We decided while in Costa Rica to book ourselves into a surf camp in Nicaragua for a week. It’s much more difficult to access the surf in Nicaragua and the surf camps provide 4x4’s and boats to get to the breaks plus all meals, surf photographers, etc. Obviously this costs a little more (about 3x our normal weekly budget) but we took the chance that it could be the best week of the trip. It was also the only way to see a decent chunk of Nicaraguan surf without renting a car ourselves and blundering around the dirt roads. We decided that Popoyo Surf Camp looked about the best so we locked it in while in Santa Teresa.
The summary? We got skunked. The wind here is supposed to blow offshore all day for 300+ days a year, and every day at this time of year. Somehow we were unlucky and the first 2 days were onshore and not much swell around either. We got a couple of surfs in but nothing to write home about. In fact, if we’d been home we wouldn’t have gone out. No fault of the surf guides, just poor conditions, unusual for this time of year. I should also mention that the food was absolutely amazing, we ate like kings including a massive lobster feast on the last night.
The other weird thing was the camp turned out to be run by Christians with fish symbols everywhere, a surfer’s bible in our room and a Christian reality show (which had been filmed at the camp) screening on the TV in the dining room most nights. Not a huge problem but the whole religion element had clearly been kept under wraps on the website and if we’d known about the Jesus-bent we probably wouldn’t have chosen this one. Anyway, we tried to keep the swear words down to a minimum and I avoided saying too much about the anti-Muslim website one of the surf guides was showing me on his laptop (I’m not even joking).
We were the first guests there but after a couple of days a few more people arrived including 2 more guys to join our surf group, Matt and Nate from the US. Cool guys and we had quite a good time hanging out drinking beers in the pool and rubbishing all the religious propaganda. The surf also cleaned up once the offshores started. It picked up slightly so we got a few funs surfs in over the next 5 days in smallish waves and a few photos! We checked the forecasts every night online and it always looked like it was going to pick up the following day but it never really happened. Oh well, we took a chance on mother nature and it didn’t pay off…
