The Nicaragua Journal.
Chapter I: Miles Alone
Published April 15, 2024
I’ve traveled alone for 3,731 miles to get here and now, I’m questioning whether I can make it nine kilometers by myself.
“It’s only a ten-minute walk to the beach from here, right?” I ask, remembering what I’d read on the hostel’s website.
The guy at the front desk looks at me and laughs. “Which beach?”
My eyes go wide. I’m in the least developed country in Central America, a place I’ve never been, where I don’t speak the language, and my instinct is to do everything I can to avoid ignorance. This is because, less than twenty-four hours into my first solo trip, I’m still painfully unaware that most of the nomads I’ll encounter are also stumbling through every step of their journeys and I’m still clutching onto the delusion that I’m in control of mine.
But, I thought I’d done thorough research, and the question throws me.
Every travel blog I’d read, every hostel description, every variation of “Should I travel to Playa Maderas, Nicaragua?” I’d typed into my Google search bar resulted in mentions of only “the” beach. It had seemed, according to the internet, that there are famously few options for anything in this town, which travelers agree is a blissfully quiet surf mecca sitting right outside of the bustling beach town of San Juan Del Sur. For some people out there, a few nights in Playa Maderas is the highlight of their entire vacation. Others could’ve done without the overnighter, kept it a day trip, and spent more time tipping back bottles of Victoria at the bars in SJDS. I trust dozens of strangers to be my shepherds because I have no choice. If there are people in my rolodex who’ve spent time here, I don’t know about it. So, I’m left to judge credibility on a rubric of technicalities like grammar and image quality. If they have enough sense to string a legible sentence together and choose a decent filter, they must be trustworthy. Those with the highest scores are to blame for where I’m standing right now, fresh off the back of a truck coming from my first night spent in the main town, eager for two days of surfing before I continue on.
The man at the desk lists off the names of nearby beaches, of which there are only two. One of them is the town’s namesake, and that’s the one I’m sure I’m trying to get to. He tells me to take a left out of the front parking lot, then take a slight right over the hill and keep going until I see it. My nod doubles as a silent prayer to a god that I fear I might have to start believing in.
Standing on the main road, everything below me is dirt and loose rock. Above, blue and blinding. In all other directions, desolate. There are powerlines where there should be palm trees, fields of dry grass where there should be coastline. There’s no marked territory, no tourists or locals with beach bags and bikinis. Just dead air, open space, and the occasional truck with a bed full of construction workers who all turn to look at me with indiscernible glares.
I’m halfway up a comically steep hill and I have no clue how long I’ve been at it. I’m too busy focusing on every placement of every step of my worn-down Birkenstock-cladded feet to notice the time. I don’t know what lies ahead, so, reluctantly, I keep going. A few steps further I see a sign that says Big Surf House. OK, I saw that on Hostelworld when I was booking this trip last week. A sure sign of civilization and proximity to water. I soldier on, keenly aware of how low the sun is getting. I spot Maderas Café and a broken surfboard nailed to a tree that says, “Welcome, Surfers!” A coastal north star if I’ve ever seen one. I breathe a heavy sigh of relief, give the hem of my shirt a few shakes for airflow, and trek onward. I’ve made it to the descent, my abs are tight, torso leaned back, knees carefully bent. In the distance, past a blanket of bare trees hiding the break, I finally see the farthest edge of the ocean.
The last stretch of road is flat and when I make it to the end, I find three small open-air bars, a handful of surfboard rental racks, and a dirt parking lot with a few cars and motorbikes. Beyond, the sand is lined with umbrellas and beach chairs and the water is dotted with silhouettes bobbing up and down. It’s the first time I’ve seen another human in what I can only assume has been ten minutes. “Where the hell did all of these people come from?” I think.
I watch the sky grow golden as the sun sinks toward the ocean and turn around before it touches the horizon. One successful walk to the beach doesn’t negate all of the warnings against being out after dark from the aforementioned blogs or from the travel sites claiming Nicaragua to have a high crime and kidnapping rate. Trudging back up the dirt hill, I answer a call from my mom to assure her that, more or less, I’m physically and mentally in one piece. Talking distracts me from walking and halfway through my sentence I step on a smooth rock nestled on top of a pile of dust. It slides down the hill, taking me with it. Before I realize what’s happening, I’m on all fours.
This trip is a fluke. When I found out I was getting laid off last November, travel wasn’t a thought. Being career-oriented, the only thing on my mind was all of the work I needed to do to find more work. I made a list of people in the industry I wanted to reach out to and had a spreadsheet of brands and publications I could see myself working for along with contacts for recruiters I’d send my resume to. I spent hours scrolling through job boards and tracking which roles I’d finished applications for. As I started wrapping up my projects at work, more and more news broke about layoffs across the industry and tales of an increasingly bleak market were flooding my LinkedIn feed. Around this time, my roommate was gearing up for a digital nomad stint in Costa Rica and had given me a few dates that were open for me to stay with her. One of those windows was the first week of February — the first week of my official unemployment.
At first, I was caught up in all the reasons not to go. Santa Teresa is hard to get to, requiring a prop plane out of the main airport once I land in the country. That’s a total of four plane tickets, meaning a lot of money would have to leave my bank account without knowing when it’ll go back in. The most responsible way through this would be to pinch pennies and keep my head down in the job search, lest there be a gap in my resume that may deter recruiters. But, it was a free place to stay, a chance to go somewhere I’d never been, and an excuse to be somewhere tropical during a New York City winter. An opportunity had presented itself, and all I had to do was say yes. With a touch of guilt, I booked my flights and a few weeks later, headed to JFK at the crack of dawn, ready to use my passport for the first time in years.
It happened gradually throughout that trip, without me noticing. Between slow mornings and waterfall adventures and dropping in on waves that were too big for me and easy laughs on quiet nights with new friends that fed my soul, I’d become acclimated to a new environment in which I very much belonged. It was an obvious divergence from the home I’d nestled into over the past few years. One built on checklists and productivity. Its bones were made up of accomplishments that I could prove on paper, its walls were thick with all the right people I’d impressed. And in it, I was always increasing my skillset and working well under pressure and going above and beyond on everything, always. It wasn't until I stepped outside that I realized I had forgotten to carve out any windows.
This layoff showed me how badly I’d been cooped up. For the first time, maybe ever, I stopped worrying about how things would work out, I just knew they would. Because this structure of mine is strong, and even if it crumbles, there’s still a whole world of lives I could be living, places I could be seeing, people I could know. There are different roads to go down and different homes to be built on them. Before I left Costa Rica, I decided that I’d be going somewhere else, and soon. Unemployment could last for months or it could end in a few weeks. I didn’t know how much time it would take to land another job, but I did know that time would pass, regardless of what I did with it. The most responsible thing would be to make the most out of it while I still could.
The morning after I landed back in New York I searched, “places to travel and surf.” Australia and Bali were too far and I’ve already been there. I’d only seen one city in Costa Rica, but felt a pull towards something completely new. Nicaragua popped up and unlocked a vague memory of a late friend of mine spending time there before our senior year of high school. The more I dug into it the deeper I fell. They call it the land of lakes and volcanos and people say it’s home to some of the most beloved surf towns in the world. There are plenty of blogs written by female travelers describing successful solo trips full of life-changing experiences and hospitable locals. I let it be a fantasy as I mapped out a possible itinerary and looked into lodging and transportation options. Within 24 hours I decided it was possible, and within 48 my flights were booked.
Now, on my hands and knees on the side of the road, hungry, alone, and both overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time, I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing here.
