I may be one of the first travelers to spend more than five weeks in Central America before ever getting to a beach. I have to not being much of a beach person. I can spend a day or two at a beach when I'm traveling alone but quickly get very bored. It can be a somewhat different story if I’m staying at a beach such as Fort Lauderdale or San Diego where there is plenty to do in the area that has nothing to do with the beach, but just baking in the sun, frolicking around in the water, maybe going on a booze cruise or taking a surfing lesson or something is fun for about a day or two at a time for me.

With a bit of time to kill in Nicaragua I decided to spend a few days at San Juan Del Sur, a beach town on the Pacific a few miles north of the Costa Rican border that’s probably Nicaragua’s leading beach resort . San Juan is located on an isthmus within an isthmus, the whole of Central America being a large isthmus between Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Lake Nicaragua, though, is the second largest lake in Latin America after Titicaca in Peru/Bolivia and is separated from the Pacific by a long and quite narrow strip of land at one point only 18 miles wide. This is what has long made Nicaragua a potential alternative to Panama for a canal connecting the two oceans.

It turned out to be quite a nice place, a real town with an almost Caribbean vibe of colorfully painted little shacks, lots of hostels catering to a mostly young backpacker and surfer crowd, and not much in the way of bigger or fancier hotels a la Mexico and Costa Rica. The town is a real fishing port and the crescent-shaped beach faces a bay rather than open ocean, so the waves around town are quite puny. For real surf you have to take one of the regular shuttles north or south to more secluded beaches that do face out onto the open Pacific and have some decent waves .

The landscape around San Juan Del Sur is tropical dry forest, a somewhat unusual looking landscape in February deep into the dry season when most of the trees have shed most of their leaves. It looks like winter in dry places at higher latitudes like Colorado but with very hot temperatures. I suppose my biggest objection to San Juan was the wind. They said it was unusually windy (everything this year is getting blamed on the El Nino phenomenon), but given the large wind farms east of San Juan toward Lake Nicaragua, wind must be a quite regular phenomenon. It made being on the beach unpleasant because of being constantly sandblasted and even made happy hour in the raised bars above the beach quite sandy.

I lazed my couple days away with short stints on the beach, sunset happy hours with cheap 2-for-1 cocktails like mojitos, mango daiquiris, and pina coladas I usually pass by in most places in favor of cheaper beer. And the seafood is also great value in San Juan Del Sur with great shrimp and lobster and massive bowls of Sopa Marinera with a copious variety of shellfish. After two and a half days, though, I was more than ready to head to Granada.