La Playa Matilda

or, Paradise Found, Nicaragua

Some places take a little time to figure out, but usually by the second day they have either grown on you, or you become disenchanted. I knew how good this one was just as soon as I arrived. The far southwest of Nicaragua. A beach less traveled. I am a bit wrung out from the way, which I suppose is about par for the course. A traveler’s life is often tiring. Have traveled just far enough to the edge of the gringo trail to wonder whether I got off it. Perhaps where I’ve gotten to is to the part of the trail where the expats live. And given their extensive time in these parts, they would know where the best parts are.

This spot of earth, three beaches, from Playa Maderas north to Playa Majahual, feels like a blessed realm. Beautiful cove beaches separated by dramatic rocky cliffs and promontories that you have to high-step inbetween waves to get across. Within a couple hours of arriving here, I was sitting with six expats in a fishing boat pulled up on the beach, drinking Victorias, conversation spreading every which way. Let me go back a few steps and figure out how I got here.

Finally I escaped the elemental pull of Isla Ometepe two days ago, knowing that I could easily stay another day there, and another, felt myself sinking into the gravity of those two mountains and all that water. I knew it was going to take some doing just to get packed up after a week of camping, no less get off the island. Woke early and laid everything out from my tent, packing up what was dry and hanging the wet things on lines in the empty lot next to the school. While they dried, I walked up the rocky dirt road to the Margarita bar one last time, which has some of the finest cuisine in all of Nicaragua, though not a menu.

You walk up to the counter and say que tienes? and the lady there will say what she’s got. This time, my first for breakfast, I said the magic words, and she said, desayunos, and I said, que es? and she said gallo pinto, huevos y pan and I said que bueno! and it was, just like everything else from her kitchen. I was getting near the end of Hemingway’s Collected Short Stories, reading unpublished ones he wrote in the Spanish Civil War. When I got back to the Hacienda Merida it was getting towards ten in the morning, and most of my things were dry. I paid my bill, the equivalent of sixty four dollars for seven nights, the cheapest lodging I’ve yet found. Camping will do that. Thanked the folks at the hostel and walked myself out to the dirt road.

The one bus a day leaving Merida was already two hours gone, so hitchhiking was the only way out, which is theoretically quite easy to do on Ometepe. Theoretically, provided that a vehicle other than a moto actually comes by. If they come, they’ll pick you up, but it might be you stand there half a day before someone does. I parked myself under a tree with a log-bench to sit on, figuring it might be awhile. About an hour later a sagging blue ancient Datsun pickup came chugging up the road, and I put out my thumb.

They stopped, the passenger seat full of melons, the back with two men standing aside a pile of bags of baked goods. The driver with a craggy weather-beaten face asked Donde va? Moyogalpa, I offered, the town two hours north where the ferries leave from, a longshot. No, he said. El Quino was his counter-offer, the little crossroads village on the just north from the center of the hourglass. That was way better than sitting right there, so I said bueno and then he smiled and raised his eyebrows expectantly, made that creepy sign for money, raising his hand and rubbing his thumb against his fingers. Cuanto I asked, and he thought about it, and I hate this moment of waiting, when people are considering how much to charge the gringo, and he said a hundred cordobas ($3.33) and I said esta bien and threw my bags up and climbed on back.

I had found a very slow ride. They were delivering melons and breads and pastries to all the tiendas and many houses along the way. A good way to see the scenery, but no way to get anywhere. They’d pull off on side roads and go way up rutted tracks to bring a woman four bread rolls. At some point I started helping to speed things up, hucking watermelons and bags of bread down to people. It took two hours, but we passed El Porvenir and Santa Cruz and Santo Domingo, delivered all the goods, and then stopped at a little house short of El Quino. The driver told me he’d take me the rest of the way on his motito, which seemed like a very bad idea with two men and my pack, and we were top-heavy, but after a wobbly ride he got me there and left me at the bus stop there where I’d started out a week before. Half an hour later the bus came, I got on and found a seat, and it was another hour up to Moyogalpa, the sight of which did not inspire further investigation.

Got off the bus at the ferry dock, and the guards in their blue naval-looking uniforms yelled Ahora, ahora! and I ran across the parking lot as fast as a man carrying forty-five pounds on his back can run and got on the two o’clock ferry thirty seconds before it pulled away from the dock. I sat back and watched the shores of this peaceful island and its two mystical volcanoes shrink slowly into the distance. Ometepe, I will return.

The taxi drivers off the docks at San Jorge were trying to sell me a direct ride to San Juan del Sur, my destination that day. Veinte dollares, quince dollars, doce! — no, no, no — then just a ride to Rivas, the next town over where the buses south run from. They were lying to me, saying there were no buses to there, and I knew it. But for some reason, even with all of my experience against taking taxi drivers’ travel advice and a bus sitting a hundred yards away, I got into a colectivo taxi where the guy charged me twice as much as the Nica passengers I was squeezed in with, as we followed the bus through traffic to the bus station.

In the sweaty chaotic lot in Rivas I was quickly ushered onto a departing bus for San Juan, and sat in the last available seat, up front next to an old woman who talked to me periodically, of whose words I understood none. We got into San Juan del Sur around five, a hot, dusty, touristy town full of young gringo backpackers of the surfer variety. Surf shops, bars, and surf shop bars. Fishing boats filling the beach, anchored all over the little bay. The first hotel I went into, a block from the beach, had a single room for ten dollars, and a balcony from which you could see the sea, but the sheets were dirty, actual physical dirt and what looked like mouse shit. Downstairs the lady said she would change the sheets, but only if I paid for two nights.

The third place I saw was a cramped little hostel with a dorm for eight dollars a night, but inside the room I found Ian and Ben, two decent young Brit gap-year backpackers I’d met a month before at San Pedro on Lake Atitlan. I took this for a sign, and booked a night. They said they were going to make dinner soon, and invited me to join. Sounded great. Ben is half Italian, and he made an excellent Linguini a la Carbonara with spanish chorizo, onions, green peppers, eggs and cheese. It was a feast, and the best thing about my time in San Juan del Sur.

After a meal and a few beers and the sort of traveler talk you find at every hostel on the gringo trail, they were going out to a club. I walked them to the door and then wandered around town to see the storied night life of San Juan for myself. Crowds of young backpackers huddled into bars getting drunk, Nica guys in packs out hunting gringas. Along the malecon I was solicited by a gaggle of overly made up young prostitutes, one of them with dyed red hair walking along with me, pressing the issue, grabbing my hand and putting it on her ass. No quieres este? No te gusto mi culo? and me pulling my hand back, trying to be polite, es muy bueno pero no gracias. They walked away laughing.

All the bars looked like college parties that I didn’t want to go to when I was in college. Eventually I sat down at a deserted sports bar and talked to the german bartender. My allotted ninety days in the CA-4 countries were about to run out, and I was only a couple hours from Costa Rica, but not quite ready to leave Nicaragua yet. Told the bartender my situation; he thought that it was a $5 fine per day over the visa. A guy at the hostel had said it was less, and another said it was a $50 flat fee. I decided to sleep on it, went back to the hostel to get woken up by some infernal piece of electronics at the front desk that said “Please change battery” in a loud robotic voice fifty times before changing to “Batt-ree”, then finally dying. And then again when the obligatory party guy came in at 3 in the morning and rooted through this things before passing out.

Woke up yesterday tired and sick of hostels. Over some tea and discussion with hostel mates, I decided not to leave Nicaragua, and take my chances. Instead I would take a shuttle an hour up the coast to a beach called Playa Maderas that was reputedly beautiful. But first I wanted to find the “spectacular petroglyph”, just out of town according to the Lonely Planet. Al, a long-haired British guy at the hostel had been talking about how much he loved ancient history, and had tattoos of a Mayan temple, Horus and Anubis, so I asked him if he wanted to come along. Half an hour later we were walking on the road out of town. Al and his swiss girlfriend were long-term travelers, a year in Australia and New Zealand, now making their way through Central America volunteering at hostels. They had another one in a week in Costa Rica. His girlfriend’s birthday was the next day, and he was trying to figure out how to make it special on a limited budget.

The first part of the directions were simple: walk on the main road until you cross the bridge and take a left at the gas station. Pass a school on your left and then a gate on your right. This much was easily accomplished in twenty minutes. But then it got vague: continue until you see the old farmhouse. We walked a long way past fields and cow pastures, through some woods around a bend, up to where a bunch of workers were leveling a lot for some condos. No farmhouse. Neither the couple that passed us on bikes nor the construction workers had heard of any petroglifos, and we’d walked two miles.

Just on the verge of giving up, I asked a couple old security guards watching an empty parking lot, and they were the first people who didn’t seem dumbfounded by the very idea. They knew about the petroglyph, and told us to go back 400 meters and take a left on the dirt road. We found it, but quickly it turned into deep muddy mess. Al’s flip-flop got stuck in the stick, and the thong part ripped out of the sole, and so he went barefoot, his feet coated. I’d sold this venture as a half-hour walk, and was feeling quite guilty now. This road, which was more like a river of mud, led us to a massive and deserted construction site, a vast expanse of disturbed earth, but at the end of it there was another dirt road in better condition. It was all seeming like a bad idea but we agreed that we’d come too far to give up now. At some point we met a herd of cows slowly ambling down the road, and as it seemed they were going somewhere, we followed them.

Eventually they led us to a farmhouse, though this couldn’t possibly be the right one, as the directions said it would be visible from the main road. This place turned out to be some kind of an adventure tour zip-line operator, and we were amazed to see that one of the options on their menu board was “Trip to the Petroglyph $5”. So it really existed, and we asked us a young man for directions. He mercifully didn’t charge us, and drew us a map. We followed a trail up into the hills behind the house, took a couple false turns, went too far up the hill, but eventually found our way into a dark forest and down to a green river. Next to it, by a deep pool, was a great big black volcanic stone with carvings four feet across. It was elaborate and detailed and mostly inscrutable.

We sat there and pondered for twenty minutes, a lot of lines and circles and shapes that were clearly meant to express something, but we couldn’t figure out what. A map? A story? There was some sense of accomplishment in actually finding this out of the way place, but it was probably not worth the two hours of walking we had done and the loss of his flip-flop. Al jumped into the river, a deep pool of somewhat murky water, with all his clothes on. I abstained. We walked back, talking more about his girlfriend’s birthday, ancient aliens and pyramids that he insisted were built without slaves and his life of perpetual travel.

On the way down, we stumbled upon two big black howler monkeys hanging in the trees over our path. A male and a female, right there not twenty feet above, the smaller female climbing lower to get a better look at us and making kind of a cooing sound. While she seemed curious and maybe even friendly, the male was anything but, screaming and rumbling and jumping about. We stood there amazed — usually it’s very hard to see them — and were afraid to pass under, but then the male turned around to very deliberately display his huge, stark-white testicles to us, and made a horrific howl. It was clear we needed to get out of there, so on the count of “ready, set, go” we ran by to the sounds of ferocious monkey anger, and kept going. We agreed that the monkey show was even better than the petroglyph.

Back at the edge of town I went into an Israeli falafel place and he went back to find the girlfriend who was probably very worried by now. We said goodbye and I apologized again for his shoe.

When I got back to the hostel, I tried not to draw too much attention to myself as I packed my things, given that my morning adventure had stretched into afternoon and I was several hours late for checkout time. I slipped out, picked up a few groceries for the next couple days, then walked over to a hostel to wait for the two-thirty shuttle to the beaches north. They put us, a pack of gringos looking to get out of gringoland, all on the back of a truck with benches, covered with a plastic tarp. Everyone else was just going there for the day.

We drove out past where the petroglyph had been, up through a line of high hills to where the road turned from pavement to dirt, and eventually down a rutted track into Playa Maderas. A few bar-restaurant-hostels, a surf shop; opening up onto a glorious rocky beach, the prettiest I’d seen on my journeys, high rock cliffs, glassy arching waves dotted with surfers. It was about four in the afternoon but still very hot. I set out carrying my bags across the sand, past a couple beachfront bars, people lying out sun-tanning and coming in from the surf. I climbed out onto a rocky outcrop interspersed with tide pools, and out on the end of it I could see the next beach, maybe better than the first, curving, steep white sand, framed by dark rock, glorious tall palms: Playa Matilda.

Under the trees were a few houses and a couple modest hostels, a little shack of a restaurant bar at the end, maybe five people on the beach. The place with camping, Casa Cristina, was deserted except for a woman in a hammock out front; she directed me to the restaurant. I left my cursed bags and walked up that way, found a rickety old place with two tables. There were a couple people waiting for some food and about fourteen cats and the woman cooking inside told me to wait. After a little while she came out, said she was Cristina, camping was seven dollars, and I could camp anywhere I wanted. I thought that was good enough; went back and set my tent up in the yard under some wiry thorn trees.

There was a one-story building of cement construction in front with four rooms, one occupied by Cristina, a bunch of hammocks hanging on the porch. One of the three rooms was occupied by the woman in one of the hammocks, the only other current guest; her name was Marit, about my age, and she was down from Vancouver for a month. Out back was a large shaded yard of sand, and a small building with a shared kitchen. When I’d set up my tent I came out to sit in a hammock and talk to Marit. She gave me a little rundown of the place, and told me she was going to the next beach over, Majahual, for sunset, and invited me to come along for a beer. Sounded excellent.

I went down to the beach and waded into blue waters that were somehow colder than in Mexico, four countries north. After a swim I went up to Cristina’s restaurant and ordered a jugo and she made me a limonada with fresh limes and I sat there and watched the cats all circulating like a school of fish.

By the time I was dried off and changed and met Marit for the walk, I was feeling very good about my decision to stay in Nicaragua a little longer. Turned out the sunset walk was to a bar to meet five expats who’d found this little patch of paradise. Arian and Nicole, Americans, live up in the hills full-time and run an eco-lodge. Syd, from Germany, was their friend and long-term guest. Marc, a Canadian, works in oil and gas and spends half the year living in a little house on Playa Matilda. Peter, also Canadian, spends a couple months a year down here in winter. They were all interesting, quirky folks, and there was this feeling of being among friends that was very refreshing. We took our bottles of Victoria out to a beached fishing boat in the shade of some trees and Nicole passed around a spliff and we watched the sun set orange and streaky out over the waves.

Too quickly it was gone and the show was over, mosquitoes attacking and everyone getting up like it was time to go. But there was a second act. We took an armful of litro Victorias, walked back to Marc’s house on the beach, and we all sat on stools at the bar on his front porch. He played 80’s music and we talked about all kinds of things: spiny lobster, how to drum up some business for Arian and Nicole’s eco-lodge, trials of living in Nicaragua, the tension in that country that no Nica person had mentioned, the chances for impeaching Trump.

Best conversation I’d been part of in a while. A many-headed, meandering, chaotic conversation. The kind that only comes with people who know each other well but still find what they have to say interesting. Before I knew it, it was nine o’clock and Marc was going to sleep and kicking us out and we all split ways. I thanked them for welcoming me into their community. The two nearby restaurants were both closed by now, so as Marit and I walked back to Casa Cristina I offered to make her dinner. We stopped by Casa Matilda, the other hostel next door for a couple more beers, and went back to the kitchen to cook.

I made black beans and quesadillas with chopped tomato and avocado, and on the first bite we realized how famished we were. Afterwards we sat out at a plastic table in the yard and got to talking about our generation, the so-called Generation X. How we were so full of potential, but now we were coming into our time of being in charge, and what were we doing? Whether the whole generation was “fatally flawed” as my friend Reuben once said. We talked about the Millenials and what it was like traveling with them, the effects of lifelong internet and devices, that they seemed way less sociable, but way more idealistic. About the generation after that, and being Jewish and matzo ball soup and bagels and office jobs. One of those nights where the conversation just can’t seem to stop.

She washed the dishes and I was grateful to her for welcoming me into her world and she was grateful for not going to bed hungry. Everyone was grateful and everything was good and we went and passed out in our respective places.

The next morning I walked over to Playa Maderas and rented a surfboard. The waves there were beautiful and glassy but seemed a little big and besides there were crowds of surfers there. Walked a ways over towards the end of the beach where the surf was medium sized and paddled out. Started out great, just catching wave after wave, long ride, taking my time to get my balance and get up. Then the surf got rougher, started pushing me around, when I’d catch a wave it would break over me and put me deep under. Got so much water in my ears it lasted for days. After an hour I was so tired I could barely make it back in, took some time to rest and recover on the beach.

Perhaps unwisely I went back out, and the waves were either too small or too big, mostly got thrashed or left behind. But I caught a couple, even did a bit of turning at the end of rides. When I finally got out I was so tired that I fell on my face in about six inches of water. Tripped over a rock and just felt my body give out. It was all I could do to carry the board up to the surf shop and walk back over the rocks to Playa Matilda.

Laid in the hammock in front of the hostel and fell asleep, and when I woke up Marit was leaving, going into San Juan for a night at the bars. Why anyone would want to trade this place for that one was beyond me, but she’d been here a long time. That night I went back to Majahual for the sunset beer, but it was just Marc and Peter, who long ago had worked as waiters together, and it was waiter talk, all about people and incidents that meant nothing to me.

They went back to Marc’s house and I let them go and went to the restaurant where we’d been getting our beers. Costillas, pork ribs with gallo pinto and plantains and avocado. I started reading a book called The White Rock about Peru, a British guy who finds previously unknown Inca sites in the Andes. For the first time in a while I could feel the call of the road, the long road that led to those faraway places. It is very easy after you’ve been traveling for months to lose sight of the big picture, to be overwhelmed by all the places you’ve been. You kind of sink deeply into the present, which is both good and bad.

This morning I woke up early and felt fine, better than I have in weeks, saw the sun coming up over the trees in the yard. Was starting to think I needed to get out of here, see about that whole visa running out thing, but Nicaragua had other plans. While I was drinking my morning tea Cristina came and sat down with me. She’s about sixty, the sister of Matilda who owns the place next door. She’s tired of running a hostel and a restaurant, doesn’t love it, says it’s not good to cook food if you don’t. I said that the limonada had been good, and she smiled and said, but that was for you. It’s too quiet here, she said — good for a month to get away, but she used to live in Managua and misses it there. Wants to get into real estate. She said that they aren’t her cats, that they just showed up and then there were more and more of them. I told her it was because she feeds them. But what would they eat if I didn’t?

She asked how long I was staying, and I told her I was thinking of leaving today. She said that if I wanted to stay another night it would be free, and got up and walked away. I went to the front and sat in a rocking chair and looked at the ocean, and after some consideration I decided to stay. Wasn’t all that difficult. No one had offered me a free night so far, and this is one of the very best places I’ve been. So one more night in Nicaragua. Marit will be back and we can go over to Playa Majahual and sit in the boat and see what kind of a sunset it will be.