Welcome to Paradise.
During my last two days in Leon, I shared my dorm with a Canadian, a German, and a Brit. We hit it off and, when I suggested making for the beach following my volcano boarding adventure, the other three felt we should move as a unit.
A benefit of staying in a dorm: Instant Adventurers’ Clubs.
A couple weeks ago, my friend Troy shot me an email telling me to visit a place called Rancho Esperanza, where he’d stayed for a week some years before. I worked with Troy this summer on sailboats up in Portland, Maine. He informed me that Rancho Esperanza was owned by another fellow from Portland. I’d never heard of the place, or the small town of Jiquilillo where it sat, but decided to take his word for it.
To call the place I spent the next three days magical would be an understatement. It’s ina remote fishing village that can only be accessed by four miles of extremely rocky road.
The road to Jiquilillo. This is where tires go when they’ve committed crimes against the state.
The town itself was once a big resort area, but nearly all of the vacation homes were destroyed by Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and never rebuilt. What remained after the storm is what remains there now: a fishing village. The fisherman lived further back off the beach, but live a lot closer to it now. Mitch changed the landscape of the whole area. The original road to Jiquilillo is now buried under ten feet of ocean.
In 2004, Nate (the fellow from Portland) started Rancho Esperanza as a backpacker hostel and community building tool. Profits are poured back into the community, and locals (and local kids) are trained as guides. There are horseback tours, volcano tours, tortilla making classes, and even a class in how to climb trees and pick coconuts from them. Every sunset, when the fishermen roll their boats to the water (a process involving moving two large tubes under the boat, pushing until the boat rolls off one, then moving the one in back around to the front, over and over until the boat hits the water), guests frequently go out to help push.
The path from my hammock to the beach.
I went for the surfing, but I managed to hit town on the one week of the year that the ocean was completely dead. No matter. I spent three days watching sunsets, walking around the small village, and getting in on a game of beach baseball with a bunch of the local kids (they made me the pitcher).
Apart from that, it was nothing but laying around in a hammock and reading. I read four books in three days, and generally only took breaks to walk down to the Pacific to go swimming and watch the horses and dogs play in the sand.
Beach dogs.
The place was so perfect that I almost had a hard time being there. It was almost as though I couldn’t wrap my mind around what I’d found, and my days there became a kind of dream. Some places are so perfect you have to prepare yourself for them or your mind will simply reject that they are real.
I was on one of the most perfect beaches I’ve ever been on, swimming in bathtub warm water, and I could count on both hands the number of people on the beach with me. This does not happen.
It reminded me of Sarasota. It reminded me of childhood. And in a way, that was hard. It was a perfect place, and it only made me want to go home again.
Beach soccer at sunset.