Hi Thorn Tree Readers-
As a 12 year veteran of travelling and living abroad with the bulk of time spent in Latin America, it pains me to have to write a post like this but I think we all know (as I do now, even more so) that you can NEVER be too careful.
Here is the version with most pertinent facts:
Boyfriend and I flew to Nica for 9 days in San Juan del Sur area. I am fluent in spanish, which we know is helpful. Driving from Managua to San Juan we were stopped by police in our rental car at a highway junction for not using a turn signal to go around a slower car. Forget that no one else uses turn signals (or any other traffic rules) there, that's not the point (check out Managua; NO street signs and very few traffic lights...organized chaos!). The policia asked me to surrender my license, because he needed to "send it to Managua and would in turn give me an official report slip with his badge #, etc etc, instead". I told him I was not giving it to him b/c I could not re-enter my country without it. After about 10 minutes of some don't-give-me-that-bullshit gazing on both parties' behalf, he let us drive off.
Case in point- a friend in the US warned me this might happen, so I was prepared. Do not give anyone your license, it is a lie- they do not need to retain it...and do NOT bribe him to let you go, unless you really see a major threatening situation starting and are desperate. I have read that we as tourists should not facilitate that system whenever possible and I totally agree.
Spent entire stay at rented house in Balcones de Majagual, found through Aurora Real Estate in San Juan del Sur. They were fine to work with. The house was really exquisite and worth the $$ paid. Wildlife everywhere and good access to beaches. What I did not understand until I was physically there is how remote it is; 15 K down an unlit, bumpy dirt road through the jungle-like terrain, and there are local families/farms interspersed in the land surrounding you. I personally find the entire concept of the development that is going in those hills very disturbing if you understand poverty in latin america, and I think problems lie ahead for people that move there, or even rent the houses as tourists, like we did. Nothing happened to us in the house, but after another incident that occurred (described below) I was terrified of sleeping there anymore. It occurred to me ('scuse me if this is a big DUH, but I have always been safe and lucky in my traveling) that tourists, wealthy or not, staying in houses with no guards and screens for walls in the middle of forests in Central Am. is a really dangerous concept.
There are a couple of eco-developments now under construction there, all by the same builder/architect team and the whole purpose is to have privacy and architecture that is very united with natural surroundings-- http://www.balconesdemajagual.com/ Believe me, it is beautiful, peaceful, and very enchanting. One of the most remarkable places I have ever stayed, and pretty posh for jungle living. Nonetheless, you could VERY easily be robbed or even attacked in your sleep if motivated thieves were to stake you out. You feel like "no one is around you", which is the point to "getting away", but that is also the inherent problem. Locals know that place like the back of their hands, and there are a few bad seeds out there that could so easily gain access through the screen walls of the house at any time.
I have never been one to stay in expensive resorts, and I know Piedras y Olas in town has been mentioned by other bloggers here, but if I ever return to San Juan that is the only place I would stay, because the security is there 24/7 (The food in their restaurant also happens to be fantastic if you want to splurge). I hate to say that though, because I have always felt- with my backpacker roots- that you miss out on a lot of the local culture staying in walled-in resorts. However, as I will account below, there is a reason for those resorts to exist:
On our last afternoon there, we went to Playa Yanqui to catch a final day and sunset at the beach. We ultimately decided to go to Playa El Coco/La Flor, where there is a protected preserve where turtles nest. It is out of the high season for this, so we really just went to see the beach itself, although 2 travel guides (no naming here, ok?) recommend going around 9 p.m.- which astounds me now- to try to catch turtles coming out of the water. An ex-pat Canadian we met while walking on the beach had lived there for 9 years and loved El Coco, but said Yanqui had been prone to robberies recently.
My boyfriend and I started walking down the beach, to a beautiful outcropping of rocks at the end. If you travel around those rocks, there is another beach on the other side, and so on and so on. There are multiple beaches connected by rocks you can cross over. Absolutely gorgeous, and you can see beautiful rocks sculpted by the surf.
We caught the sunset, and started walking back to our car, parked by a restaurant/hospedaje. There was plenty of light. As we headed over the last 2 rocks outcroppings, we heard some yelling from the jungle hills behind us, like men cat-calling to a woman. We were between one set of rocks and about to climb over the last one to get back to the main beach. Suddenly, I heard footsteps running behind us and turned around. Next comes a moment I will never forget, and I still shake writing these words since it was less than 2 days ago that it happened.
When we turned around, 2 teenage boys with t-shirts tied over their heads/faces, a la guerrilla-warfare soldier style, were running toward us with large knives. We started screaming and backed away but the were rocks behind us and we were trapped. They were making stabbing motions and we tumbled to the ground. I think one was pulling on me to get down in the sand, and the other stood over my boyfriend, who threw himself on top of me and put himself between me and the knife. Definitely a moment where you think, within a quarter-second's time, "all of my traveling, my adventures, my experiences...and now here is a moment I hoped would never come. We are going to die here, right now." It was absolutely tragic. Being on your back, with large daggers being held over your body, waiting for them to be plunged into your flesh...well, there is really no way to translate that experience unless you are ever in a situation like that.
I felt one of the guys rummaging through the backpack on my back, and I started to realize they just wanted money. As I tried to get out of the straps to give it to him, he found my boyfriend's wallet and showed it to the other guy. Having found what they really wanted, they immediately ran off and scrambled up into the hills and disappeared in seconds. Stunned, we scrambled over the rocks and ran the 500 yards or so back to our car. In open space, with people out on the beach, we had been seconds away by foot but were completey staked out and ambushed. We realized the cat-calls we heard earlier had been from guys in the hills signaling to their buddies, the attackers, that we were coming- it was a big set up. We ran to our car and sped the 20 or so minutes down yet another now dark, dirt road away from the beach back to San Juan. In the week that we had been there, the thought of someone jumping out of the woods and attacking our car never seemed more possible until then. I now saw danger in every corner.
We were leaving the next morning, and had to depart early from San Juan. We were absolutely too freaked out to drive down La Chocolata at that point, the 15 K we always drove in the dark to get to our house in Balcones de Majagual. Fortunately, a wonderful woman from Boston who lives and works in town took us in for the night- we had coincidentally met her the night before. We returned very quickly to our house at sunrise and packed our things quickly to make our flight back to the US.
There was no time to file a police report, and I was ready to get the hell out of Nicaragua anyway. Would it even matter? We found out later that we had been in a national preserve which was supposedly guarded by the state army. I beg to differ. Sadly, I feel my love affair with Latin America was been severly dampened for a while, and I am just so thankful that my boyfriend and I escaped with only a missing wallet. We had our keys to the car, and our physical selves intact, although I had a very painful right elbow which I thought sustained a fracture when I was shoved to the ground, but it is getting better now.
If you are traveling to Nicaragua, please, please remember this story. I can say now that I did have a weird vibe from almost my initial entry into the country that I never felt anywhere before in Latin America. It felt to me like the tourism and the locals were incongruent somehow, and I feel that they are building so fast in San Juan, and there seems to be an underlying resentment as the socio-economic disparity grows. Our friend from Boston who helped us that night has had a totally different experience, and felt the locals were friendly and welcoming. I did not. I missed the smiles and the openness I have felt in other countries; it seemed to be vacant in Nicaragua.
I know we all return with different experiences, and I hope yours is better. I knew I had angels watching over my shoulders in prior years of travel, so in some ways I felt like eventually something like this was going to happen, somewhere, and it did. I have always enjoyed traveling off the beaten path, and sometimes there is a price you pay for that. Thankfully, we left with our lives.
