San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua

A combination of a need to do laundry and a dread of facing the Costa Rica border controls has kept me in the tiny Pacific coast town of San Juan del Sur. To be honest, I also was looking for high-speed internet connections, and I finally found it here.

I spent the last three nights in Rivas, a transport hub about 35 kilometers north of the Costa Rican border. Rivas itself isn´t much of a town, but cheap lodging near the bus terminal was the selling point for me as I was able easily to catch buses to colonial Granada, a beautiful, historic city on Lake Nicaragua, the largest freshwater lake (3200 square miles) in the region. Granada, with its well-kept public parks, majestic 16th century churches, and bustling central market was itself worth the price of the ticket for me because one of my favorite past-times is to walk through the old centers of colonial Spain and watch the locals and tourists mingle.

Granada has a fairly well-developed tourist infrastructure, with plenty of good hotels, restaurants, internet shops, and espresso bars--my kind of town. I spent all day Saturday taking photos and tooling around.

This part of Nicaragua, which is roughly 100-120 km south of the capital Managua, is one of those geographic marvels: an isthmus bordered on the east side by Lake Nicaragua, which according to Wikipedia has sawfish, tarpon and sharks, and on the west side by the Pacific. The land area is mostly cattle ranch land (with plenty of horses, goats, and pigs), corn and rice fields, and banana plantations. The people are quite friendly, but poor--much poorer, in fact, than their Costa Rican neighbors.

As I mentioned, Rivas isn´t much of town--"a run down version of Granada," according to the Lonely Planet guidebook, but its location was convenient for me: 67 km to Granada and only 33
to San Juan.

I took the bus to San Juan yesterday. This charming community is only now becoming known to surfers as an excellent place to catch the waves. Even now, in the midst of the rainy season, there are plenty of Californians and Europeans down for their holidays. I´m not a surfer myself, but when I woke this morning I just didn´t want to face the long lines at the border for my return to Liberia, Costa Rica. Since I certainly didn´t want to spend another night in Rivas, a return trip to the ocean coast seemed like a most pleasant option.

Unfortunately since I decided to stay another night in Nicaragua, the possibility of my making it to Tortuguero, where the turtles hatch on Costa Rica´s Carribean coast, becomes more remote. I´d orginally intended to be back in San Jose by Tuesday afternoon and in Tortuguero by Wednesday night at the latest. I have only one more week until my next Tuesday flight back home. The way I feel now, though, I may just laze my way back to San Jose, check out the volcanos in that area, and visit with the artist uncle of one of my violin students