A Place That Sticks

Every time I travel somewhere new I look for "a place that sticks" and usually I find one. It´s the place, which I don´t know much about ahead of time, where I discover reasons to stop moving and hang out for a bit.

Last year in Guatemala it was Antigua; when I first went to Thailand it was Chiangmai (it stuck so much I ended up staying the better part of 8 years there); and on my first trip to Europe, the place that got me stuck was Zurich, Switzerland.

This time around, the place that´s sticking me around is San Juan del Sur.

It´s a no-brainer, really: cheap but good $20 hotels, seafood/lobster dinners for $12, beachfront terraces with $2 rum cocktails, excellent laundry service, great coffee, high speed internet. How decadent! Do I really want to face the crowds at the border this morning? I think I´ll head back to Costa Rica tomorrow a.m. instead, get back to the capital hopefully by Thursday in time to catch the last of the San Jose Jazz Festival, then take things from there.

Tortuguero will probably have to wait for another visit from me some other time.

I´m not that good at being a tourist, really. Until recent years, my traveling was always open ended: I´d go to Ireland in the summer, follow the road to Europe, and end up staying there 18 months. Or, as in my last trip to Thailand in 2007, I went basically with an open-ended mandate (albeit one month´s worth) to record a bunch of fiddle tunes with friends.

But these two week holiday excursions to Central America are a new thing for me. I´m simply not made for the mad-dash type "tour this place one day, then tour the next place the next day." I still find that despite my penchant for trying to cram as many places into the little time I have, really it´s better for me to hang out and absorb things.

I´m not much of a beach fanatic, nor am I a sun-seeker. But San Juan has some kind of quiet, down-home charm that I like. It´s a fishing village, still, despite its recent moves to accomodate tourists and surfers. The foreigners you see here are mainly younger people--college age, young adults who maybe don´t have a lot of big bucks. There are quite a few North American & European families (there´s a large RV with British Columbia tags parked on the ocean front, a young family with a couple tween children). And there´s a smattering of American retirees-Baby Boomers come to "spend their kids´inheritance" on a house or a condo.

In some ways I prefer traveling in the tropics during the rainy season because, far from raining all day and night, what you get is a good mixture of warm and sunny, usually not too hot, with a cooling off after the midday meal (when the day is hottest--siesta time), and maybe a short rain shower or two in the late afternoon to end the day. Rainy seasons, too, are good on the traveler´s wallet. Since it´s not the "high season" it´s easy to find a decent hotel, and sometimes you can bargain the price down. It´s less crowded and more quiet at night, which I like.

I´m glad I had a chance to take a little breather here in this yet undeveloped part of southwest Nicaragua. Check back again, maybe on Thursday, when I should be back in San Jose for jazz, coffee plantations and volcanos!