My taxi driver dropped me at a gas station across the street from the multicolored “San Juan del Sur” welcome sign.
San Juan del Sur is a medium sized beach town of about 15,000 people situated on a moon shaped bay of the Pacific in the far Southwest of Nicaragua. It is a well renowned party town, known for its ‘Sunday Funday’ barcrawl every week. It’s a place where both tourists and the natives flock to cut loose. It’s also known for surfing, but there’s no surfing directly in San Juan. Instead there are 6-7 nearby beaches north or south of San Juan reachable by shuttle.
I walked about three blocks into the center of town, looking for Casa Oro, a hostel Luka recommended. After asking a couple people, I made my way to the far end of the main street in town, and sauntered into the lobby of Casa Oro, glad to be out of the heat.
While waiting to check in, I looked to my left and saw Muffa at a nearby table.
Backstory: One thing I wanted to do while traveling was volunteer on a permaculture farm to learn as much as I could about the concept. Since Lake Atitlan, I was actively seeking out farms to work on. Through crazy synchronicity, I got in touch with Muffa. One day on Facebook, which I rarely go on, I was confirming a new friend and saw the area where it suggests friends. Facebook suggests dozens of people to be friends with due to other connections. One profile picture was of a guy doing headstand which I liked and randomly clicked on (usually, I would never do this. I usually just log into Facebook for a specific reason and then get off before my mind can be tainted by inanity). Once on the guy’s page, I saw a person I recognized. Whoa, weird. It was a guy I had went to college and worked on a project with. I looked at his profile a bit and saw he was the owner of a new regenerative farming project near San Juan del Sur Nicaragua. Whoa, weird. And he was looking for volunteers. Wow. “Ok, seems like I’m being directed here by the Universe,” I thought, and messaged him. He told me to let him know when I was in San Juan and we could meet to discuss.
Now, having been in San Juan for all of 10 minutes, I walk into Casa Oro as directed to by Luka earlier that morning, and Muffa is sitting there having lunch. WTF. I walked over and introduced myself, and we had an interesting chat. Turns out, he’s the owner of Casa Oro. He had been working in finance in Chicago for several years before leaving to travel, and finally landed in San Juan with the goal of starting an eco-project. Casa Oro is the revenue arm of his operation, and he plans to have the hostel/restaurant completely supplied by the farm he is starting. His long-term vision is to make San Juan del Sur the most regenerative city on the planet. Awesome. He told me he had been pouring all his time and energy into Casa Oro for the last two months, which was undergoing a major renovation. He had to attend to some business, so we parted ways and agreed to talk about volunteering at the farm later.
I checked in and found out there was a shuttle leaving in an hour for Playa Maderas, a good surfing beach 30 minutes north of San Juan. I rented a surf board for a week, and then had a delicious lunch at Dale Pues Sandwich Shop. I made it back to Casa Oro by 2:30pm to load into the shuttle with my board.
Playa Maderas was a sight. It is basically about a quarter mile long moon-shaped cove encircled by volcanic rock. On the south end of the cove sit a couple hostels and bars catering to the surf and party types. When I arrived at about 3pm the place was bumping. It was like a scene from spring break.
Though part of me wanted to party, a greater part of me wanted to commune with the ocean, so I lubed up and went surfing. The scene surfing was insane as well. There must have been 60 surfers past the break waiting for waves. It was amateur hour. I am an amateur, but even I could say it was madness. A set of waves would come and 10 people would paddle for the same wave, inevitably dropping in on one another and getting in each other’s way. It was dangerous. I saw one guy get his forearm sliced open by the rudder of another surfboard. I was more worried about catching a surfboard to the head and being knocked unconscious. I caught one wave for a short ride where I had to bail out to avoid running into someone. I saw some a few more experienced surfers shredding on the waves closer to shore, and decided to join them where the waves were smaller, but it was less crowded. I spent the rest of the afternoon catching 3-4 foot waves that the advanced surfers didn’t want. It was fine by me.
I asked a nearby surfer with a watch for the time and he told me it was 5 after 5pm. I was supposed to catch the shuttle back to San Juan at 5pm. I paddled in quickly. In knee-high water, I grabbed my board and started trudging to shore in haste when I blasted my right foot on a big, jagged, underwater volcanic rock. I let out a yell in pain, as a central nervous system tremor shot up my spine telling me something was injured. After breathing into the pain and composing myself, I could feel something flailing around on my right big toe. I lifted my foot out of the water to see my toenail dangling and blood everywhere. I pressed the toenail down and hobbled quickly to the bar where I left my backpack, trying not to get sand all over my toe.
At the bar, I got some napkins to soak up some blood and assess the situation. The front half of my toenail was cracked in half from left to right, hanging by thread where it connected to the left side of my nailbed. The squiggly pink part under the toenail was exposed and bleeding, so I just pressed the toenail back down, wrapped it up, and hurried off to catch my shuttle. As I arrived the driver was waiting for me, and said something in Spanish to express displeasure at my tardiness, but I motioned to the blood-soaked napkin covering my toe and he changed his tune and got me some more paper towels.
Back at the hostel, the toe finally stopped bleeding. The question was to rip off the toenail now or later. I put some Neosporin on the nailbed, pressed the nail down, and taped it up. Over the next couple days, the slightest stubbing of my toe on anything caused shooting pain. The toenail fell off more or less by itself two days later.
After cleaning up, I went for a limited walk to explore San Juan and get a street food burrito. Then I returned home to read and rest my foot before dozing off.
The next day, the toe was still painful, but I couldn’t let it ruin my fun. I went back to Playa Maderas at 12:30pm. I had a couple beers while waiting for the tide to come in at about 2, then hit the surf. The place was much less crowded, which was nice. I surfed until 5pm again, and made it to shore safely, but still managed to painfully bang my toe when loading my surfboard into the truck and let out a yelp to which the other passengers looked at me like I was a weirdo.
The next week passed similarly. I got into surf-mode. There are lots of beaches to surf around San Juan, but the surf reports all said poor surfing until the swell came in two weeks. I tried surfing at Playa Hermosa one day, but the surf was terrible and it was basically a wasted day. The best spot was Playa Maderas. I would generally hang out and read and write in the morning, then headed to Maderas around noon and surf until 5pm. I’d then clean up and venture out for dinner and a beer while mostly avoiding the many opportunities to party all night in San Juan. The entire week passed like this, except for Thursday, when Casa Oro had a party for its grand reopening after the renovation.
At the Casa Oro party, while having a beer and listening to a speech by Muffa, I sat at a table occupied by an older gentleman, Greg from New York. Turns out he has been in the permaculture field (pun intended) for 20 years. Another permaculture guy, weird. He had just come from Matagalpa where he’d spent 6-weeks on Selva Negra, a 100-year-old German permaculture farm which was pioneering permaculture techniques before it was even referred to as such, researching and writing about the farm’s highly efficient design. Now he was in San Juan working on another eco-project that a friend had flew him down for. We eventually went to a cerveceria (brewery) for dinner and ran into Tommy from France, whom I had originally met in El Salvador, on the way. He was keen to join, so the three of us had dinner and beers while discussing the fucked-up state of the world (LOL), and opportunities for transforming it.
After dinner, we returned to Casa Oro for some drinks and dancing to live music. I met Vanessa from Quebec. We started hanging out, and later she was going to meet some friends at another bar called Pachamama and invited me. I joined her and so commenced a wild night.
Pachamama is a madhouse for the lunatic early 20’s party-animal type. The type of place where there’s a conga-line passing beneath a guy standing on the bar pouring tequila into the open mouths of passersbyers below. I’ll will admit, if you can handle the debauchery, it’s a pretty good time ?
Vanessa, a party girl, was in heaven. I met her friends—a few Aussie dudes that seemed to have a few screws loose—and drinks started flowing. We did some dancing and bar hopping and eventually ended up at L.I.T. (Lost in Translation), a bumping late-night bar. This is the type of place with people dancing on pedestals and in cages in the middle of the dancefloor. At L.I.T. shit got out of control and I don’t know what happened to Vanessa or the Aussies, but I ended up out front of the bar having a smoke when I met Francesa, a Nicaraguan girl. We got to talking and it was on. We were making out within about five minutes. We left together soon after.
On Sunday, I took the day off from surfing to go to a yoga class in the morning for some much-needed body love. Sitting on a surfboard while waiting for a wave causes your body to naturally engage all of tiny muscles of the core to maintain balance while floating. After five days of surfing my lower trunk and upper hips were stiff as a board. The yoga class was exactly what I needed. I stayed an hour after class to further work on my hips and meditate for half an hour. Ahhhhhh…
Afterwards, I video called home to say Hi to Mom and Dad, then I played poker all afternoon. I have nothing special to report on that, as it was my second session playing all low stakes tournaments on the new poker site, and I pretty much bricked everything to lose a couple hundred and dent my small bankroll.
On Monday, I met with Muffa and his girlfriend Fiorella to speak about the farm. Muffa leveled with me and explained that the farm was in its infancy and there wasn’t much going on there at the moment, but that he wanted to get it off the ground asap. He told me he had not been to the farm to oversee operations in over a month since he was concentrating on the renovation at Casa Oro. From what he’d been briefed on, things weren’t going well, and he was contemplating firing all of the other volunteers and starting over. And, now that the hostel was complete, he was going on a vacation and still wouldn’t be available to manage the farm for another two weeks. All this was somewhat ominous, but due to the synchronicity of my stumbling across his Facebook and his project, I felt I was supposed to go forward and volunteer. I told them I was just wanted to learn as much as possible about farming in Latin America and was willing to stay up to a month. They arranged to have me taken to the farm the next day.
Tuesday, I went surfing at 7:30am and returned at 10:30am. I turned in my board and ran errands. I packed up, and in the process noticed I was missing $350 from an inside pocket of my daypack. I had the dorm I was staying in for the past week mostly to myself with just a couple other people showing up for a night or two and moving on. I had been chummy with the cleaning lady, chatting with her and practicing my Spanish every day, and I didn’t want to believe it was her, but I think the money was most likely taken by a staff member. No one else would have had much of an opportunity to dig around inside my backpack, which I stored under my bed, and find the cash. But it was my fault. The hostel provides lockers and has signs saying to lock up your valuables and I ignored it. There’s a line from the Tao Te Ching, that has always stuck with me from my first time reading it, “If you don’t trust people, you make them untrustworthy.” That line says a lot more than initially meets the eye if you let it marinate for a while.
Anyways, I have barely locked up any of my belongings up during 8+ months of travel, and this was the first incident. I almost think $350 is a fair price to not have to deal with the hassle of locking and unlocking my stuff in a locker over the course of my travels. The funny part is, if it was the cleaning lady and she would have straight up asked for $350, I’d have given it to her, but I understand that would never happen in practice. Oh well, I just hope the person who took the money puts it to good use and doesn’t spend it frivolously.
At noon, I met Caroline (37, Spain) and Dominic (28, Netherlands), two of the farm volunteers who came to town to pick me up. We had a brief meeting with Fiorella, then off to the farm we went. I rode in the bed of the pickup truck, and Dominic picked up some hitchhikers along the way. Three Nicaraguan ladies got in the back with me, and I tried to speak with them in Spanish, but didn’t do too well with the noise of the truck and wind.
About fifteen minutes later, we arrived at the farmhouse in El Carrizal, about 7 miles south of San Juan. I met the other two volunteers, a couple, Lana (31, UK) and Tarik (25, Turkey).
The team welcomed me in and showed me around. The accommodations were modest. It was an open air, tin roofed house. Three bedrooms, a porch, bathroom, and kitchen. Lana and Tarik shared a bedroom, Caroline had a bedroom, and Dominic and I shared a bedroom. There was a dog, Coco, and two cats, Linda and Lolita.
They let me know some of the hardships of living there. There was no internet, but a foreign SIM card could get limited data for a phone. The refrigerator broke the prior week, so we had to deal with no way to preserve food. The wind was crazy this time of year, gusting over 100mph during the night, blowing things everywhere making it impossible to keep the house tidy. It was also the time of year when a local tree was flowering, and the wind blew it’s seeds everywhere. The seeds, called Pika Pika, are nearly invisible and tiny enough to get through the mosquito nets on our beds and itch like hell when they get on your bare skin. Finally, being in the middle of the countryside of Nicaragua, there was the need to stay vigilant against creepy crawlies—mostly scorpions which like to find their way into weird crevices such as wrinkles in the sheets on your bed or clothes on the floor or in your backpack. On the farm, you always needed to be wary of where you place your hands and to look for scorpions before touching something. Tarantulas were all over the place too, but they don’t bite. Linda and Lolita were our protectors as they enjoyed hunting and ‘playing with’ the scorpions and tarantulas at the farmhouse.
I settled into my room and then we all hung out getting to know each other until just before sunset.
Near sunset, we all walked across the street to the farm, where they showed me around a bit, then we hiked 15 minutes to the top of a hill at the edge of the property to smoke a joint and watch the sunset over the Pacific.
In the evening, we all had a nice vegetarian dinner together before retiring to bed early (like farmers) at about 9:30pm.
Before I went to bed, I made a calendar with a checklist of activities I wanted to complete every day on the farm. I was looking at the isolation of farm life as a good opportunity to ingrain 8 ‘daily practices’ I had been wanting to establish. These were: Yoga (minimum 30 minutes), Morning Meditation (minimum 15 minutes), 100 pushups, 100 air squats or burpees, Study Spanish (minimum 30 minutes), Breathwork (pranayama or Wim Hof method), Write (minimum 1 hour), and Meditate before bed. I would sprinkle in reading throughout the day. A lot to get done in a day, but this is the type of life I want to live.
I woke at about 6am to winds ripping through the open-air patio outside my room. I got up and went outside to do yoga and meditate under the big Tamarindo tree in the front yard in the breaking dawn. The cats joined me and watched me from above in the tree. I began with three cycles of Wim Hof breathing exercises, followed by 100 pushups and squats, followed by 45 minutes of yoga, and 30 minutes of meditation. 5/8 of the way done on my daily practices in under two hours. Then I went in to join the rest of the crew in having breakfast and getting ready for work. We headed to the farm at about 8:30am.
I got the full tour of the farm, and was not too impressed. It needed a lot of work. It was overall pretty messy, with trash, mostly bottles meant to eventually be repurposed and reused, in piles everywhere. There was a big barn, or bodega, made from mostly recycled materials, but it was filled with a bunch of junk that had been gutted from the hostel. There were several half-finished projects around the property. Lost cows roamed, trampling and eating newly sprouted plants in the raised beds. And most of the crops had just been planted so there was not much to learn about tending a permaculture garden. Muffa tried to temper my expectations, but I didn’t heed his warnings. “Well, this is an opportunity to see what it really takes to start a project like this in Central America,” I thought and soldiered on.
Dominic and I got to work on the compost. He taught me how to make compost and tend the eight compost bins. After checking and turning compost in all the bins, and recording the progress of each batch in a journal, we moved on to watering the garden. Daily watering of the plants was a challenge because there is no plumbing system on the farm. There is a well, but it is 300 yards away from the raised beds, down a hill, and they were waiting on a pump to arrive from the US. Watering had to be done by repeatedly filling 2-gallon jugs out of 55-gallon barrels of water retrieved from a nearby farm who let us use their water. Not to mention it was dry season, so there was nearly no help from nature to feed the plants.
After watering, we moved on to working on the compost toilet outhouse. The foundation, roof, and frame of the walls of the outhouse had been constructed, now the group had been trying to make the walls using cob. Problem was that the cob mixtures they had tried worked for a few days, then started cracking and crumbling in the Nicaraguan heat of dry season. The walls needed to be stripped of the cracked cob. Then we’d need to make several batches of cob with differing ratios of ingredients to find the mixture that worked in the heat. Though cracked, the cob was quite resilient. Stripping the walls of cob took the rest of the day, and we headed home for lunch at about 1pm. Farm volunteers are supposed to work for ~5 hours per day, but in practice we usually worked 4 or less.
After lunch, I lounged on the patio reading The Market Gardener, a book about small-scale organic farming. Later I studied Spanish and read for a couple hours before dinner. After dinner, I wrote for an hour, then meditated, and went to bed. Boom, completed my 8 practices on day one.
The weekdays of the next three weeks passed in similar fashion, just different tasks on the farm. Weekends we were off and free to do as we pleased, which usually meant going to town and/or the beaches around San Juan.
The next day, after finishing stripping the compost toilet, we tried to make test batches of cob, but realized we were out of sand to make the cob. The work truck had just been taken to a mechanic in Rivas as it was having transmission problems. So, we couldn’t just ride to town for a truckload of sand, we had to order it through underlings at Casa Oro as Muffa and Fio had went on vacation. Little problems like this plagued my time at the farm.
Having hit a roadblock, Dominic and I surveyed the farm and tried to determine what we could do with the tools available to make the biggest long term impact to the farm. There would eventually need to be stairs down to the well to make retrieving water and getting to the other side of the property more feasible. The well is down a hill that is not easy to traverse—steep with loose earth making it slippery and dangerous. We decided to dig stairs into the hillside from the well up to the flatland near the bodega.
It was grunt work for sure, but strangely enjoyable. I mean if you haven’t dug stairs into virgin land, you haven’t really lived. I’m not joking. I hope to do the same on my own land soon. Dominic and I worked diligently with mattocks and grub eye hoes for a couple hours in the shade of trees.
By my second day, it had become clear that anything significant that would be accomplished on the farm would be done by Dominic and myself. Dominic explained to me the situation on the farm. Lana and Tarik were mentally checked out. They were unhappy with the circumstances and ready to leave the farm, but first needed to find a new place to volunteer as they had little money. Caroline meant well, but just wasn’t an effective worker and was always dealing with problems with her Nicaraguan boyfriend. As such, the others weren’t keen to help digging the stairs. I was now understanding why Muffa mentioned he was thinking about getting rid of the volunteers and starting over.
We worked hard until about 11:00am when the midday heat reigned. Then work got slower and more laborious for the final couple hours. We had carved about 20 stairs in about 4 hours. Not easy work, but I looked at what we accomplished proudly as we packed up and called it a day. We were both exhausted and soaked in sweat as we headed home for lunch.
The next day it was the same thing—Dominic and I working all day on the stairs. We were about 2/3 the way done by time we finished for the day. We were glad it was Friday and we didn’t have to work for the next two days so we could rest and recover.
On saturday, Dominic, Daniel (Carolina’s cousin who lives in Costa Rica and was visiting for the weekend), and I hitchhiked into San Juan for the day. Hitchhiking is a thing in Nicaragua. It’s like a code amongst the people: help those who need a ride, and when you need a ride others will do the same. We spent an hour or so using the internet at Casa Oro, then took the 12:30pm shuttle to Playa Maderas. Daniel was keen to try surfing. We spent the afternoon surfing and hanging at the bar having a few cold ones.
After taking the 5pm shuttle back to San Juan, we had another couple of beers and then tried to hitchhike home in the dark. It’s harder to get a ride in the dark, and we didn’t have success for forty minutes until a SUV sped past and then stopped abruptly. We piled in and the driver took off. He was an American in his late 30’s who lives in San Juan, and after introductions and pleasantries (within about 45 seconds of getting in the car) he asked us if we had any cocaine. We responded in the negative and he couldn’t believe it. “What?? You don’t have coke?! Are you bullshitting me?! No?? Oh well, just have to wait ‘til I get home!” He cranked up the music and drove like a madman until he got to his house, about 2/3 of the way back to the farm.
In front of his house, we happily piled out of the car, and we were back to hitching. A taxi passed by after about 2 minutes and we paid 100 Cordobas (~$3) to get home.
After dinner, all the housemates hung out playing cards and drinking rum on the rocks until about midnight. It was a good time to get to know everyone a little better, both by how they played cards and with the inhibition lowering effects of the rum.
Sunday, I headed into San Juan for a day of poker. I set out at about 11am to hitchhike and was picked up by a family, and rode in the backseat with their two little girls of about 4 and 7. I chitchatted a bit with the parents in Spanish while the little girls looked at me oddly. I don’t know if they’d ever heard a foreigner butcher their language before.
In San Juan, I ran some errands and then spent the afternoon in Casa Oro grinding and listening to podcasts. Unfortunately, nothing eventful happened poker-wise.
At about 10pm, I tried hitchhiking back to El Carrizal with no luck. There were no cars on the road on Sunday night. I ended up taking a colectivo taxi with the backseat filled with three ladies and a little girl to Playa Hermosa, about a half mile away from the farmhouse for 100 Cordoba.
The next day, we found out that some cows had ruined a couple stairs near the bottom and had to repair them. By lunch, Dominic and I finished the stairs. It was another long, hard day, but it was done. The stairs turned out decent and should last at least 10 years. We were proud of the work.
Tuesday, Dominic and I decided the next best thing to do was to create new raised beds. The farm had few places to plant crops. The beds that it did have were already planted. The farm would need a dozen or so new beds eventually. Furthermore, the soil is clay heavy and needs substantial work to improve the soil quality. We had several bins of compost ready to be used, so it seemed creating new beds was logical next step to get the farm up to speed. However, it was more hard, manual labor.
We used a method of creating the beds that Dominic had learned while working on a farm in Costa Rica. The first part was to dig about a foot down, then layer in tree branches, dirt, brush, dirt and compost.
We finished two raised beds measuring about 30x15ft each behind the bodega by Thursday.
Friday, it was Dominic’s last day on the farm. The end of his 4 months in Central America was nigh and he was flying home to the Netherlands on Sunday. We worked on engineering a well bucket all day. You need a special bucket to fetch water out of a well. Just lowering a 5-gallon pal down the well won’t work. Instead, well buckets usually have a one-way valve which lets water into the bucket then seals off when you pull the bucket up. We tried various designs using materials we found on the farm. It was like a team building exercise where you’re given an assortment of random materials and need to build a certain device. We used a 3.5ft piece of 4” PVC and made a one-valve using two 2-litre Coke bottles. It worked well for two trials, but the weight of the water broke the thin plastic of the Coke bottles on the third try. We decided we would need to buy a cap for the PVC pipe in town to make it strong enough to work properly. We called it a day early and headed home for lunch.
That evening, Dominic, Lana, Tarik, and I hitched into San Juan for some fun. We went to ‘Name that Song’ night at Republika Bar. It’s a bar trivia game where teams try to name the title and artist of a collection of songs revolving around a certain theme. An MC hosts it, and the winner gets a free bottle of rum. It’s a big Friday night thing in San Juan with about 60 people and 10 teams participating. The theme that night was ‘Friends’. Awww how cute. At the beginning, I told the team I had Rock and Roll songs covered, and delivered, only missing one Rock song. It lasted about 3 hours, during which time we had a lot of beers. We did good, but finished in third place. We finished off with a couple of shots of delicious ginger infused rum.
After Republika, the crew walked along the boardwalk of the beach to L.I.T. for some dancing. We arrived there at about 10:30pm, early by L.I.T. standards, and few people were there. Dominic started buying many rounds of rum and Cokes and we had our own personal dance fest.
Later, as the place filled up, things started getting crazy. In the madness of the dancefloor, I met Fransiska from Germany, and we danced together. I, of course, let the ecstatic dance flow. Pretty soon we were making out in the middle of the madness. After a drink, we went to the beach to look at the stars and make romance. We headed back to her hostel at about 3am.
The next morning, I said goodbye to Fransiska and headed into the 10am sun with a ripe hangover. I stopped at a hardware store to get a PVC cap, and got a text from Dominic asking me to get his backpack from L.I.T. In their drunkenness, the crew had left Dominic’s backpack with two tablets and other valuables in it behind the bar. I wandered down to L.I.T. and found one of the bartenders was cleaning. I asked if there was a backpack behind the bar, and by some grace of God it was still there with everything still inside.
I hitched back to El Carrizal and found the team in various states of despair nursing their hangovers in the midday heat. We all spent the day napping and laying low.
In the evening, the stove ran out of gas, so we were forced to cook dinner over a campfire in the fire pit out front. It was an inconvenience and took forever, but it was nice hanging under the Nicaraguan night sky and talking while the food cooked.
Sunday morning, Dominic packed up and said his goodbyes to all the housemates and pets. He and I hitched towards San Juan together at about 9:30am. At the crossroads between San Juan and Rivas, we got out of the pickup, and said our goodbyes. He then caught a hitch to Rivas en route to Managua, and I walked into San Juan.
In San Juan, I had breakfast at a café, El Gato Negro. While sitting at the counter, I met the owner, Kelly. We got to talking and it turned out she knew Muffa, and she filled me in on some of the going-ons and recent history San Juan. She was working on her own eco-project called Harmonia on 267 acres of land near the Costa Rican Border. She offered to take me hiking on her property the coming Friday, and we exchanged contact info.
In the early afternoon, I headed to Casa Oro and played poker all day. Another uneventful day on that front. I stayed the night at Casa Oro, then caught a hitch back to the farmhouse at 7am the next morning.
That day it was just Lana and I working on the farm. There was infighting going on between Lana, Tarik, and Carolina that had made the situation at the house a bit tense. Tarik didn’t care to participate in volunteer duties anymore, and Carolina was nowhere to be found, probably dealing with her boyfriend. I spent the day cycling the compost, repairing things around the farm, tidying up, and giving the plants some TLC, even speaking to them.
I spent the next couple of days working with a machete cutting trees to build ‘cages’ to house all the bottles that were in heaps all over the farm. Lana had started building the cages for the bottles last week and now needed help. Many thin, long, young trees were previously cut down to build fences around the property, so I luckily didn’t have to chop down any trees. Instead, I cut the trees to size and hacked off branches to make them manageable and as straight as possible, then hauled them up the hill near the bodega.
In the afternoon, I went to Playa Hermosa with Carolina and some of the Nicaraguan ladies and their children from El Carrizal that she was friends with. It was incredibly refreshing to go in the ocean after working on the farm. I spent a bit chatting with one of the lady’s 10-year-old son who thought I was cool. He had never spoken to a chele or a non-native Spanish speaker. I explained that he needed to speak slow for me to understand. He still spoke too fast, but after I asked again he cutely spoke painstakingly slow for me. We stayed until sunset.
The next day, after taking care of the compost and plants again, I spent finishing the well bucket. I drilled holes in the PVC cap and used an innertube from an old tire to create a one-way ‘valve’. The flap of innertube would let water in through the holes when the bucket hit the water, but the weight of the water would seal innertube over the holes when the bucket was pulled up. I tested it and it worked successfully with minimal leakage. A nice little piece of MacGyver-ing on my part. Each bucket full retrieved about 3.5gallons of water.
After work, the crew went to Casa Oro for the bi-weekly volunteers meeting. It was a strange meeting. I wanted to tell the girl who was in charge while Muffa and Fio were away that my three compadres were fighting like children and not working. Ultimately, I felt it wasn’t my place as the new guy. Plus, I had made the decision to leave the farm the coming weekend. It was not going as I had hoped, I wasn’t able to accomplish much without Dominic, and there wasn’t anything further I could learn about permaculture.
On Friday, Carolina, her boyfriend, and myself spent all day making the bottle cages. It was Lana’s project and she wasn’t even around to work on it. We used twine to tie the trees I had cut to posts. By the end of the day, we had three decent receptacles to organize the farm.
Saturday, I hitched into San Juan in the late morning. I spent the day at a lovely garden restaurant called Simon Says using the internet to catch up with the world and researching how to get to Costa Rica and planning my next move.
In the evening, I had a few beers and dinner before hitching back to the farm. I got taken halfway in a pickup then let off near Playa Remanso. I walked for ten minutes and then was picked up by a guy from Oregon who lived just past El Carrizal. He had moved to Nicaragua three years ago to start a family farm and escape the rat race. Livin’ the dream.
I got back to the farm, and informed my roommates of my decision to leave the following day. They were a little shocked, but understood completely. I had dinner and a couple beers with Lana and Tarik, then I laid in lawn chair with Lolita on my lap reading and stargazing until bedtime.
The next morning, I packed up and said goodbye to the crew. They were all sad to see me go, as I was a neutral party that got along well with everyone, and was a strong worker who’d become the de facto leader. Lana was especially sad to see me go. We had become good buddies during my few weeks on the farm. Carol gave me a ride in the work truck and dropped me on a corner in San Juan. I rucked to Casa Oro and checked in for two nights.
After running some errands and cooking a ginormous brunch, I video called home and then played poker again all Sunday.
During the day Muffa and Fio returned from their vacation. I spent some time speaking with Muffa and explaining the situation on the farm. He was sorry that I had to deal with those circumstances and thanked me for my contributions. He told me I’d be welcome back any time, and hoped I could see the farm’s progress at some point in the future.
Nothing good to report poker-wise. Grinding up a bankroll from scratch was proving to be more difficult than I imagined on the new poker site.
Monday, I laid low. I spent some time writing, reading, running errands, and researching Costa Rica. I went to a yoga class in the evening which ended at 5:30pm, and I immediately walked down to the beach to go for an incredibly refreshing dip while watching the sun set.
Tuesday, I did a yoga class first thing in the morning, then had breakfast with two girls from the yoga class. We had a nice time chatting about yoga and all the other weird stuff we were into. It’s always nice to meet people who are into the same things as you are. I wanted to hang out with them further, but I had already booked accommodations in Costa Rica.
I packed up, checked out, and said goodbye to Muffa, Fio, and a couple others I had gotten to know at the hostel. I hired a taxi to take me 30 minutes to the Costa Rican border.
On the way to Costa Rica, I reflected on the month I had spent in San Juan del Sur. I was glad to be leaving. Don’t get me wrong, San Juan is a cool place to visit and I enjoyed my time there. However, it’s your classic Latin American tourist beach town—hot and crazy. Even though I mostly avoided temptation, staying in (or near) any such beach towns for as long as I did is draining. Couple that with disappointment at my experience on the farm, and I felt relief to wash my hands of San Juan and move on to the next adventure. ¡Vamos!