Seventy kilometers off Nicaragua’s mainland coast and only an hour-long flight away from Managua, Corn Island was a more than welcome distraction from dusty, hot and chaotic Nica cities.
Big Corn’s landing strip almost covered one fourth of the island, and on our paseo by bike across the island, we witnessed that the kids playing soccer on the small triangle of lawn right before the landingstrip didn’t even stop their match when one of the three daily planes was landing. Since we only stayed at Big Corn for two nights, we didn’t go to Big Corn’s smaller sister island Little Corn, which you can only reach by a (sometimes rough) boat trip.
The island really had a Carribean feel, with significantly more people of African descent than the mainland, reggae music (we even heard Jingle Bells reggae-style playing in a church), everything going at a slower pace, and simple tin-roofed huts alternating with colorful houses and hotels. Plus, Big Corn offered amazing flora and fauna: A dog getting in close combat with an aggressive crab is far from being unusual here.
We stayed in a charming priavte cabana with thatched roof at Paraiso Beach, a tiny village of a few cabins, a small terrace restaurant and hammocks suspended between palm trees, in Big Corn’s main community Brig Bay. Flowers spread out on our bed were welcoming us at our arrival. It was paradise, indeed!
On bikes, we explored the whole island within two hours. We rode on white beaches, along the landing strip, stopped for a cold Toña beer and a double-shot of Nicaragua’s famous Flor the Caña rum on the rocks (slow pace, as you know). The rest of the day, we were chillaxing in hammocks, reading, blogging and taking in the abundant green vegetation around us.
Eventually, we had to get back to the mainland. The flight to Corn Island with La Costeña was not a problem at all, but the return to Managua promised to be… exciting. When the officers at the sole check-in counter in the smallest airport we’ve ever seen (which looked more like a regional bus terminal) asked us to step on the scale they had previously used to weigh our checked luggage, it became pretty clear that this time, we would go with a substantially smaller plane. We were handed out reusable plastic “boarding passes” that only said “Managua”. After Simone counted ten other people in the waiting room, she immediatly hit the bar for a beer. In the end, the flight was not too bad. Yes, there might have been a few tears and nervousness in the beginning after climbing into the tiny, tiny plane, but after a few minutes in the air, Simone had to admit that sitting basically in the fourth row of the cockpit was actually pretty cool.
