So from Big Corn Island I flew to Managua and then it’s about a 2 hour taxi ride down south to San Juan del Sur (Saint John of the South). I remembered SJDS from the first time I was there about 5 year prior when I was doing my Central America trip, Costa Rica up to Cancun, and upon getting dropped off by the taxi in the middle of town (it’s a very small town) the layout and the landmarks started coming back to me. I walked towards the big party hostel, Casa Oro (obviously it’s not a party hostel right now) and kept going a street with a whole bunch of guesthouses in a row. I put my mask on and semi-randomly chose one that looked alright. These were family run places, with the family living downstairs and the upper floors having around 10 rooms plus a kitchen and small common area. I booked 3 nights and it looked like only one other person was currently staying there. I could get away with English on the Caribbean side, but it was mostly only Spanish over here.
The first thing I did was join the facebook group for San Juan del Sur and make a post inquiring about monthly rentals. As all the tourists had left due to Covid and the borders were basically closed, this post got me a lot of messages! I had choices from bungalows, a room in a boutique hotel with shared kitchen way up in the hills, a studio out near the surf beach, some local places that would cost hardly anything, etc. But after living in a very spartan set up for the last 2+ months, I kinda wanted something nice, and with good wifi. I checked out a couple places, and that studio out by the surfer beach was very tempting, but at the end of the day I decided to stay in town with the niceties like ice cream places, coffeeshops, smoothies, pizza stands, asian food, etc. Hell, even Nicaraguan cigars!
There was a British lady and her husband who had a great set up with a whole house that she would normally rent out for $200 a night, and she was offering it to me for $600 a month. We’re talking 3 bedrooms, a big ole modern kitchen, a small pool and lounge chairs out front, upstairs balcony, big TV with netflix, well decorated, lots of natural light, gated, etc. This was a pretty good offer! The crazy thing is, I could have probably haggled lower if I wanted to, because I mean there were basically no new people coming into town. She was kind of the OCD type, and had a list of rules like 20 miles long, but I agreed all the same. It was a very cushy set up!
San Juan del Sur, in better times, was one of the main party places in Central America, which means it also has a kind of seedy underbelly that goes along with the booze and drugs. Late night muggings were not uncommon. I remembered the golden rule when I first was there: “never walk on the beach at night” and I assumed it was still true. The good new was that I really had no intentions whatsoever of staying out late at night. I was hardly drinking, playing poker every night, plus the obvious fact that there was a pandemic going on. So I wasn’t very worried, although I had to imagine that the lack of tourists was hurting some of the locals really hard.
My favorite place in town, by far, was the coffeeshop. It was modern, well crafted, open air, and overlooking the bay. And the coffee was great of course. That was the place where I was able to meet some of the other gringos sticking around during the pandemic. And I must say, it was a pretty eclectic crowd. There is something about ex-pats that tends to also coincide with a mistrust of government, conspiracy theories, and just being anti-science in general. I suppose that’s why a lot of them left their home countries, because they wanted more ‘freedoms’ in Nicaragua. One of the first people I met was a guy who did a monthly newsletter on global conspiracies that had been covered up (obviously not well enough) and he had a hefty life insurance policy, in case one of the powers that be tried to silence him. Hmm. But there were also plenty of normal people too!
Another thing I really liked about SJDS was that there was a lot more room to roam. Staying too long on a little island can get you feeling a bit cooped up. I like having some new places to explore, so I had plenty of that in SJDS. There are lots of little roads that snake their way into the hills, some of them have nice houses and gated, but the guards usually let me run up and back. The benefits of being a gringo! But man it was not easy running. The summer months are basically 100% humidity, so throw in some hills on top of that, and ouch, not fun. And I did find some great look out points. Even the main section of beach was about 1.5 miles long, so that was a pretty solid run right there. If I ran anything more than 5 miles I’d be on the verge of overheating. But running on the beach as the sunset colors were coming out over the bay, mwah, chefs kiss!
There are also some even nicer beaches around that you’d want a scooter or motorcycle to get to. Preferably a motorcycle because some of the roads are very steep and rough. So occasionally I’d go rent a motorcycle and go off exploring outside of town. My favorite beach was called Playa Majigual (you can probably guess what that means) and besides being very isolated, it had this gorgeous rocky out cropping that you could rock-hop out to during low tide, watching the sun set as the waves crashed all around you on the rocks. Just a a fantastic spot. The Pacific side has a much more raw and rugged type of beauty than the Caribbean side. And so many of the great spots you get all to yourself. I was pretty content with my decision to stay in Nicaragua during Covid.
And at least by this point, things were cooling off a bit with the virus. At least in the US, the spring spike was over. Same with nearby Costa Rica. In Nicaragua, well who knows. The government was doing it’s best to pretend Covid did not exist. Things didn’t sound great in Managua, but in San Juan del Sur, life seemed reasonably ordinary. I assumed the very outdoor/open-air lifestyle helped. Of course the expat facebook groups were constantly at war with each other on all things Covid. It was insufferable. Another popular topic was the flight situation, as there were still no commercial flights running. All the airlines would post some date a month out as their next flight, it would get cancelled a few days before the flight date, and rescheduled a month later. And somehow people were continually shocked when their flight got cancelled again!
The options were pretty minimal at first, some people were chartering small planes to fly to Costa Rica or Mexico, but prices were running at $2,000+. Eventually some fulled sized plane charters (like a 737) started going to and from Miami at $1100, so that became a reasonably popular way to get out, if needed. Another similar option was a full sized charter to Mexico City, and from there you could fly commercial back to the States, as Mexico was pretty much fully open. This is what I would end up doing eventually! But of course there were plenty of complications with government and these flights would often get delayed for a days, or week or who knows.
But back to life in San Juan del Sur, everything was pretty decent for me. I mean nothing really exciting, but definitely peaceful. I had my routine of waking up and some Spanish stuff, going out by the pool, reading, and attempting to meditate, maybe a little jaunt into town, some afternoon poker sessions, either running or doing my body weight / elastic band exercises by the beach, come back for some covid doom scrolling online, make dinner, more poker, and some tv/movies if I had time. There are certainly worse ways to live!
So honestly I wish I could type up more interesting stories about living in SJDS, but I mean there wasn’t much! Oh, well I did go try to get a dental implant, but after the CT scan it was revealed that I had lost too much bone around the site, and the best course of action was to remove my other molar (where I had lots of good bone) and use some of that to bone graft where I had lost the bone. Of course my silly dentist on little corn island did not inform me that I might need a bone graft after the extraction, so thanks lady! So I had that done.
I spend about 2 months waiting to see if anything was going to change with commercial flights, but it didn’t look like it, so I booked the Managua-Mexico City charter flight for $700. And two days before that flight was set to go, they informed us it was delayed another week, so I opted to spend that week in the pleasant colonial town of Grenada, just outside of Managua. Which was great until the night before I left someone must have been able to fish out my camera using a hook, right off the kitchen table. So there goes my trusty Canon 5d mark2 that I’d had the last 8 years. Hmmph. Actually the electronics were going bad, so it wasn’t really the end of the world. Although it was a nice wide angle lens that was attached to the camera. So unfortunately that is why I have almost no photos to post. I do have some from my trip 5 years ago though. But anyway, I eventually managed to fly to Mexico City at the end of July, stop there a few days, and then fly direct to sweet home Chicago!