Today we transfer at noon, so no need for an early start, but still we are up early packing our things. Packing is a bigger deal for Daisy than it is for me, so I also have time to sit on our lovely Morgan’s Rock sun deck and do some more reading before breakfast…and indeed after breakfast before we leave.
We are to be taken by boat, which sounds like a most convoluted process, with three boats involved, but apparently it takes only 30 minutes compared with an hour or so by road.
When we arrived at Morgan’s Rock, we were told that our boat transfer would probably not be possible, as the Nicaraguan Navy had suspended sea transfers due to the strong winds. Readers who know me well will realise that this news was not bad news to me, as I am always a reluctant sailor.
So I was not overjoyed yesterday when we were told that permission for boat transfers had been reinstated. We even tried hinting that road was fine for us and that perhaps, with all our heavy luggage, road would be easier for all concerned, but we were assured that boat was the better option when possible.
So, the baggage carriers shlep our bags down to the beach, we get into a little boat with all the luggage, the team (with great difficulty, assisted by some French holiday makers) push us out far enough for the engine to start and we (and our luggage) rapidly join a bigger boat operated by Carlos. So far, so slick.
Carlos inside, luggage outside
There’s a nice shady canopy on Carlos’ boat, which is just as well because this is the hottest part of the day.
Daisy quite likes boats and is in her element for this short ride. I sing La Bamba to while away the time, placing special emphasis on the line, “yo no soy marinero”. Carlos, who speaks no English and now assumes that I speak some Spanish, asks if I am a Mexican. I try to explain in broken Spanglish that I am neither a Mexican, nor a Spanish speaker…nor a sailor.
Carlos points out the place where the trans-Nicaragua canal is due to exit into the Pacific, although we subsequently learn that the powerful Pellas family, owners of Mukul and far more besides, have probably got their way to have the canal mouth located a fair bit further away from their fifedom of natural beauty.
We get to within a few dozen meters of the Mukul beach. There is no sign of the amphibious vehicle that we expect to shuttle us to the shore. Then, ominously, the lifeguard swims towards us to speak with Carlos:
He came bearing news
My inadequate Spanish gleaned little, except that we were basically being told, “five minutes”. “Cinco minutos”, said Carlos, “tranquilo”?
“Tranquilo”, I said. Five minutes is not long. Obviously the vehicle is a little delayed, that’s all.
Ten minutes later, more ominously, the swimmer returns. I note that he seems to need far more swimming effort to get to us than he did to get away from us, which gives me some small comfort that tide and wind are in our favour; eastwards towards the shore and that enticing looking resort and beach.
Due west, of course, there’s nothing between us and the Philippines for about 15,000 kilometers, apart from an outside chance of a tiny Micronesian atoll. 15,000 kilometers; that’s almost three times the distance between London and New York. Have pity, dear reader, these types of thoughts pass through the overactive mind of a nervous sailor when all at sea.
He came again bearing more news
The Spanish conversation went on for longer this time, but the bit I understood was the notion of ten minutes. “Diez minutos”, said Carlos with his mouth and digits, “tranquilo”? “Tranquilo”, said Daisy, sensing that I probably didn’t have it in me to say that word again, as I was becoming a little untranquilo.
Frankly, I could have coped fine with ten more minutes if I knew it really would be ten, but by now I was really worrying about how the co-ordination of the transfer could have gone so badly wrong and therefore how long it might really take them to sort things out.
The increasing breeze added to my nerves. As did my thought that we had not donned life jackets on this boat (nor indeed the first boat). When we went on short rides to and from Jicaro, on the paddling pool that is Lake Nicaragua, we were made to don life jackets every time, as a requirement of the Nicaraguan Navy. Given that we were never much more than 150 meters away from the nearest islet, that requirement had seemed excessive there. How come this safety requirement was absent (or flauted) on the fierce and mighty ocean that is the Pacific, with winds on the borderline between sailing being permitted or prohibited and 15,000 kilometers of open ocean between us and the Philippines?
By the time an hour or so had passed, my unease had turned to something a bit closer to panic. Suffice it to say that my Ultimate Travel document wallet has teeth marks that would have enabled the recovery investigators to identify me from dental records in the absence of my carcass.
Carlos had been in telephone contact with Morgan’s Rock, but seemed reluctant to let us speak to anyone, unable to understand some fairly obvious international words such as “te-le-fon” and sign language. To be fair, he was probably being sold the same, “someone will be there soon” line of bullshit that he was feeding back to us, along with an instruction to “keep us tranquilo”, which was becoming increasingly difficult in my case, in the absence of tranquilo-isers.
Looking and feeling more than a little Moby Dick
Janie was very calm; irritatingly calm. I decided that some female panic was needed to change the dynamic and add some urgency. So I said, “if we aren’t off this boat in five minutes, I’m going to jump in the water and swim to shore.” This was, of course, an empty threat. Our passports were in my pockets, along with my wallet and credit cards. Anyone who knows me well knows that I would not place at risk nor would I readily abandon on the boat such important and beloved items. Nor would I abandon Janie on the boat, now I come to think of it.
Moreover, one of the few things I know about boats is that in almost all emergency circumstances, the safest thing to do is to remain with the boat and await orders from the skipper. That advice is on the back of a postage stamp, coincidentally in my aforementioned wallet. The inscribed postage stamp is there for the very rare occasions I have needed to substitute for Michael Mainelli as host for Z/Yen boat trips on Michael’s Thames sailing barge, Lady Daphne. I wrote memory joggers for the information and safety messages on the back of a stamp, so I could honestly say to the guests, “any further questions, ask the skipper, not me. What I know about boats can be written on the back of a postage stamp. Here’s the stamp.”
Yo no soy marinero. Yo no soy capitan.
No, I had no intention of actually jumping ship. But I did get a reaction from Janie, then a more furtive interaction going between Janie and Carlos, which at least got him onto his phone again.
Whether my near-mutiny made any difference we’ll never know, but within five minutes of my “jump” threat we were “rescued” by a small, completely uncovered boat, some 75 minutes after we arrived off the shore of Mukul. That boat took us (and our luggage, but no life jackets) several kilometers back towards Morgan’s Rock, to another bay where a vehicle awaited us and drove us the last few kilometers to Mukul.
There we were greeted by Frederico, the general manager, with whom we agreed that now was not the time for a metaphorical post mortem on the shambles, merely for relief that no actual post mortem was needed. So we calmed down, cooled down, oriented, checked in and started our blissful week of rest at Mukul.
Before continuing the tale of our travels, a brief aside on eco lodges and our experiences.
We’ve now stayed in two this holiday, Jicaro and Morgan’s Rock. We’ve stayed in a few over the years, though none recently until this holiday.
We’ve always been a bit cynical and sceptical about eco-tourism. After all; there’s nothing very eco-friendly about tourism and something a bit cheesy about hectoring notices in hotels imploring the traveller to help save the planet by accepting fewer bedding and towel changes. as much as anything else, such requests seem to us to do more for hotel’s profits than for the planet.
Indeed, our previous experience of eco lodges; often with a do-goody vibe and everyone eat around the table together like scouts, had for years put us off the idea of staying anywhere boasting that term.
The term “barefoot luxury” is a similar turn off for us; too often an excuse for ludicrously high prices and ludicrously little to show for the money – more like barefaced larceny. But I digress.
The two Nicaraguan eco lodges we tried, Jicaro and Morgan’s Rock, were both way ahead of our eco lodge experiences of the past. Both have been designed to have a minimally invasive impact on their natural environments and maximum positive impact on local communities, all of which we applaud. In particular, Jicaro struck the right notes for us in almost every respect.
The Morgan’s Rock blurb was a little more old-school eco-preachy. Are you really setting standards of pre-emminence in eco-tourism by feeding all the hotel’s food waste to the animals on your massive hacienda? I seem to recall staying on a farm when I was a nipper (before ecology had even been invented) and learning that such behaviour is simply what all sensible farmers do.
Morgan’s Rock does get one huge tick in the box from me for its superb-sounding extensive programme of slow-growth hardwood forest farming and stewardship. This is very hard to achieve both sustainably and commercially, yet the owners seem to be finding a way, which is laudable and I hope replicable elsewhere.
Both properties fall down in my view on their approach to drinking water. The idea is to avoid lots of plastic bottles – good idea. The Jicaro approach was to invest in a treatment works for the local water and to assure visitors it is safe to drink. It probably was “safe” in a clinical sense, but it tasted funny and my tummy was not quite right during our stay there. I drink a lot of water and it reminded me of the way my tummy used to be in the old “water purification tablets” days of my travelling youth.
The Morgan’s Rock blurb suggseted that their drinking water approach was the same as that at Jicaro, but when I asked about it soon after arrival (I really didn’t fancy another icky three days) was assured that the water in the room was actually Fuente Pura mineral water poured into large serving flagons from giant bottles. I’m not sure how much better that approach is than smaller bottles, especially as, presumably, large quantities of that water are wasted when the flagons are emptied. Either that or unsealed mineral water is sitting around in flagons for an unhealthy period of time before being topped up and drunk.
I realise that all of these hygiene, comfort, convenience and ecology issues make it difficult to get the balance right, but I’m not sure about either approach we encountered this time.
But the big thumbs down award for ecological correctness gone mad goes to Morgan’s Rock, for the following sign placed beside the toilet:
In case you cannot read it, the sign asks the user of the tolet to place their used toilet paper in the bin rather than in the toilet, as the water is treated for reuse. We find it hard to imagine a much more unhygenic suggestion. Perhaps “share intravenous drug needles to reduce depletion of earth metals and thus help save the planet?”
Daisy and I went into civil disobedience mode immediately at the toilet paper suggestion and did what we considered to be the right thing. (No we did not smear anything on the walls. We simply flushed our used toilet paper.)
When I raised the delicate toilet paper matter on departure, the front desk manager nodded sagely, assured me that a bit of paper down the toilet would not mess up their treatment works and confessed that many of the staff don’t like those signs as so many guests remark about them adversely. You don’t say?
We rose early today, as we have arranged our bird walk for 6:30 this morning. Our guide for this activity is Bismarck, who tells us that his birth certificate says “Bismar”because the registrar missed the end of his name by mistake.
We start our walk on the beach, where the first “life” we encounter is actually a stone dead iguana on the beach with no evident signs indicating cause of death. Bismarck suggests murder by a bigger animal but given the absence of visible clues we suspect human poisoning.
Soon we are at the estuary water where a fair amount of interesting bird life is to be seen. Daisy makes copious notes of all the species while bemoaning the absence of a helpful Morgan’s Rock bird leaflet along Jicaro leaflet lines. Most of these water birds are small and therefore not photogenic with our little cameras.
Then we start to walk through the estate forest, where we see more lovely birds – some quite colourful but again mostly small. It was a lovely walk. Ironically, the highlight of our bird walk was actually a really good sighting of a group of spider monkeys. These are usually far more shy than howlers, but I think this group were so enjoying their tamarind tree breakfast that they were willing to hang/swing around for us. It was only when a vehicle came along the trail that they really cleared off.
We took a short cut through the forest proper, perhaps because we had dawdled so much earlier in the walk or perhaps in a vain attempt to find the rarely-seen toucan.
Towards the end of the walk we encountered the mother and child sloths again; still on the same tree. If you think some bits of my diary/blog can be a bit dull, imagine the equivalent blog for a two-toed sloth…
14 February, sat in tree all day, munched a little, slept a lot;
15 February, sat in same tree all day;
16 February – big day – moved to the next tree. This tree will do us for the next few days…
…actually don’t knock the sloth thing, folks. We’re planning our days at Mukul to be sloth-like in the main.
We took a late breakfast. Waitress Gabriella seems to have caught young Master Coffee’s cough. We then retreated to our bungalow where we pretty much did the sloath thing for the rest of the day. I got through most of my magazine backlog and Janie read most of the interesting Nicaragua book.
Again we went down at 8:00ish for dinner. Initially we were pleased to see that the menu had changed; but dinner actually turned out to be a shower this evening. My crab soup was a tiny bowl of sugar-water with a slight taste of crab, some small chunks of vegetable and a whole, tiny, hard-shelled crab (a little reminiscent of our land crab friends from the room) which was impossible to eat. The mains took an age to arrive. When they did arrive, mine was not the dish I had ordered and came without any vegetables, let alone the vegetables I had specifically ordered. Daisy ate her main while I waited (let’s not pretend patiently) for my order. The food was all dry and ordinary with the sauce in pots on the side. Different “chef” who brought my replacement main himself to apologise for the mistake. Daisy tried a tres leches desert and I tried rice pudding (very sweet and ordinary) for some small comfort. Still, overall the worst meal we’ve had in Nicaragua and that’s in the face of some proper competition.
Daisy’s overall (and kindly) observation is that there has been no manager to be seen while we’ve been here at Morgan’s Rock and that you cannot expect much from the local staff, who are sweet and trying (in several senses of the latter word), when unmanaged.
We’re not sorry we’re moving on tomorrow and hope for better things in Mukul.
Well, it seems the evening maids really did remove the worrying wasp-like thing from our room last night, together with a land crab, leaving only a large spider on the wall beside the toilet to keep us company. The spider is set to be a feature for the whole stay.
We enjoy making our own coffee in the room early and toddle down for a late breakfast. It seems that early breakfast is more the norm here – only one other couple late and they finish before us. Some kids are already splashing around in the pool by that hour (c9:30). I name one noisy American family “The Coffee Family”, by virtue of one of their kid’s unmitigated coughing. The lack of mitigation extends to the absence of hand or hankerchief in the coughing process. Worse still; the Coffees are in the next door villa to us. We decide that the pool is probably not for us.
Don’t ask where the first half of the day went. We both did some reading I suppose. We found a very nice semi-shady place in the garden away from the pool, which was fine for a while. Charlie collared us and asked when we’d like to eat tonight; I guess they try to stagger the guests and arrange the maid evening service. I noticed that the Coffee Family had opted for a 6:30 dinner, so I suggested 8:00 for us.
Soon we realised that the beauty of our own shady terrace would be great in that middle part of the day, ahead of our 15:00 hacienda tour.
Our guide for the hacienda tour was Herlon and our driver Eddy. The latter seemed better at spotting the fauna, even though he was driving at the same time. Both were good guides, in fact. We saw some birds, quite a few howler monkeys, a capuchin monkey so much in the distance you’ll have to take our word for it because the dot on the photo is unrecognisable and some two-toed sloths, who resolutely refuse to show us their faces.
Daisy was especially excited when we saw three macaws at the chicken and cow farm section of the estate. These birds have been introduced on the estate – they are not indigenous to the area, but they live wild and we had only ever seen a macaw in a cage before (in Guatemala all those years ago).
We also saw a viewing point from which we took a couple of good pictures and ran into Charlie with an American named Mr Mike on horseback. Then on to see the shrimp farm and a sighting of a mother and child two-toed sloth at the end of the tour; I am hoping they’ll still be in that tree when we walk that part of the trail tomorrow morning.
Home in time to shower and get ready for dinner before dark and implement my master plan for the evening; avoiding the sound and trajectory of young Master Coffee’s coughing by taking dinner relatively late. We hear the Coffee family leave for dinner, as arranged, at 6:30 (a door banging and then an absence of coughing). We sit out on our lovely terrace in the breeze, reading. We hear the return of young Master Coffee at about 7:40 (a door banging and then the presence of coughing). The master plan surely has worked.
Five minutes later, we have both finished our reading and we decide to go down to dinner a little earlier than announced, confident that our mission has been accomplished.
Daisy choses a recently vacated table right at the front of the restaurant and the waiters hurriedly start making up the table for her…but…horror of horrors…right next to us is the Coffee family complete with young Master Coffee coughing away with abandon. He must have simply returned to his room briefly to get something a few minutes ago when we heard him coughing. I suggest that the front table is a little too breezy, so we retreat to a table towards the back of the restaurant. In fact, not much more than five minutes later, both of the Coffee children go off to their bungalow leaving mum and dad behind.
I have a salad starter with cherry tomatoes, asparagus and avocado (Daisy takes a little of mine but has no starter herself). I then have the chef’s special seafood pasta, while Daisy has curried shrimp with mash and zuccini. We both try the Nicaraguan trio of deserts; I liked both cake things but not really the fried cassava thingie in syrup. I have a glass of chilean sauvignon blanc and Daisy finished off the bottle of pinot noir, with a little help from yours truly.
An early start this morning, as we have an 8:45 boat to meet our guides and transfer. Our 6:30 coffee comes with the spice cake again – hurrah. We finish our packing and take quite a light breakfast; smoothies again (those are good) and a banana pancake (which seems more like a bun) for me, while Daisy just has toast and banana.
Soon three of us (leaving Edgar behind with our vehicle and baggage) transfer into a vehicle I can only describe as a decommissioned miltary-style mass transit truck or bus, which didn’t please me at all as we had been led to expect a private vehicle. This truck thing was incredibly uncomfortable too. David promised to try and arrange something better for our downward journey.
After a couple of minutes to take water and gather ourselves (in truth, for me to gather myself), we set off on our hike.
David and Edgar arrange for a private park ranger vehicle going down, which also includes a stop at a small coffee plantation. Down the bottom we see some zip liners before heading off towards Rivas.
On the Pan-American highway, just after Rivas (where we get some surprisingly good local chocolate) we see a couple of howler monkeys on the roadside. Then a little further down a whole colony of howlers. They show off for the cameras.
Then to Morgan’s Rock, where Charlie shows us around and introduces us to several members of his family. They are Caribbean-side Nicas – the first we’ve met.
We choose some light touring for the next couple of days and take a fine dinner comprising chicken and meatball soup for me, celery soup for Daisy, surf and turf special main for both of us and a rum cake desert for both of us too. A nice Chilean Pinot Noir washed that down and might help us to forget about the bugs we’ve seen in our room.
