Saturday January 20, 2007

Photos: Fellow travelers on the bumpy road to La Boquita (left), shaded huts with hammocks and rum, and a home-made beach umbrella (bottom).













I imagine world travelers of yore found much wonder in the man’s great creations, marvelous engineering feats and towering constructions conquering nature, but today it seems more remarkable to find beautiful country untouched by modern development, like La Boquita on Nicaraguan’s Pacific coast. The beach is reachable only by a 90-minute drive from La Concha over treacherously bumpy terrain through impoverished countryside. It very well may have been my most enjoyable beach experience, full of all the usual sun, sand, and surf of any coastline, but with several distinguishing features. I’ll return again to its desertedness, because being so pristine, it was utterly unbelievable to find it sans a gaudy Hilton or TGI Fridays. More incredible still was its lack of designer housing. No McMansions or condos. Just a few wooden shacks for the locals and a stretch of grass huts for the visitors to receive their drinks and food and recline in their hammocks. It went ocean, sand, jungle, stretching northward to the horizon. Incredible. It was a cloudless, sunny Saturday and, minus the waiters and boys peddling two-dollar horse rides, the beach population didn’t exceed 30 people, and certainly no other cheles. Instead of seagulls, there were flocks of stray dogs.

The journey itself was fascinating. For the final hour, once we navigated through the provincial towns, it was a straight shot to the coast, speeding and slowing and swerving to navigate the cavernous potholes, as all the locals from the isolated shacks looked on, just hanging out, raising their arms and cheering my passing camera. Children filled the potholes with dirt and flagged down our truck with outstretched hands, which we filled with cordobas. When they’re older they can haul dirt or stitch t-shirts from the local quarry or sweatshop, but until that lucky day their pothole tax is perpetual employment, because the next rain will undue all their work. Not too unlike mosquito-born diseases.