Added: 09/09/2005 |
Travel to Nicaragua: lazy rather than hazyTravel to Nicaragua:lazy rather than hazy.
Nicaragua is the largest Central American country, but it is still small enough to make visiting for a few weeks a viable option.On your travel to Nicaragua, the vast, chaotic cities of Leon and Managua are worth a call. But if you want lazy rather than hazy, there are plenty of bumming-about options.
At Playa Coco, standing in the warm shallows marvelling at the tropical forest on the surrounding hills while a peloton of pelicans skimmed the surf you will have the full three-quarter mile of golden beach all to yourselves.
An enterprising Austrian runs a development of self-catering houses and apartments in the trees bordering the beach. The accommodation at Parque Maritimo El Coco is not especially luxurious but has flushing toilets, running water, electricity, fans and air-conditioning ... even cable TV. There's a decent restaurant, a little shop and an internet cafe, which is still a rare and extraordinary thing to find at the end of a dirt track when you travel to Nicaragua. Several times as you hung out on the deck, families of howler monkeys would stop for a while in nearby trees before moving on.
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On the way to your favourite beach, you are sure to pass through the port town of San Juan del Sur. It is growing, now. New nicaragua hotels to suit a range of budgets are being built, while at the north end of the bay holiday apartments are springing up. There always seems to be a new addition to the line of seafront restaurants and bars (many are owned by a growing expat colony) that shares the sunset view over San Juan's pretty bay.
Apart from a trickle of travellers passing through on their way to or from Costa Rica, development on this part of the coast is mostly intended to satisfy local demand. There was nothing specifically aimed at attracting to travel to Nicaragua from afar - until now. The official opening last month of a sumptuous ecological hacienda has dramatically raised the bar. Set in 1,800 hectares of private tropical forest, with a kilometre of beach all to itself,this nacaragua hotel is already luring people to a part of the world they might otherwise have ignored.
Morgan's Rock Hacienda and Eco-lodge is owned by a French family who strayed into the hotel business by accident. It was Clément Ponçon's work as an agronomist that brought the family to Nicaragua in 1974. The family settled in Managua and over the years acquired a number of rural properties. The site of Morgan's Rock was bought in 1998 as a sustainable source of tropical woods for a furniture business they were starting up with a young British architect and furniture designer called Matthew Falkiner, another long-term foreign resident.
The original idea was to develop the property into a private nature reserve. When a subsidiary of the World Bank offered grants for feasibility research into tourism projects, the Ponçons applied. The free study that resulted recommended the construction of a five-star modern resort Ncaragua hotel and the clearing of a swathe of forest to make way for a golf course. Horrified, they immediately intensified the reforestation programme, putting 30,000 new trees where the consultant planned to place the golf course.
If the report had a value, it was in galvanising their thinking. They decided to build a hotel that was the very antithesis of the modern cookie cutter resort hotel. The hotel is situated in primary tropical forest on a curving hillside at the south end of the bay. Fifteen bungalows with their own little gardens are dotted around the hillside, a short walk through the forest and over a suspension bridge from the palm thatched hacienda with its pool, restaurant, reception and bar.
The bungalows have their backs to the hillside and their fronts up on stilts. The main rooms are open on two sides, giving floor-to-ceiling views out through the trees to the beach and the sea. The effect is startling and soothing - you feel like you are up in the canopy. This was the idea. "We wanted to blur the boundary between the inside and outside," says Falkiner, who designed everything from bungalows to lamp shades.
The bungalows are gorgeous and original, combining modern simplicity and traditional materials: the columns are polished trunks of eucalyptus trees, the floor is made from thick boards of a lustrous dark reddish wood known as guapinol, and the walls are hand-cut chunks of volcanic rock. The furniture is all hand-made. Accustomed to normal Nicaraguan standards, you will find the quality and attention to detail mind-blowing. The bungalows are large and include their own terrace deck, but are designed to have a much smaller footprint on the ground so that animals and plant life are minimally disturbed. "Touching the ground lightly" is the phrase Falkiner uses. It seems to work. Several times as you hung out on the deck, families of howler monkeys would stop for a while in nearby trees before moving on.
Still for the children, connoisseurs of Pacific sands, the measure of Morgan's Rock and travel to Nicaragua would be the beach. You should walk down the wooden-stepped path ready to make comparisons. The bay is perfect: good surf for boogie boarding and a special feature most love - an estuary. With the tide in, it is possible to ride waves all the way into the calm inland waters of the river.
When you return to Nicaragua for a holiday there will be only one beach for you ever since.
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