at any one time; tourism is now the island’s main economy, having taken over from lobster fishing. There are no poisonous snakes or spiders on the island, though there are still plenty that look like they might be. The most common language is English, and the island’s name is officially Little Corn Island (rather than Isla Pequeña del Maíz), because the islands were British between 1655 and 1894, and when they then became part of Nicaragua, they were immediately leased to the USA. It was only in 1971 that they finally became fully Nicaraguan and the result is that the Corn Islands feel far more Caribbean than Nicaraguan, and for English-speaking visitors, there’s no language barrier, which is a wonderful relief after the mainland.

There’s a large baseball stadium surrounded by forest in the middle of the island, which you can reach via the footpath from the village to the north of the island; it’s a bit of a surprise, given the small size of the community, but they do like their baseball here in Nicaragua. The highest point of the island, at 38m above sea level, is home to a communications tower, and next to it is a small lighthouse tower that you can climb up for a 360° view of the whole island. Outside the main village there’s a smattering of low-key hotels dotted round the northern and eastern shores... and the rest of the island is made up of tropical forest, golden-sand beaches, corn-blue lagoons, palm trees and lots and lots of sunshine. Little Corn Island ticks all the boxes for a remote island paradise, and then some.

Five Stars and Counting

We split our stay between two places, the first on Cocal Beach halfway up the eastern shore of the island, and the second at Otto Beach in the middle of the northern shore. The trade winds tend to blow from the northeast round here, so the village and harbour are tucked away on the more sheltered western side, and while this means the boats are protected from the onslaught of the hurricane season – which last hit here in 2009, when the eye of Hurricane Ida passed right over the island – it does mean that the village gets hot and humid while the northern and eastern coasts are much fresher. Given how much I hate hot and humid weather, we happily fled the village scene and parked ourselves on the breezy beach for the duration.

It helped that the eastern shore is home to the number two hotel on the island, while the northern shore is home to the number one hotel. It also helped that the number two hotel, the lovely Little Corn Beach and Bungalows, could only fit us in for our first three nights (and then only because of a last-minute cancellation), so we did the maths and took them up on their offer, while booking the following week with the Yemaya Hotel and Spa, the island’s top spot.

It was unashamed luxury. The only cabin they had available at Little Corn Beach and Bungalows was their best one – what a shame! – and it was lovely, with a huge and extremely soft kingsize bed, a view out onto Cocal Beach through the gently waving palm trees, and a pleasant restaurant nearby that served ice-cold beer, lobster, fish, steak and decent wine. We did precious little except sit and enjoy the view, with the odd wander along the picturesque beaches or through the forest and into the village. We absolutely loved it.

Yemaya, though, took things to a whole new level. Back when we first started going on holiday together, Peta and I would spend our holidays travelling, visiting places like Cuba, India, Morocco and so on. Over the next few years, my job intensified to the point where I needed to go on holiday to rest, and travelling for two weeks is hardly restful, so we graduated to five-star holidays on the beach in places like Mauritius and Malaysia (none of which I wrote about, because there’s precious little to say when you’re lazing on the beach, sipping cocktails and snoozing in the sunshine). Once you’ve tasted the high life, it never leaves you, so when Yemaya called out with its promise of five-star luxury on a paradise Caribbean island, just as we needed a haven from the travelling circuit of Central America, we just couldn’t resist.

God, it was worth it. Yemaya is made up of 16 luxurious boutique cabins, with properly hot showers (our first since Santa Ana in El Salvador), delightful beds, a perfect beach a few steps from a lovely veranda, and an attention to detail that simply doesn’t exist at the budget and mid-range levels. We slipped rather too easily back into the velvet glove of five-star living, happily ditching the shitty diet of Central America for wonderful curries and fresh fish dishes, and switching to cocktails and European beer instead of yet another bottle of Nicaraguan lager. We wandered along the beaches, which are absolutely picture-postcard perfect at the northern end of the island, and snorkelled on the reef that comes right up to the beach in front of the hotel.

We did a scuba dive, where we swam through huge shoals of fish, saw a monster moray eel and marvelled at a grumpy-looking stone fish (though we only managed the one dive because we both went down with a mild dose of Delhi belly, which forced us to kick back and do nothing for a while... though the snorkelling was so excellent that we didn’t really feel the need to dive again anyway). And we just sat there and soaked up the endless panorama of pure turquoise seas, lapping waves, gentle island breezes and golden beaches.

Basically, we stopped travelling for 11 days and instead had a holiday. Boy, did we need it; getting back onto the road is going to be a bit of a shock after such a blissful interlude in paradise.

The South

Granada to Isla de Ometepe

Written: 17 February 2014

We’d heard some pretty nasty things about the twice-weekly public ferry from Granada to Isla de Ometepe, and to be honest, I was a bit scared. Lago de Nicaragua, the huge freshwater lake that the ferry crosses to get to the island, is famous for its strong winds, and as any sailor knows, strong winds mean big waves. And big waves and passenger ferries do not mix well, particularly when I’m on them.

It didn’t help that when we returned to Granada after our wonderful visit to Little Corn Island, we accidentally picked a hotel room with a sloping bed and a nasty line in mosquitoes, which came as a bit of a surprise as we’d decided to book a better hotel than we normally do, to help with the come-down from a week of five-star living. After we complained the following morning, with our hair sticking up like members of The Cure, the hotel kindly moved us into a different property for our second night, where we enjoyed life in our own self-contained apartment, overlooking a pool from a delightful veranda. But the damage was done: we were exhausted from a whole night of rolling into the middle of the bed and trying not to scratch too much, and on top of this, Peta had contracted a bout of swimmer’s ear from our one scuba dive on Little Corn, and the antibiotic drops were taking their time to kick in. To say we weren’t on top form is an understatement.

But we decided we’d give the ferry a go anyway, because we figured it could go either way; if we were lucky, it would be an enjoyable four-hour ferry journey across a volcano-studded lake, and if we weren’t, it would be a long fight against seasickness, because when the lake plays up, it really plays up. The advice we’d been given was to stay away from the windows, because when it’s rough, even they can’t keep the lake out of the cabin. And as for seasickness... well, they don’t allow anyone to drink alcohol on board, which says it all, really. So I stocked up on seasickness tablets and crossed my fingers, sending up a prayer for calm weather the next morning.

Two Deckchairs, Please

It turns out that the secret to enjoying the ferry trip from Granada to Ometepe is to hire a deckchair. There are two levels on the ferry – first class is on the upper deck, while second class is on the lower deck – and as foreigners are only allowed to buy first class tickets, you have a choice between the open deck at the back, or the air-conditioned cabin that comes complete with padded benches and a blaring television that simply won’t shut up. If it’s a nice day then the open deck is much more enticing, and if you get in there quick, you can hire a deckchair for the entire journey for just over a dollar.

It’s a great idea because Lago de Nicaragua is the largest lake in Central America, so not only is it big enough to feel like the sea, it’s also big enough to act like the sea. The winds around these parts tend to be easterlies or northeasterlies, so you have a choice: the port side will be sheltered from the sun but will bear the brunt of the wind, while the starboard side will be more sheltered but will also catch the hot, afternoon sun. We hired two deckchairs and the man stuck them on the starboard side, towards the back of the deck, and so the die were cast; we’d see later whether or not we’d lucked out.

But first we had to get going. It is supposed to take four hours to sail from Granada, at the western tip of the lake, to Isla de Ometepe, about halfway along the southwestern shore, with the ferry leaving at 2pm and arriving at 6pm, just as it’s going dark. This isn’t as quick as the standard way of getting from Granada to Ometepe – which involves an hour-and-a-half in the chicken bus to Rivas, a short taxi ride to San Jorge, and an hour’s ferry crossing to Ometepe – but the Granada ferry is rather more civilised, as it doesn’t involve the chicken bus. It does get as packed as the chicken bus, though, and they really ram the passengers on; first class is all bodies and bags, so goodness only knows what second class is like, but when you’ve got yourself a deckchair, you can just sit there and watch the world go by.

We didn’t quite leave on time, finally pulling out of Granada half an hour later than scheduled, but we’d already started snoozing, so it didn’t really matter. The skies were pure blue, the wind was fairly steady but not as strong as it could have been, and we sat there for the next five hours as Granada receded into the distance and the twin peaks of Ometepe’s distant volcanoes slowly grew larger on the horizon. The sun was fierce, but my chair was just behind one of the ferry’s chimneys, so I managed to stay happily shaded while Peta’s chair got the sunshine that she wanted. It was blissful.

Unfortunately it wasn’t so blissful for those on the port side of the deck. They enjoyed a smug couple of hours as the sun cooked the starboard side while they were sheltered, but as we headed out into the middle of the lake, the wind picked up and the swell started rolling. And suddenly, wham! The bow hit a big wave and five seconds later there was a crashing sound followed by lots of high-pitched shrieks, as half of Lago de Nicaragua splashed over the port side and rained down on the port-side passengers. Suddenly there was panic as water gushed across the metal decks, soaking all the bags that were on the open deck (ours were inside) and washing over those who hadn’t been lucky enough to snag a deckchair and who were sitting on the bare deck.

It wasn’t remotely chaotic where we were sitting. At one point I had to pick up my bag when I saw some water heading our way, but I had plenty of time to hang it on the back of the deckchair and go back to contemplating the wonderful view of Ometepe. And when the next splash hit, and the entire row of deckchairs on the port side got drenched so much that they gave up and went inside, we didn’t get splashed one little bit. Oh, and we got to enjoy a glorious sunset too. I guess the starboard side was indeed the right choice...

We also lucked out when we finally pulled into the dock at Altagracia. We’d booked one night in the Hotel Central, which then promptly filled up with a group of American cyclists who were also on the ferry, so those who hadn’t booked ahead ended up in the Hotel Castillo, which had absolutely terrible reviews on TripAdvisor. The Hotel Central was, in comparison, a lovely little spot, and it did a mean grilled chicken and served cold beers, which went down a little too well that evening.

And, I realised as I sipped my third Victoria, I hadn’t felt seasick once. What a great way to get to Ometepe...

Isla de Ometepe

Written: 19 February 2014

After spending so long lounging around on Little Corn Island, we weren’t sure about the wisdom of visiting another island so soon, but I’m so glad we did. Isla de Ometepe, the world’s largest freshwater island that sits about halfway along the southern edge of Lago de Nicaragua, is a stunningly beautiful place – particularly if you like volcanoes, as I do – and although we didn’t stay for long, it was well worth the detour on our way south to the border with Costa Rica.

The island’s beauty lies in its skyline; shaped like a figure of eight turned anti-clockwise through 45°, the island is made up of two huge volcanoes that are joined by a saddle of sand, all of which is smothered in lush green vegetation. The volcanoes are quite different in character: the larger of the two, 1610m-high Volcán Concepción, is one of the most perfect volcanic cones that I’ve ever seen, while 1394m-high Volcán Maderas looks more like the remains of a cosmic hard-boiled egg after the teaspoon has done its worst. And because the two volcanoes sit facing each other across the saddle of sand, with Concepción to the northwest and Maderas to the southeast, you get wonderful and ever-changing views of the peaks as you move around the island. It’s breathtaking, as long as the clouds are being kind (which, for our visit, they were for the most part).

To be fair, we didn’t do a great deal of exploring. After our night in Altagracia, we decamped to a very pleasant little hotel on Playa Santa Domingo, the beach along the northeastern edge of the sand saddle that joins the two volcanoes. The food in the hotel restaurant was organic and refreshingly un-Nicaraguan, and we happily collapsed into the hammocks overlooking the bay. The only drawback is that it’s extremely windswept on the northern side of the island, with the trade winds pounding across Lago de Nicaragua and straight into the beach, but the scenery is stunning and hardly any of the beach is developed, with just a handful of small hotels along the northern section and practically nothing at the southern end.

Walking along the beach is an enjoyable way to spend the day; from the southern end of the curved bay there are wonderful views of Concepción, while the northern section has Maderas as a backdrop, and all the while the waves pound into the black sand beach, driven by the steady breeze. Because of the reliable wind, this is a popular spot for kitesurfing, and their colourful sails ride up and down the lively surf; meanwhile, because Ometepe is a very rural area, farmers drive their cattle down to the lake to drink, and horses live at the southern end of the beach, ready to take visitors on beach rides. It’s a strange mix of slow traditional farming and high-octane modern sport, all in the shadow of that perfect cone and its binary companion.

For our last day on the island, we took a kayak up the Rio Istiam, a small river (or, more accurately, a river-shaped mangrove swamp) that almost cuts the island in two across the southern end of the sand saddle. Our guide was keen to show us the vibrant birdlife, alligators and turtles living in the swamp, and he did a good job, but I kept getting distracted as we’d paddle round another corner in the river and bang! There’s another picture-postcard view of Concepción’s cone, or another delightful skyline dominated by the jagged peaks of Maderas. These are the days when you’re thankful for digital cameras; Ometepe is such a pretty island you just can’t stop framing the views and clicking that button. What a lovely way to end our Nicaraguan journey...

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 19 February 2014

As we’ve travelled south through Central America, we’ve asked people coming the other way what they’ve thought of the countries they’ve visited, and there’s a surprising consistency to their opinions. Costa Rica gets summed up as being expensive and touristy, but great for wildlife and outdoor sports; El Salvador is always described as incredibly friendly, but fairly light on big attractions; and when people talk about Guatemala they tend to talk about the other travellers they met there, and oh yes, did you go to Tikal and wasn’t it simply amazing? But it’s Nicaragua that gets the pithiest response. Everyone, and I mean everyone, uses exactly the same phrase for Nicaragua; they shrug and say ‘well, it’s cheap.’ It’s not exactly the most ringing endorsement you’ve ever heard.

The thing is, it’s not a bad way to sum up the country. Nicaragua has the lowest prices in the region for travellers, a direct consequence of it being the poorest country in Central America; the Nicaraguan córdoba has been steadily devaluing against the dollar for some time, and this helps to bring prices down for foreign visitors. The only exception we found was the price of tours, which are kept high because the target market can afford it; our day-long coffee tour cost US$140 for the two of us, which is pretty much a European price. We were happy to pay that, but when your hotel room is costing you just US$15 a night for a double room with en suite bathroom, it certainly stands out. Meanwhile transport is very cheap, accommodation is very cheap, food is very cheap, and that’s always welcome for the traveller with a finite budget.

On the other hand, it’s also cheap as in ‘cheap and nasty’. The food is pretty rubbish; the transport is noisy, uncomfortable and polluting; the beds are hard; and the country is clearly poor, with open sewers in the cities, holes in the pavements, dust absolutely everywhere, and in places like Granada, lots of beggars and people who simply demand that you give them money. I don’t have a problem with any of this – these are all facts of life in poor countries – but it means that while Nicaragua might be cheap, you tend to get what you pay for.

As for the sights, there are some great ones – we loved Little Corn Island and Isla de Ometepe – but most of the other places we visited were less enticing. The colonial city of León is worth a look even though it’s as hot as hell, but we found Granada’s seedy tourism a bit too much to bear; the canyoning in Somoto is quite entertaining but is probably not worth the long journey north; and the coffee and chocolate tours around Matagalpa are mildly diverting, but not exactly life-changing. Most of the time, when balancing the effort/reward equation, we found that the amount of effort often outweighed the reward... for us, anyway.

So it’s a bit of a challenge travelling in Nicaragua, which is not much of a surprise, but it would be a lot easier to ride the ups and downs if the people were cheerier. Unfortunately the Nicaraguans seem to be a bit cheesed off with life; they’re not a terribly smiley people, and they don’t seem to want you in their country. There are exceptions of course, but the nice people we met were almost always involved in the tourist industry, whether tour guides or hotel staff, so they had a vested interest in being friendly. Outside of the tourist bubble, the people are often genuinely arsey. I lost count of the number of times that I went into a shop and politely asked for something, only to have the grumpy woman behind the counter stare at me as if I’d sworn at her; then eventually she’d turn around, shuffle to the back of the shop, dragging her feet like a grumpy teenager, and when she’d return she’d throw the product on the counter with an almost audible sigh of irritation, as if I’d gravely insulted her by the mere act of trying to offer her money in exchange for her goods. This approach to customer service – which we in the West would call an ‘attitude problem’ – seems to apply to everything, from restaurants to taxis, and although you soon get used to it, it doesn’t exactly help you fall for the locals’ charms; indeed, there simply don’t appear to be any to fall for.

But then you remember that Nicaragua is incredibly poor and that the Nicaraguans have plenty to be grumpy about. And you shrug your shoulders and thank your lucky stars that purely by an accident of birth, you’re able to visit this country... and you’re able to leave it, too.

Or, to put it another way, ‘Well, it’s cheap.’

Further Reading

This story is continued in another of my books, Tainted by Tourism: Travels in Costa Rica (also available for free from www.moxon.net/ebooks). If you enjoyed this book, you might like to know that there’s a whole series of free books like this available from the same source, covering 25 countries and six continents:

- The Back of Beyond: Travels in Australia

- Into the Deep Blue Sea: Travels in Belize

- A Town Full of Nothing to Do: Travels in Burkina Faso

- In Search of the Lost City: Travels in Colombia

- Tainted by Tourism: Travels in Costa Rica

- A Funny Sort of Socialism: Travels in Cuba

- Snow on the Sun Loungers: Travels in Cyprus

- Love at First Sight: Travels in El Salvador

- Paradise Has Teeth: Travels in French Polynesia

- A Million Mosquitoes Can’t Be Wrong: Travels in the Gambia

- The Road to Jesus: Travels in Ghana

- Stuck on the Gringo Trail: Travels in Guatemala

- Many Ways to Change Your Mind: Travels in India

- Hello Paul, What’s Your Name? Travels in Indonesia

- The Muddy Confluence: Travels in Malaysia

- The Lapping of the Dunes: Travels in Mali

- A World-Class Dive: Travels in Mexico

- Snaking Patterns of Sand: Travels in Morocco

- Roof of the World: Travels in Nepal

- God’s Own Country: Travels in New Zealand

- Poverty and Paradise: Travels in Nicaragua

- Alone on Two-Palm Island: Travels in Panama

- The Head and the Heart: Travels in Senegal

- Serious Fun: Travels in Singapore

- Melted Meccano: Travels in Thailand

If you know someone who might like any of my books, please pass them on; I make no money from this, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading my books and recommending them to their friends. If you’ve enjoyed reading my writing (or even if you haven’t) I’d be delighted if you could sign my Guestbook at www.moxon.net/guestbook – after all, it’s the feedback that makes it all worthwhile. Happy travels!

THE END

Table of Contents

Preface

Playa Esteron to León

León

Volcán Telica

Estelí

Cañón de Somoto

Matagalpa

From Bean to Cup

The Chocolate Factory

Granada

Flying to the Corn Islands

Little Corn Island

Granada to Isla de Ometepe

Isla de Ometepe

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading

Table of Contents

Preface

Playa Esteron to León

León

Volcán Telica

Estelí

Cañón de Somoto

Matagalpa

From Bean to Cup

The Chocolate Factory

Granada

Flying to the Corn Islands

Little Corn Island

Granada to Isla de Ometepe

Isla de Ometepe

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading