“The dried fruit alone…” My friend Kim’s eyes fluttered closed as she recalled her recent visit to a tiny resort on a private island in Nicaragua. “It tastes like candy.”
Kim, a fashion editor whose spot-on taste dictates a good half of my clothing purchases, library holds, and video streams, now had the fix to my family’s post-White Lotus spring break problem. We wanted to go to Costa Rica, following in the footsteps of seemingly everybody else we know—but given the Costa craze, the shortest flight we could find involved a nine-hour layover in Winnipeg.
A trip to Nicaragua, Costa Rica’s northern neighbor, was a little more realistic. Once a magnet for intrepid backpackers and surfers who were willing to overlook the nation’s political turbulence and the State Department’s alarming travel advisory, Nicaragua is shaping up to be the next “it” destination for those seeking sun and sand.
The Nicaraguan travel scene started to take flight right before the pandemic. After a few shaky years, it has caught up to where it left off—and then some. Sure, you still have to exercise some caution when traveling, and you should certainly do your research before you go. But the menus are getting more intricate and delicious. The luxury experiences are getting more luxurious. Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander recently retreated to what Salman Rushdie called a “beautiful, volcanic country” in his account of a three-week visit. So did Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Margot Robbie went there for a yoga and surfing retreat (and encountered a human foot on the beach, but that’s another story).
Like electrolytes or Nutrafol, Nicaragua is one of those words that you can’t stop hearing about once it lodges in your mind. “It was a slow recovery, but we’re back in the game,” Howard Caulson, the general manager of Jicaro Island Lodge, a thoroughly idyllic getaway, told me. “Having a time out gave us a chance to up the ante. Beforehand, what we were providing was really good. Now it’s even better.”
This being my first time in Nicaragua, I am unable to confirm his claim. I can, however, attest to his staff’s near-psychic abilities. Somehow they knew I was a morning person, and every day after sunrise, a staff member came to my casita bearing a carafe of coffee and steamed milk, along with warm banana bread. One night at dinner, my daughter whispered to me that the empty bread basket was a bummer. And when the mosquitos came out for dinner, all I had to do was wave hello to the front desk before I was handed a bottle of insect repellant.
I booked something of a yin-yang week in the largest country in Central America: three relaxing nights at Kim’s secluded island getaway, and then four adrenaline-packed nights at a Goop-approved resort on the Pacific Ocean. My family and I would end up spending some of the most sensational nights of our lives on Jicaro Island. The resort was dreamed up by Karen Emanuel, a pink-haired Londoner who was working in the music industry when she was traveling and came upon an island for sale. So she bought it, as one does.
Emanuel teamed up with the eco-focused Cayuga hotel group, and in a mere two years, their team transformed a lush and raw 1.25 acre property into a private oasis that miraculously manages to feel anything but claustrophobic. The resort’s Zen aesthetic is somewhat misleading; it is impossible to be bored at Jicaro, with its astonishing nature (a field guide lays out 42 birds), not to mention kayaks and stand-up paddleboards and the glittering emerald green lake that surrounds the island.
To call Lake Nicaragua a lake would be like calling the Bible a wee novella. It’s an enormous and gorgeously warm body of water with some 365 islands that were formed by a volcanic eruption that took place 20,000 years ago. The massive boulders that sit in the “lodge’s” (they don’t use the words “hotel” or “resort” there) infinity pool and the black pebbles scattered across the winding pathways at Jicaro all originated from Mombacho volcano, which hovers in the distance behind a Rothko-like streaky patch of clouds. Sunset is, as you can imagine, spectacular.
Every square inch of land is painstakingly considered, and the atmosphere is one of a tropical meditation garden (with an infinity pool and spa and state-of-the-art restaurant whose ingredients come from local fishermen and farmers). The nine casitas, two-story structures which were built out of wood slats from trees felled in 2007 by Hurricane Felix, feel like magic tree houses through a mid-century modern lens. At night, when you are having dinner (do not miss the chimichurri steak) magic fairies slip in and surround the beds with beguilingly gauzy mosquito netting. If you’re an early riser, you can read on the front porch, surrounded by the clacks and cries of birds and the howler monkeys who live on a nearby island.
My family and I came much closer to the clouds when we huffed and puffed our way up the top of the volcano, on an excursion that we took on the second day at Jicaro. The cloud forest, as it’s called, is home to sweeping fields of wild orchids as well as tribes of wild pigs and monkeys. We swerved up and down craters and spotted a white-faced raccoon and a slumbering sloth.
The following day, we set out for San Miguel de Oriente, a town where 95% of the residents are master potters. The streets and outdoor stadium are decorated with murals and the goods at the shops include everything from traditional Mesoamerican sculptures to flower vases with Marimekko-like designs. My son purchased a jaguar head for his bedroom. It was Easter, but the town was uncharacteristically sleepy for a vacation week, as Nicaragua’s co-presidents Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo had issued a ban on public religious celebrations. (Their government also insists on reading every newspaper article before it is published.)
We then touched down on Caterina, a town that is overrun by floral nurseries (New York’s flower district has nothing on this quarter) before visiting Lake Apoyo—or “the lagoon,” as everyone calls it. The sapphire blue waters, heated by volcanic hot springs, attract serious swimmers and local children in life vests alike. My increasingly sulky teenage son dove underwater and came up with heaping handfuls of black, sulfur-scented sand, sporting a smile I hadn’t seen since he was five years old. He would have stayed there all day, had it not been lunchtime. (The lakeside tacos were delicious.) On our final day at the lodge, we took a boat ride around the lake. We spotted egrets and monkeys, as well as an intoxicating blend of lily pads, banana trees and mango trees.
“The mango trees are a mixed blessing,” Eva Avjean, the spa and wellness director at Rancho Santana, a luxury resort-cum-housing complex on the Pacific Ocean, told me. “Sometimes the monkeys grab a mango just before it’s ripe and throw it at my head.” A veteran wellness consultant, Avjean oversees everything from the daily rooftop yoga classes held beneath a bamboo roof overlooking the Pacific Ocean, to the facials and sound bath sessions. She lives on the labyrinthine property, whose 2,700 square acres add up to the size of 2,000 football fields. These are numbers that sound like numbers, but when you get lost trying to move from your room to the beach, or take a 20-minute shuttle bus from one beach to another, it starts to make sense. This place is massive. One morning, as I attempted to find my way to breakfast, I made a wrong turn and ended up walking up and then stumbling down a precipitously steep path. (My forearms are still banged up as I type.)
I managed to get my hands on some bandaids before my meeting with Avjean. She was only supposed to be a consultant for six months in pre-pandemic times, but she ended up living at “the ranch,” as they call it. She has transformed what used to be yoga and massages on the beach into a state-of-the-art wellness center, a calm complex located five minutes away from the main “clubhouse.” Apart from the robe-clad, White Lotus Saxon-like dude who I spotted screaming into his phone about “back channeling” and “sealing the deal,” Avjean’s spa practically hummed with a sense of calm. Over the cries of howler monkeys, she told me about a new facial massage, a sound bath in the works, and an upcoming longevity retreat.
After my massage, I returned to our five-bedroom beach house on steroids (“It’s like the Kardashian house, but better!” is how my TikTok-fluent daughter put it). Next up were sand dune surfing and family surf lessons (confession: owing to big toe pain from a burpee injury, I couldn’t pop up—but it did inspire me to book an appointment with a foot doctor), then treetop yoga classes (more toe pain) and delicious meals at the property’s many restaurants.
On my family’s final day in paradise, I looked at my phone and saw that Ivanka Trump was surfing close by, in Costa Rica. I may have failed to obtain the dried fruit of Kim’s dreams, but I dodged a bullet—and had the best vacation of my life.
By Lauren Mechling