Laguna de Perlas or Pearl Lagoon is a name that recalls to your mind tropical, far away and fascinating places. The panga (a kind of launch), where I am, is headed for this lagoon, while Blufields disappears behind the lagoon’s bights and the wind flows on the crammed passengers’ faces. Once again there are no foreigners on this boat while the skin-burning Caribbean sun is shining. If the lagoon shores show a green of a rare intensity, the boatman shows a broad static smile on his sunbathed face, not understanding If that smile was representing an internal state of peaceful happiness or rather an unusual plastic pose. With more or less an hour sailing you get ashore on the small dock of Laguna de Perlas. Here you’ll soon realize that the hot weather and the merciless sun have already burnt the skin you haven’t covered.
In front of you, you’ll find a village with a main road, the only one with a normal flooring, and some other dirt road. Here you really feel like at the opposite side of the world. Here everybody speak English between themselves and great part of the population is ethnically Caribbean black.
With the hairs ironed by the wind and by the brackish waters I get in a bar, one of the first you would encounter outside the dock area. The owner seems to come from a movie, one meter and ninety centimeters tall, a bit fat, Caribbean face and a seraphic expression on his face, long dreadlocks and something of quietness in his movements. He suggested me to try a shake made of fresh vegetable and fruits. A shake that he is used to drink, a healthy one. I had the bad idea to try it. While I was drinking the “tasty” shake a movie representing Jesus life was on his tv. If you’ll ever stop here you could try tasty shakes (just avoid the “healthy” one), hamburgers and sweets. All these things are prepared by his wife and him.
Finding a place where to sleep doesn’t involve any great research. There is not plenty of Hotels and I must say that, from what I’ve seen, they are pretty clean. I would suggest to go at the Hotel Casa Hurlich. A white man from Nicaragua, son of a Swiss and an American, will welcome you telling you some stories about his life and the small village you are in, while he is showing you the hotel. Here you have a fair choice between big rooms with a king size bed and bathroom and more modest rooms with shared bathroom. The last option will make you save enough dollars. This hotel has a great veranda on the lagoon where you can quietly lye on the benches or the hammocks. The restaurant of the Hotel has a great view on the lagoon and it has a peculiar furnishing made of sword fish, lamps made of white shells, a huge bar bench and.. some airplane seats used as sofa.
If in Bluefields you were in other times here in Laguna de Perlas time has stopped. Here you have an all-day-long sun, hot enough to fry an egg. Vultures are laying statically on the numerously palms or on the roof of the huts that you find on the shore of the quite lagoon where small balloon fish are slowly swimming.
At the end of the main road, which stops few steps after the Hotel Urlich, you can find a very small beach with few boats anchored and some huts. At the opposite end of the road you’ll find another road, a torrid one, that leads you to a different beach. Walking down this road you’ll find around you a scorching landscape made of yellow brushwood while basilisks are running away as soon as you get close to them. At the road side a pool of extremely polluted water was giving a sad sight of dead fish floating. At the end of this walk there is a micro village made of wooden huts, each one with electric power but, apart from the electricity meter, I haven’t seen any trace of electricity usage. Here poverty is visible in the animal’s thinness. Kids play their games along the dirt roads between the colored clothes hanging to dry up.
The beach is more interesting than not nice in itself. Being a lagoon, its waters are a bit brown. Here you won’t meet any tourist. I’ve met only a couple of Spanish but they have been living in Nicaragua for a while. Close to the thin beach, between the palms, there are a lot of canopies hosting small bars, each one with its own music. Don’t hesitate to ask, because here you can seat down and eat a lot fresh grilled fish.
It could happen to you, while walking back to the hotel during evening, to see a special unit of the police, with their heads covered by a black balaclava, handgun in their hands, conducing an arrested criminal at the local police station. I didn’t ask anything while people was staring at what was happening.
Every evening transforms Pearls Lagoon in a magical place between stars, lagoon, moon, quietness and the peace all around you. The sound of water down the veranda. A paradise.
With the first morning lights at dawn, leaves the daily bus to El Rama. Walking down the desert and half dark streets you could hear the gospels coming out from the local church where enthusiastic worshippers are singing to God.
Once the bus left, I discovered that we would have had a special guest on board: a parrot steadily clinging some time on the upper part of the seat and some time on the owner shoulder. On the difficult dirt road, where this old and ramshackle bus passes every day, you can have a glimpse of older times, where horses are still used to move around and where the rare service stations are able to drive your mind to the western movies.
With this bus headed to El Rama started the slow, long and hot return to San José. Differently from the arrival in Nicaragua this time the trip would have been divided in two days, stopping one night in Managua, a city still on red alert due to the recent earthquakes. While the bus was slowly crossing the arid lands of the central Nicaragua, at the numerous stops, various food seller where getting on the bus to sell their delicious food.
While kilometers from the Costa Rican border where shortening, the volcanoes’ peaks of the Ometepe Island on the Nicaragua lake where dominating the horizon and so, this way, ended the adventure in one of the most remote and wild areas of Nicaragua.
Next leg Costa Rica! A country where nature dominates unopposed.
P.S. A photo gallery of the entire trip to Nicaragua is available in the website photo gallery.
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