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San Juan del Sur

We took the shuttle today from Granda to San Juan del Sur, near the border with Costa Rica on the Pacific side (I was wrong earlier thinking it’s on the Carabian side). The trip was a quick two hours over some bumpy roads and we settled down at Casa Oro as the recomended hostel in the area. Nowhere near as nice as the place we stayed in Granada, it’s kinda in a sad state. There’s no running water at the moment, but they say that’ll start working soon.

Anyway, the beachfront here is picture perfect beautiful. Blue skies, little boats in the harbor, huge sand banks, the works. The beach here in town is a little gross. When walking on it later in the afternoon, we found jelly fish washed up to shore and some gross looking yellow foam. Apparently you have to go like 10km up or down the coast to find the really epic beaches in the area. We had lunch at a little place on the beach. Sadly there wern’t many options for me (beans and rice), but the seafood look good. Jamus and I walked along the beach and the town area for a while, which isn’t much more than a strip of pavement and some small streets that go back, then headed back to the hostel.

After getting back and relaxing for a bit, we met up with some other travellers and went out and had some more drinks and food. They’d also just arrived from Granada, so we were swapping stories. We went back to the local beach and hung out for a while and tried to avoid (but coudn’t) the kinda-gross water. Hopefully tomorrow we’ll make our way out to the better beaches; there are a few groups of travellers here in the same situation as us that might go as well (e.g. arrived too late to make the bus out).

Now we have a bit of a quandry on our hands. Our flight to Mexico City leaves Friday at 4pm from San Jose, Costa Rica. I want to go to the beach tomorrow morning and leave for the border thereafter, but transportation is hard to come by. The border crossing takes a few hours due to the traffic at it, so if we leave tomorrow morning we’ll get San Jose probably some 6 or 8 hours after we leave. Thus, we need to figure out what we’re going to do. Later tonight, it’s probably just dinner and hanging out. This sleepy little town doesn’t have much going on, outside of travellers and a some 6,000 locals so it’ll be a quiet evening.