We Nicaraguans have many dictators. Then we kill them.

My lengthy excursion across Panama now over, it was time to head all the way back across the Central American isthmus and beyond. I was expected in Nicaragua in about a couple week’s time, and after deciding against a ludicrously overpriced flight to Managua (~£500 for a 1hr30 flight) I was instead going to savour the journey towards the spiciest country I’ve been to yet.

Costa Rica ¶

Indiana Ben and the Kingdom of the Crystal Dipshits ¶

24 straight hours of bussing after leaving Puerto Lara, and I was finally at the famous Puerto Viejo (de Talamanca), just across the Costa Rica–Panama border on the Caribbean coast. Puerto Viejo itself is a major backpacker/party/surf town and I’d met many people heading to or coming from it throughout this trip, so I figured I’d check it out and then I could at least say I’d seen more of Costa Rica than just the Osa peninsula. As one might expect from a Caribbean beach town in the middle of a tropical paradise, the beaches were lovely and I rented a bike along with another guy from my hostel (another German, of course) and went on a nice cycle ride along the coast towards Manzanillo (though the nature reserve was a disappointment).

Despite the luscious scenery, I kind of hated Puerto Viejo. It’s the first place I’ve been to during this trip that really felt like there was no real town underneath the shell of the tourist town—I imagine everyone who works there commutes in from distant elsewheres. Worse than that was the precise flavour of tourists that seemed drawn to the place, a cohort I shall unaffectionately call the ‘crystal dipshits’: think harem pants; twirling poi; sensitive young men playing guitars on the grass with their shirts off; more than happy to tell you the latest woo they’ve adopted from some ancient vaguely Asian custom; and quick to rail against non-specific toxins in coffee or soda whilst doing lines of cocaine or taking ‘shrooms all day. Also, as an added twist, now they’re all also anti-vax and just as eager to tell you about that, including my personal favourites: a UK couple who got refused entry to Nicaragua at the border when they were unable to present their vaccination cards or a recent negative test result, in what I can only describe as a monumentally negligent approach to looking up entry requirements before setting off.

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Truly, I have never seen more white people with dreadlocks, and the first hostel I stayed at—Rockin’ Js—had an aesthetic I could best describe as refugee camp-chic, with a two-storey building and rows upon rows of tents (charged at a rate of $10 per person per night, the same price as the air-conditioned dorm room that I inexplicably had entirely to myself). After this first night I switched to Backpackers Puerto Viejo, a much more pleasant little hostel comprising two dorms joined via the kitchen (which was also the building entrance); few other hostels I have stayed in are so perfectly-architected to promote sociality, with everyone inevitably running into each other and hanging out in the central kitchen area, just like university halls. I met several cool people there, including a Quebecoise called Orlean who was heading to Nicaragua to work in a hostel; I noted the location and said I might see her again there.

After a week, I was fed up with the artificiality of the town and the inflated prices of everything, so I took a 5-hour bus up north to San José (standing room only). There I stayed in a slightly more intersting area than I when I had first arrived, in the much nicer In the Wind Hostel, and made a couple pals. One was just coming from Nicaragua and so I asked her about my current plan, which involved crossing at the far less-trafficked of the two official border crossing points (Las Tablillas or San Pancho, depending on which side of the border you’re on) and making my way gradually north towards León through the Rio San Juan region east of Lake Managua, rather than the traditional tourist route on the Pacific side. She told me that she didn’t think it would be doable, that there was nothing there and that I’d struggle to travel on public transport.

I ignored everything that she said.

Nicaragua ¶

The Accidental Immigrant ¶

It was finally time for me to head to Nicaragua, on another 5-hour-long standing-room-only bus to Las Tablillas. The bus stopped just short of the Rio San Juan, the river that delineates much of the Costa Rica–Nicaragua border, and I saw a couple of roadblocks on the bridge; not impassable for a pedestrian, but enough to make me think perhaps that wasn’t the way to go. I saw that everybody who had been on the bust with me turned to the left, past a Costa Rican Red Cross tent, and started heading down a dirt track; this must be some sort of temporary diversion, I thought, and set off along with them.

We walked and walked and walked, which seemed a bit excessive. After a kilometer or two of walking along the border wall, we crossed through a gap in it and doubled back on ourselves. This was a bit of a red flag, and when we had to make an unassisted river crossing (me holding onto branches to keep from falling in with all of my backpacks) I really started to have my doubts about the route I’d chosen:

Photo by the author

When we finally arrived at the Nicaraguan side of the border crossing, I saw a couple of immigration guys leaning against their vehicle impassively watching as the group walked past, and then turned left and headed straight into Nicaragua. I went up to them and asked where I was supposed to get my Costa Rican exit stamp, and after much bemusement they pointed back across the bridge… to Costa Rica.

It turns out I’d accidentally managed to follow a big group of Venzuelans sneaking into the country (although given that the authorities were sat there watching it, sneaking feels like the wrong word). Regardless, the clearly-amused immigration girl was surprisingly friendly, given where I was and how many men with guns were walking around, and she thankfully sent my dopey ass back across the border the direct way. The Costa Rican guards asked me if I was coming from Nicaragua to Costa Rica, and I tried to explain in Spanish that, physically, yes I was, but legally, I had never left. They were confused, but seemed to get bored with me pretty quickly and shooed me further on.

Eventually I had all of my paperwork in order and crossed back again, over the bridge this time.

Heading Downriver ¶

My next stop was San Carlos, in the south-eastern corner of the enormous Lake Nicaragua. The town is gorgeous, with steep elevation changes between streets and a destinctive style of brightly-painted buildings. The chaos of the bus terminal—thronged with passengers, luggage assistants, people selling anything and everything and the semi-official money-changing coyotes plying their trade in their distinctive tan utility vests—was a fine introduction to the intensity of Nicaragua.

The next day, I took a two-hour boat ride downriver to the small, car-free town of El Castillo, so named for the old Spanish fort atop its central hill, and fell in love with the place immediately. I had read a blog post that recommended a tour guide called Juan Ardilla and sought him out, but he didn’t have any solo tour options available; he introduced me to another solo traveller (a German) who had arrived the same day, and by the evening we’d arranged an all-day tour for us and a handful of people we’d both met in our respective hostels through Basiliscus Tours. In the meantime, I revelled in the price difference between Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

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We set off the next day on kayaks, exploring the tributaries of the Río San Juan for most of the morning. I shared mine with the German and an Austrian–French couple, one of whom was certainly out of his depth as the captain and kept crashing us into the bank, through tree branches or beaching us on submerged logs. He also drank almost an entire bottle of rum throughout the course of the day, which may have been part of the problem, but at least he was happy to share it with his crewmates.

We disembarked, checked in with a couple of soldiers (who seem to have the most boring job in the world) and went on a hike through the Refugio Bartola. Our guide was excellent, explaining the traditional uses of various plants, pointing out tiny poison dart frogs and telling us which plants to eat without dying. When we got back to town we all went our separate ways (it was only me and a French girl called Alice in our hostel, the others were all elsewhere). We all got back together that afternoon for dinner and drinks, which ended on a bit of a bum note when the incredibly drunk Austrian guy got feisty and started going on and on about killing Austrian politicians (first to a random German girl from another group that was in the restaurant, and then to us when they unsurprisingly decided to leave); I was in no mood for this kind of edgy LARPing and told him to pack it in.

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I was so enamoured with the town that I extended my stay several times. Alice and I explored the town, checking out the COODEPROSA chocolate co-operative on the outskirts where I had my first taste of the stuff in many months and sampling the fresh fruit juices at Border’s Coffee. I developed a brief infatuation with the This American Life radio show, and figured out how to connect my OSMAnd mapping app. with my OpenStreetMap account so that I could update the data for the town, as most of the restaurants were currently showing as being in the middle of the river:

Screenshot by the author

Somehow a horse tour that Alice had tried to arrange morphed into her helping a farmer take his produce to another nearby town, and we joined back up with others from the tour for a couple meals and a night-time boat tour. My final day there I spent wandering into every school I could find to ask if they needed English and/or IT teachers, with the intention of spending a lot more time here after returning from Cuba. I gave my number to a bunch of people, but except for one school administrator who sent me a single hola a month later and then didn’t reply to my follow-up question I have had no success thusfar and I no longer have the time to spare on this trip; however, at least I have one contact now, and I’m definitely expecting to come back here someday (not least when I’m ready to retire).

Today is Gonna be a Volcano Day ¶

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Alas, my time in El Castillo had to come to an end. Alice and I made our way back to San Carlos, watched the sun set behind the volcanos of Ometepe island and drank by the shore of Lake Nicaragua as we waited for our overnight chicken bus. This turned out to be a pretty bad idea, as chicken buses are not known to be particular conducive to sleep; after five hours on an uncushioned school bus chair my arse was as numb as it’s ever been. We arrived into Managua around 4am and said our goodbyes, and after a couple hours of waiting the first colectivo to León arrived; a minibus with no luggage rack, and after a couple that were too full I eventually managed to squeeze myself and all of my luggage into a seat.

Finally, after a largely sleepless night I arrived at 7am. I was there to volunteer with Volcano Day as a tour guide, and when I arrived they immediately asked if I wanted to go our on a tour that day; I said I’d think about it, and then fell asleep whilst unpacking my stuff and missed the group’s departure. That proved to be lucky, though, because it meant that I got to go volcano boarding in the afternoon instead:

Hanna

Whilst the company offered many tours, the most commonly-booked were the volcano boarding on Cerro Negro (the second-biggest source of tourist income in Nicaragua, so I’m told) and various hikes on El Hoyo and Telica ranging from sunrise and sunset trips to overnight camping expeditions. I got bored of the volcano boarding pretty quickly (and fed up with the expectation of pouring rum and cokes in the back of an old army truck as it bounced around the moonscape surrounding the volcano), but luckily I seemed to get pigeonholed as a camper/hiker pretty early on and didn’t get many boarding shifts after the first week.

Telica crater was always impressive and the sunrise views were incredible; Telica sunrise shifts were perhaps the best available, as a 4am start would get you back by 9am and done for the rest of day, so it was effectively like getting an extra day off. El Hoyo was a more demanding hike, but the views from the campsite were absolutely astonishing; the walk down to Lake Asososca was incredibly tedious, but definitely paid off when arriving at the destination. Unexpectedly, I ran into Orlean again on a volcano boarding tour, as she’d decided to come check it out before heading to her hostel. I again said I might see her there, but later decided I would probably just stay working with Volcano Day until my flight to Cuba.

During this time, I also deepend my antipathy towards reggaeton (although I do still think that Gasolina slaps). From the buses of Panama to the volcanos of Nicaragua, this omnipresent, hyperactive noise-masqeurading-as-music had been dogging me for several months. The final straw came on the Las Peñitas party bus, were nobody else volunteered to connect to the speaker and so I did. After a couple tracks of blessed relief (a mix of Black Box and Swedish House Mafia, I believe), someone asked me if I had any reggaeton, as though I would have sullied my phone’s storage with such frivolities.

Labour Organising with Volunteer Labour ¶

As a seasoned voluntourist by now, not to mention an inveterate rabble-rouser, I also did my bit to remind the others of their reponsibilities (or lack thereof) as volunteers, seeing as how we were all making the owners far more money than they were spending on our twice-daily rice and beans and poorly-maintained accommodation.

For example, the deal we’d all made was 6 days on and 1 day off each week.¹ As my first week drew to a close, I told people it was my day off the following day, though the schedule hadn’t yet come out. They all came out with stories about how it’d never happen like that and how they worked 12 days before getting their first day off, etc.; lo and behold, when the schedule came out, I had been put down for a tour and the others all chuckled at my hubris. Then I called over the girl who wrote the schedule, told her she’d made a mistake and that tomorrow was my day off, and promptly found myself removed from the shift.

Where the others took their shafting as some sort of rite of passage, I just took it as them being crap at enforcing boundaries. I also think there’s a moral case to be made for working-to-rule as a volunteer (and even, potentially, being a little flakey and unreliable) so as to counteract the natural incentive for an employer to rely on enthusiastic free labour rather than employing locals.²

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It’s ambiguous whether the day off palaver was a conscious attempt to screw over volunteers or simply the result of crap organisation (i.e., I don’t think they were tracking people’s days off, and just expected people to raise the issue themselves), but it would happen pretty regularly. Also, we wouldn’t get the schedule for the following day until around 20:30 the night before, which meant it was basically impossible to make any plans, and if you were unlucky with one of the 2am starts it would mean only getting ~5 hours of sleep (and that’s only if you went straight to bed when the rota came out). There was some other schedule-based tomfoolery as well, such as one guy who returned from an overnight tour to find that he was supposed to turn around and go back out later that day, and one girl who got sent on a sunset tour with 45 minutes notice on the same day as a leaving dinner put on, in part, for her, which then had to be delayed until she got back.

Whilst I was initially wary of the company being an exploitative expat-run business (e.g., I had never been near a volcano before, so why was I being entrusted to lead tours on them?), I was glad to see that it (unlike the rival company across the road) was local-owned and that most of the Nica staff seemed to enjoy their work, although there was definitely some sketchiness with how the drivers were treated and some of the younger Nicas there were effectively on unpaid internships. I could also see our unique value as English-speaking volunteers pretty quickly, as most of the clients spoke English³ and most of the Nicas did not, or not well enough, or they were too shy to try to. They knew the routes inside and out though, so we would usually end up as translators and general morale-boosters (and/or bartenders), as well as giving the Nicas a chance to practice their English both on- and off-shift. Plus, at least two of the three bosses were pretty chill, and we could generally slip in as many beer orders with returning tour groups as we wanted.

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But it wasn’t all good. On one Telica tour we left some food out on the campsite table overnight, but unbeknownst to us (or at least me) there were wild horses roaming the area who made short work of our breakfast supplies and made a terrible mess. When we got back, the boss tried to make the Nica I had been with pay for breakfasts in the restaurant we operated out of for all of the clients; this despite the fact that the guy was one of the unpaid interns, and that the boss had just made several hundreds of dollars from the tour. Luckily, one of other owners intervened and my guy got off with a slap on the wrist and a funny story.

The moral of the story is that looking for expat–local exploitation was always going to be too limited a scope; whilst it is a decent heuristic for avoiding contributing to another problem (i.e., paying money that will be immediataely siphoned out of the country to help pay for some Yank’s second home), it’s naive to think that locally-owned business are immune to exploitation. The interests of bosses and workers, whatever their respective nationalities or other superficial similarities, are always at odds and a cool boss is, at the end of the day, still a boss.

Join a co-op.

Semana Santa ¶

Also unbeknownst to me was that my time at Volcano Day overlapped with Semana Santa, or the Holy Week before Easter, which it turns out is a very big deal indeed in Latin America. For a full week we were fully booked every day, sometimes with multiple groups going on the same tours. Hondurans, El Salvadorans, Costa Ricans and more made their ways to León to hike, board and party. The larger Spanish-speaking groups would generally go with Nica guides on their own, but I had a few join on to tours I was leading, and all I can say is that Latinos are definitely not a naturally athletic people (with the prominent exception of one Costa Rican family, where the parents were both crossfit enthusiasts and where the father ended up carrying two backpacks for the two-day trip after the youngest daughter threw a dramatic wobbly about 5 minutes in).

On Easter itself, all those of us who had the afternoon off took a ride the district of Sutiaba to check out their famous passion carpets. Unfortunately, the Church is currently in a fight with the Ortega government and, as a result, the traditional procession of walking through them was cancelled this year; instead, people just dashed them apart themselves.

I Can’t Work in These Conditions ¶

In the end, I spent three weeks working with Volcano Day. It was a bit of a mixed bag: I loved the core activity of hiking and camping (obviously), and I never really had a bad client (though I did have some slow ones, plus one dad-and-lad who had a very odd dynamic, with the kid refusing to join him any photos and constantly complaining about others being NPCs like the weird alt-right kid from Knives Out). But the lack of organisation really started to grate. For example, kit prep was always a nightmare as the number of clients continually changed, and on one overnight trip we arrived at the campsite to discover that in the chaos the kit that had been grabbed was missing tent pegs and a tent; me and the other guide bivouacked in just our sleeping bags that night

The state of the volunteer accommodation was also pretty ropey, with trash everywhere and always a huge pile of unwashed dishes beside the sink:

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We had breakfast and lunch provided each day, but not dinner, but we also had nowhere to store food and were discouraged from using the kitchen (due, not unreasonably, to the women who cooked our meals not wanting to find it left messy). The end result was that we basically had to eat out every night; there was cheap food around, and healthy food, but rarely dfid the twain meet. However, perhaps the biggest killer for me was the inability to plan anything in advance due to how last-minute we would receive our tour allocations. All the late nights and surprise early starts were also a potent recipe for sleep deprivation, on top of the physically demanding nature of the work, and a set of weakened immune systems paired with the unhygeinic living conditions left everybody subject to a continually circulating set of bugs and colds.

Most of my spare time was spent either in ViaVia, the restaurant out of which Volcano Day operated, or by the beach at Las Peñitas. Both tended to involve drinking. We volunteers went up as a group one evening to watch the sunset from the roof of the Cathedral, and had a couple very wholesome family meals. The city itself was markedly more pleasant than all of the Central American cities I had been to by this point, with its charming colonial architecture and small size.⁴ Also, whilst our accommodation may have been pretty grim, there were loads of kittens in it:

Nicaragua, According to the Nicaraguans ¶

Before arriving in Nicaragua, I had some prior familiarity with its history: the Somoza dictatorship; the Sandinista revolution; and the civil war against the US-backed Contras.⁵ Of the period since the ’80s, though, I knew markedly less, beyond a handful of articles about press crackdowns in Index on Censorship. However, I had watched the documentary ¡Las Sandinistas! with a group of friends and already had some inkling of the rocks upon which the Nicaraguan Revolution had run aground, as the women who were essential to the success of the Revolution⁶ found themselves sidelined by their macho comrades and the addressing of their concerns was put indefinitely on hold. I was going into it with an open mind, then, but primed to be critical (as always).

All of the long drives and remote camping trips provided a fantastic opportunity to talk to the Nicas away from the threat of surveillance within the city (where they were noticably more reticent), and whilst many were critical of the FSLN it’s worth noting that this was not monolithic, even amongst the young Nicas, with one of them (whose middle name, I think it’s relevant to point out, was Stalin) praising the government for making Nicaragua far safer than its neigbours, and free of the issues of gang violence that have so plagued them. Another pointed out el Fortín de Acosasco as we drove past it, telling us of the torture and forced disappearances that took place there under the Somoza regime (including some of his own family members, the whereabouts of whose remains has never been determined; he spoke of bodies disposed in some of Nicaragua’s many volcanoes, though I’ve not been able to corroborate that). There were a lot of faded posters along the highways in support of Ortega, and we drove under a bridge almost every day on which someone had painted the words Daniel 2011.

However, another expressed his fear that Nicaragua would be the next Cuba (a particularly interesting comment given that Cuba was to be my next destination), and another concurred, saying that the only difference at the moment was the lack of a centrally-planned economy. And even the guy who pointed out el Fortín complained about the rampant corruption in current-day Nicaragua, particularly of the Transit Police who he said act like a gang, shaking down drivers by issuing spurious fines. I asked him what happens socially when someone decide to join the police if they’re so detested; he said everyone stops talking to them.

On my final weekend in León I finally got around to taking the free walking tour that I’d be putting off since I’d arrived. It was fantastic, and the guide was surprisingly candid about the current state of affairs Nicaragua; at one point I asked him if he worried about getting in trouble and he just said it hadn’t happened yet, and that he knew how to tailor the speech when there were Nicas in the audience. He highlighted a lot of interesting facts about Nicaragua, three key figures I remember being that around 77% of the working population are in informal employment, some 90% live along the Pacific coast and in the interior highlands and 30% live below the poverty line; the one that really surprised me was that the average age is just 25. He also spoke rapturously about the presidency of Violeta Chamorro—who he called the lady of peace—and recounted bitterly Ortega’s manouevering to victory in the 2006 elections against a divided opposition and with only 38% of the vote,⁷ in one of the last elections generally recognised as having been conducted freely and fairly.

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He showed us buildings that still bore bullet holes from the 2018 protests across the road from the city’s hospital, where he told us about the free (but chronically underresourced) healthcare system;⁸ compared to the shiny private hostel around the corner from our place, the state-run one truly looked dilapidated, and our guide told us that hospital-acquired infections were commonplace (though I haven’t found any source to back that up). And, in fairness, he did also say that there was a new hospital currently under construction on the outskirts of the city. Nicaragua, he also pointed out, is a terrible country in which to be a woman; despite initially progressive measures in healthcare and reproductive autonomy following the Revolution, Ortega’s turn to the right and alliance with the Catholic Church upon his return to power has seen the banning of abortions in all circumstances and many restrictions on access to contraception, along with the shuttering of vital women’s services and upticks in rates of domestic violence, sexual assault and femicide (because no duh).

One thing I hadn’t noticed until our guide pointed it out was the complete lack of newspapers in the many roadside stalls and corner shops; the last independent newspaper in Nicaragua had ended its print edition in 2021 in the face of government repression, including a blockade on ink and paper coming into the country. Our guide also took us to the university and explained that higher education is free to Nicaraguans, but that a Bachelor’s takes around 5 years and is only available to those with the means to live in the cities throughout that time; also, depending on the subject, the pro-government propaganda in the teaching materials can be more or less overbearing, though I don’t see how this could affect degrees like computer science or medicine overly much (#STEMmasterrace).

He also highlighted the underdevelopment of the interior and Caribbean coast of the country, which he felt to be intentional; with fewer eyes in those parts of the country, the Ortega government was free to plunder their natural resources in combination with foreign businesses, which echoed the explanation given to us by our guide in El Castillo when we asked why the military were restricting entrance into the Indio Maíz Reserve. Daniel Ortega’s personal net worth is apparently estimated to be around $50m, though these figures are worth taking with a pinch of salt; however, our tour guide did say that whilst Nicaragua doesn’t really have a middle class, it does have an aristocracy comprising Ortega, his family and his friends.

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Nicaragua, already the second-poorest country in the Americas after Haiti, has been particularly hard hit by the loss of its tourism industry—the second-biggest in the country—over the years of martial law following the 2018 demonstrations, and then COVID lockdowns immediately afterwards, but the first cruise ship was due to dock some time in August. We all chipped in some money and our guide took us around the local market, sampling various snacks and delicacies that all seemed to be corn-based. At the end, his historical narrative reached the present day and he gave us his unfiltered opinion about the Ortega government. His pride in the country and his frustration with its current political situation was palpable, but he was optimistic: with its young, energetic population, and abundant natural resources, he believed that the moment that the dictator was gone the country would experience a rebirth and rapid development. His excitement was infectious, though the hundreds gunned down between 2018–2020 show that Ortega isn’t going to go quietly.

On my final day in León there was some sort of anniversary and FSLN youth were out on the streets in force holding demonstrations; though curious to talk to some real FSLN superfans, I stayed away; I think the celebrations were related to the 2018 protests and I didn’t fancy having anything to do with that, and I’d heard enough from some of the Nicas about the indiscriminate violence carried out by those same youth during that period to be wary.

Whilst I do still think that the FSLN were undeniably heroic once upon a time,⁹ and some of their achievements like the Nicaraguan Literacy Campaign were and remain hugely impressive, the Ortega rump holding on to power now seems to me to have little to do with them beyond branding.

El Tránsiting ¶

I was about a week away from my scheduled flight to Cuba, which would be departing from San José. I hadn’t really thought about how I planned to get back down there, or exactly when I would tell the bosses that I was off. My vague plan was to go to Ometepe for the better half of a week and tackle the volcanos of Concepción and Maderas, but before I got around to planning anything I ran into a Canado–Croat¹⁰ girl on the walking tour who was headed the same direction as me. After the tour we explored the city, including my first proper pint (ignoring the silly glassware and the ludicrous price) since leaving the UK.

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She was heading to the small fishing village of El Tránsito in the coming days, which just so happened to be the village that Orlean was working in. After a little thought, I decided that there was definitely a compelling argument to spending the intervening week relaxing by the beach rater than going to Ometepe to climb even more volcanoes. I duly informed the bosses that I would be leaving before completing the requested 6 weeks, but it all seemed to be fine. Yuli and I were drinking from midday. Then, at 20:30, I found out I would have to be up at 4am to lead a one-day tour of the usually two-day route up El Hoyo and down to Lake Asososca, solo; I shouldn’t have told the boss that I knew the route when he asked me.

Hanna

The early start not so much, but a good, long final hike the next morning was probably just what my hungover body needed. Once I got back, I planned to go straight to sleep for much of the afternoon but was instead persuaded to join the beach party bus for one last ride. Many beers later, I finally got to sleep around 10pm, as the others got ready to go clubbing.

I’d wiped out the last of my córdobas, so in the morning I headed off to the only cash machine in the entire city that I’d been able to withdraw money from (apparently Mastercard can be temperamental, and both of my banks helpfully replaced my Visa cards without asking shortly before I left the UK after the latter increased their transaction fees). Slightly panicking about how I was going to pay for my journey to El Tránsito, I packed my bags and tried again a few hours later; thankfully, they were working again. I met up with Yuli and we hopped on a chicken bus, then hitched a ride from the highway to the town itself.

A Vacation Within a Vacation ¶

El Tránsito turned out to be a a lovely little fishing village-turned-surf spot. Of course, it has all the same problems that the latter condition brings in terms of profit-siphoning expat-owned businesses, amplified here by the weird fortresslike design of some of these eyesores, but at least that made it easier to identify and avoid them. Another good rule of thumb I found was that anywhere that gave its prices in USD would be about twice the price of anywhere else (if not more: a coffee in a local place would run you 15 córdobas [~15¢] compared to $2 in the fancy, air-conditioned Surf Café). As a seasoned Central American backpacker by this point, I found a few fantastic local eateries—Comedor de Pescadores and El Ancla being the stand-outs—and did my bit to direct others there too, thus eating into the profits of the expat scourge, no matter how minutely.

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Yuli and I stayed at SOLID Surf Camp, which whilst owned by a non-resident expat did seem a little more positive for the community in that it offered volunteering options to guests; the Canado–Croat (a nurse back home) spent one morning going door-to-door providing vaccines and we later both joined an English class for adults to chat with them for a bit. I gave surfing another stab, sharing a day-long board rental with two similarly-amateur Germans, and I popped in to Free Spirit Hostel for a beer pong tournament, much to the surprise of Orlean.

Just as with El Castillo, I continually extended my stay until I had only one day to go until my flight. I set off on the bus at 5am, and 17 hours later I was at Aeropuerto Internacional Juan Santamaría. My flight wasn’t until the next morning, so I tried to sleep, then gave up and watched The Simpsons and the 1964 Soviet propaganda film Soy Cuba, which may well be a new favourite of mine.

I came to Nicaragua excited to see a real revolution first-hand; I left feeling like I had done no such thing. Would I have better luck with my next destination?