Nov 3, 2017

During the night, we pulled into San Juan del Sur in Nicaragua. It was lightly raining, in the high 70’s, no wind. There was a full horizon to horizon rainbow out our window as we first looked out on the tiny village. A huge statue of San Juan overlooks the harbor and the steep hills running down to the rimming beach. Pelicans sit on all the little boats in the harbor. The hills are covered in low growing trees and there are lots of condo-like building built stepping stone fashion down the slopes.

  

After breakfast, we took a tender over to the village, about a 20-minute ride. We climbed up some broken stairs into the reception area which was a concrete pad with a canvas roof. Several different bands were playing, costumed girls were dancing, vendors were hawking every native knick-knack imaginable - leather goods, hats, sunglasses, pottery, whistles, fabric goods and taxi trips. We walked out to the street and followed it along the beach front. Lots and lots of bars offering free wi-fi and cold beer. The sidewalks are paved with stones, tiles, broken concrete and about two feet wide. The streets are muddy and broken and cars and dirt bikes whiz past. Lots of colors and every type of building from mango logs and blue tarps to sleek pink and yellow haciendas tightly line the walkway. We saw a grey squirrel with a multi-jointed tail eating coconut and some huge black pigeons which sounded like parrots. There were missing buildings on the beach side of the road, (maybe hurricane damage?) which gave egress to the beach. It was a weird combination of excess and poverty, but everyone was smiling and welcoming. We spotted massed tangles of overhead wiring (which makes Jim happy) and HUGE cell towers far off on the mountain tops. Everyone has a cell phone.

  

(Can't understand why...)

There were armed policemen on every corner. We were told there is no crime in San Juan. The tourists are too important to allow any harm to spread. We also heard there is a 90% literacy rate, universal health care and you can drink the water. It’s still a third world fishing village but it has some remarkable attractions.

 After walking as far as we could, we walked back along the beach. We watched one man using an old skiff and a rope tied to two trees to pull his “ferry” back and forth over the river which cut across the beach. The pelicans were diving, and the little kids were swimming. We wandered into the surf, but it was a little too cold to go swimming. It was raining, but warm and only gently falling.

We came back on the tender about noon and spend another lazy afternoon reading and napping.

Around 4pm, Jim went to the front desk to straighten out an incorrect charge on our account and arrange for luggage transfer in FL.

We visited with Christian at the Atrium bar – had my first Mojito, and it’s pretty tasty. We wandered up to the Lido deck and had a glass of wine by the pool.

The pool is surrounded by a wide bench which surrounds a walkway around the actual pool. The walkway is 4” deep with overflow from the pool. That way, the pool is full to the brim, you can splash on the edge and there’s no run off from the pool to the surrounding patio. You can sit on the bench and splash in the pool without getting wet. In this case, it was raining, so we did get wet but it was such a warm gentle rain, we barely noticed it. The big screen was showing movie trivia so we splashed and laughed and amazed ourselves with the breadth and width of our knowledge.

We went to change and then had dinner at the Horizon Café. We then grabbed an after dinner drink and went back to our room for some movie watching and sleep.