For a stretch of months, I used Mexico City's Benito Juárez International Airport as my base of operations — a hub from which I fanned out across Central America, from Belize all the way down to Panama. The routine had a certain monastic rhythm to it: fly south from the capital to wherever, spend a few days wandering around, fly back to Mexico City, repeat. Why I'd organized things in such a spectacularly inefficient way, I honestly can't remember. But at some point, I broke the pattern. Just once, I crossed a border without doubling back to Mexico at all. The route: Costa Rica to Nicaragua, overland — or rather, over water.
I'd based myself in San José for the first leg, then caught a bus northwest to Arenal Volcano National Park, about 150 kilometers out. The hotel sat close enough to the crater that from the grounds you could watch chunks of glowing red rock arc through the sky, and lava crawling down the mountainside like something out of a geology textbook brought violently to life. The level of activity, I was told, fluctuated depending on what the volcano felt like doing that day — but during my stay, it felt like doing a lot. Still, life continued around the eruption with a kind of cheerful indifference. You could sit by the pool with a cold beer and watch the pyrotechnics unfold, though doing so in a swimsuit felt absurd, even reckless. On the road near the hotel, enormous volcanic boulders lay scattered — souvenirs from some previous eruption. If that happened again, right now, while I was out here in flip-flops… Well. Some things are bigger than you. You chose to come here. I'm pretty sure every other traveler on those pool loungers was running the same quiet calculation.
Before the mountain made the decision for me, I headed further north and crossed into Nicaragua by land — or again, mostly by water. Partly I was restless with the hub-and-spoke routine. But there was also the fact that this border crossing, from Costa Rica into Nicaragua via the river, had long been one of those legendary routes that serious backpackers passed down like a secret handshake.
The first step was a bus to a town called Los Chiles. At the terminal near the national park, a ticket agent directed me toward a vehicle — which turned out not to be the scheduled public bus, but a private charter idling right next to it, belonging to what appeared to be a local women's social club on an outing.
A few minutes into the ride, the ladies noticed the unfamiliar Asian guy who'd wandered aboard. There was some murmuring, and then — with the practical good humor of people who've sorted out worse problems — a consensus emerged: their charter was going well past Los Chiles anyway, so why not just let him ride? From there, it escalated quickly into a full-blown fiesta on wheels. Someone produced a guitar (from where, I have no idea), someone else started dancing in the aisle, and suddenly we were rolling through the Costa Rican countryside to the sound of singing and laughter. Hours later, the bus slowed at a bend in the road and let me off at Los Chiles. The women waved from the windows like they were watching a son leave for college. The driver asked me for nothing. I still had my original bus ticket, untouched, somewhere in my bag. I wonder if I ever got a refund.
Somewhat drunk and entirely happy, I shouldered my pack and walked to the bank of the Río Frío. There, I boarded a lancha — a motorboat in the loosest sense of the word, more accurately a long wooden hull with an engine that someone had clearly hot-rodded for extra power. It would carry me downriver, across the border, and into Lake Nicaragua, terminating at the Nicaraguan town of San Carlos. In other words: an irregular international ferry. Already aboard were about six locals, all silent, faces unreadable — Costa Ricans heading out or Nicaraguans coming home, impossible to say.
The river wound through dense jungle in tight curves, sometimes opening to twenty meters across, sometimes narrowing to a corridor of overhanging trees where you could almost reach out and touch both banks. The correct way to describe it is not "a river through a jungle" but "a jungle with a river running through it." The whole scene — the opacity of the vegetation, the stillness, the sensation of moving through something that didn't particularly want you there — read like a passage from Paul Theroux's The Mosquito Coast. At intervals, rickety docks materialized out of the undergrowth with the unreality of a mirage, and at each one stood a man whose entire vibe was best described as deliberately unplaceable. The boatman would cut the engine, glide over, exchange something with the man — an object, a package, words — and move on. The other passengers registered none of this. Neither did I, exactly, though I filed it away.
About an hour in, a painted sign appeared on the riverbank, maybe five feet tall: Nicaragua — Open Arms. Written in English, for some reason. No fence. No gate. No officer. Just vegetation, and presumably animals. I was, apparently, no longer in Costa Rica. The river continued, and then the jungle peeled back all at once, and the lancha shot out into an almost incomprehensible expanse of open water — Lake Nicaragua, one of the largest lakes in the Americas, big enough to feel like an ocean. The boatman opened up the throttle. The shore receded. There were no life vests. I became acutely aware of how small the boat was, how large the water was, and how completely out of my depth I was in every sense. It was late afternoon. He was going fast, I realized, because he needed to reach San Carlos before dark. No running lights on this vessel. That seemed reasonable. I had no choice but to agree.
We pulled into San Carlos as the light was going gold. The whole crossing had taken about ninety minutes. At the dock there was a small general store, and the other passengers dispersed into the town with the ease of people returning to somewhere familiar. I was the obvious outsider, and a local kid spotted me immediately, grabbed my bag before I could protest, and began shouting "¡Hotel, hotel!" — a one-man welcome committee earning his finder's fee. I told him in Spanish that I expected nothing less than the best hotel in town. "¡Sí, sí!" he said, already walking.
We were about to head off when a voice from the direction of the store cut through: "¡Oye!" And then: "¡Pasaporte!" Right. The international border. I turned back. There was no immigration office. No official window. The man running the store — or possibly just working the counter — held out his hand. I gave him my passport. He leafed through it with the efficiency of someone who'd done this before, and handed it back. "¿Sello?" I asked. Stamp? He shrugged. "No se sella." No stamp here. Who this man was, exactly, and what legal authority he held, I cannot say. But I was in Nicaragua. What I can say with certainty is that even if I hadn't been, there was nowhere else to go.
The hotel the kid led me to was a few minutes' walk from the dock. The mattress had absorbed the shapes of everyone who'd ever slept on it, but the room was otherwise fine — until I noticed that the wall between my room and the next one stopped about two feet short of the ceiling, leaving a long gap open to the night air and everything that moved through it. I lay there listening to Lake Nicaragua breathe, to insects performing their nightly opera, and to the snoring of a stranger somewhere beyond the wall, and fell asleep feeling like I'd arrived at the edge of the world.
A few days later, I was ready to move on to Managua. The capital sat on the far northwestern shore of the lake — meaning that by road, you'd have to loop all the way around the eastern side in a long counterclockwise arc, a journey of eight hours or more with stops. I wandered into what passed for a travel agency near the waterfront and asked if there were alternatives. There was, the woman at the desk said: a small prop plane flew to Managua's international airport. She'd check on today's schedule.
"Hay un vuelo hoy a las dos," she said. There's a flight at two. I looked at my watch. One o'clock. She was already printing the ticket.
I asked how to get to the airport. She told me to wait outside on the bench. I did. Ten minutes later she emerged, gestured toward a pickup truck idling at the curb, loaded my bag into the bed, and waved me into the passenger seat.
Ten minutes after that, the truck stopped at the edge of town on a high, grassy plateau with a sweeping view of Lake Nicaragua. There was a small open-sided shelter. There was a windsock. There was grass, and beyond the grass, more grass, with what might generously be described as a gravel suggestion running through it in a rough line. This was the Aeropuerto de San Carlos.
After a while, a sound — prop wash and engine noise — drifted in from somewhere overhead. A single-engine plane came in low and touched down on the gravel-grass runway in a spray of pebbles, rolled to a stop more or less in front of me, and went quiet. The door opened. A fold-out staircase unfolded from the fuselage. A pilot in uniform appeared, surveyed the surroundings, and turned back into the cabin to address his passengers: "Por favor, desembarquen." Please exit the aircraft.
The woman from the travel agency — who had apparently also been doing double duty as ground crew — shook the pilot's hand, then opened the cargo hold and began pulling bags out onto the grass, lining them up in a row. The arriving passengers retrieved their luggage and wandered off on foot or into waiting cars. Meanwhile, a small group of us departing travelers materialized, as if from the grass itself. The woman helped load our bags into the hold. The pilot beckoned us toward the stairs with the informality of someone waving you into his living room. Before I climbed up, the woman caught my arm, gave me a quick hug, and said: "Gracias por volar con nosotros. Cuídate." Thanks for flying with us. Take care of yourself.
The door closed. The prop plane pivoted on the grass, trundled to the far end of the field, turned around, and lifted off — light and easy, like it had done this a thousand times. It banked out over the lake, climbed north above the water, and less than an hour later set down at Augusto C. Sandino International Airport in Managua. Ground crew: one. Pilot: one. Whole operation: completely functional.
That was how I traveled from San José, Costa Rica to Managua, Nicaragua — by charter bus crashing a ladies' party, by jungle river in a wood-hulled motorboat, and by single-engine prop plane from a field with a windsock. A border crossing I've never forgotten. These days, a paved highway connects the two countries, and the bus is the standard way across. The lancha service and the San Carlos waterfront immigration post — such as it was — are said to be long gone. But I'd like to think that somewhere along that river, locals are still making the trip the old way, quietly, without telling anyone.
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