Rediscovering my Love for Travel in Granada, Nicaragua

I hit a travel rut around 2012. In 2011 I had hit my peak stride in terms of travel – I went on a solo trip across Mongolia, led a trip of business students around Korea, and could afford all of it easily thanks to a high paying job in the tech sector. A series of unfortunate events (yet ultimately positive in the grand scheme of things) set my life into a rather sizeable slump that took me several years to recover from.

Needless to say, I travel when I want to celebrate freedom and independence – and I didn’t feel it from 2011-2013. The last thing I wanted to do was to celebrate myself, so I spent a lot of thos years wallowing, and figuring my shit out.  Ultimately, I met my now fiance David, changed teams at work, and built a new group of peers whose interests are more aligned with my own – those events gave me a bit of a kickstart. 2014 rolled around, and I figured it was time to get my groove back.

For as long as I’ve traveled independently, I’ve never liked taking the path of least resistance. While my friends were taking spring break at all-inclusive resorts in Mexico, I chose to take a boat two hours away to a fishing village with limited electricity and no land access. I knew that I wanted a similar type of remote destination, and I was intrigued by Central America. My other constraints were around cheap flights, and relative safety – i.e. I wanted a destination with training wheels. A place I would feel safe without an advanced grasp of the Spanish language that had been somewhat vetted by travelers before me.

And so David and I set off on our first international trip together to Granada, Nicaragua. It was an experiment for the both of us. David spent quite a bit of time stationed abroad in the Navy (mostly in Guam – I know, technically the U.S. – and Japan), but hadn’t done much independent international travel. As soon as we hit the ground in Managua, however, I was back in action like nothing had changed. Navigating the taxi touts and finding a reasonable ride to Granada outside the airport felt like déjà vu for all the times I’d negotiated a decent fare at Suvarnabumhi Airport in Bangkok over the previous decade.

Traveling together is interesting for us. Our home life is starkly different from our travel life. We’re home bodies, going to bed early, taking the dogs for walks, and generally shutting ourselves in as much as possible – we’re not hoarders, don’t fret. And when it comes to home logistics, David is usually in charge. I do the chores that he doesn’t get around to, generally let him dictate home improvement maintenance projects, and can be flighty and spacey about things around the house – likely because I’m typically pretty absorbed by my work life. When we’re abroad, however, it’s totally different. He becomes the copilot, and relies on me to get us from point A to B to Z. Maybe it’s the business person in me, but I like to have things to project manage, and travel is no different. I’m a travel technician.

We got to Granada, and never has a place I had never been to felt more like home. The heat was invigorating, and enveloped us at our bed and breakfast, open to the elements. We were staying on the outskirts of town at a placed called Casa Cubano – which I may or may not have selected for us after seeing it featured on an episode of House Hunters International on HGTV (I am pathetic, I understand this already). We became fast friends with Esther, the de facto house mother of the property, and ever faster with Gary, her eccentric stray dog cum confidante.

The town itself was wonderful – it has all of the qualities I like about a place: charming architecture, friendly people, tasty vegetarian food, and nice outdoor spaces to camp and chill for a while. I particularly liked the Iglesia la Merced – it had an older, more authentic feel to it than the main cathedral on the main plaza in the old town – as well as the stunning views of the town and Lake Nicaragua from the top of the clock tower. I’m not sure if we were there in the off season, but we were the only tourists there, and it was pretty magical.

Other architectural favorites were the Municipal Market, painted a vivid green and dating back to the early 1900s. In the few square blocks it encompassed, we managed to buy all kinds of delicious fruit I had been craving, including both guava and passion fruit, as well as some naughty Hostess-style cakes. Additionally, all of the houses in the town were painted bright colors, which was a great contrast to the largely dust and dirt roads around the city.

Despite all of this, I wouldn’t put Granada, Nicaragua on my top ten list of towns I’ve visited in the world. I sincerely loved my time there, and would most definitely return given the right circumstances. But its purpose in my life travel story was more than the town itself. Granada served as a catalyst for making me realize how much I love travel, and why I will never be able to take several years off from it and the way it makes me feel ever again.