Upon arriving in Granada, most people will head straight for The Bearded Monkey to find a bed. I’m sure it’s a fantastic hostel — at least, it is surely the most popular, something along the tradition of Big Foot in León or The Black Cat in Guatemala. But if you’re looking for something cheaper and more offbeat, which isn’t even listed in the guidebooks yet, there’s Hostal Nicarao, very near el Parque Central.

It’s on the same street as Hostal San Angel, which is listed in most guidebooks, and which is also slightly more expensive than Hostal Nicarao, though still cheap, all things considered. In all honesty, I probably would have checked into San Angel if I’d found it first, but Nicarao was a cheap and cheerful alternative nonetheless. There is a big open courtyard right smack in the middle which keeps the place mostly bright and sunny, something which is a consideration for me since in a bid to save electricity, most places in Nicaragua don’t turn on the light in the day. So if there’s no natural light coming through it can be very dim. In fact, most restaurants and businesses often look like they are closed in the day, because it’s so dark you can’t see the inside from the sidewalks.

It’s easy to get to Hostal Nicarao. From the southeast corner of the Parque Central, walk south to the end of the first block. On the way you’ll see San Angel, and then a few doors down, Nicarao, which sits on the corner. It’s got a very colourful wall to advertise its presence. You can’t possibly miss it. And you can probably walk right in and find a bed to settle in for a few nights. There’s no website or online booking system for the hostal, and anyway if it’s full there are an abundance of other options.

It’s manned by some local guys who I suspect have a penchant for porn (but what guy doesn’t, I suppose). They close the doors after 1 a.m. but that doesn’t mean there’s a curfew. All you have to do is knock and they’ll open it for you. Knock loudly though, and be patient and wait a little bit. They have to switch the channel to football before greeting you, you see. It’s only appropriate

There are dorms and private rooms, beds are clean and bug-free, fans to save you from the heat, a communal kitchen, and I think, laundry services. They also have a resident computer, but they charge you for using the internet. I don’t remember them having hot showers, however, so if that’s a problem for you, I guess you’ll have to go somewhere else. But the weather in Nicaragua, especially in Granada, is sweltering. I had no need or desire for hot showers except when I was in the highlands like Estelí or Jinotega. You’ll probably love cold showers in Granada. Taking one in the middle of the afternoon is absolute bliss!

All the guidebooks seem to give you the idea that you won’t miss much if you skip out on the capital of Nicaragua entirely, but I disagree. At least, it warrants about two days of your time.

Sure, there is nothing singularly exciting about it, and it’s not exactly a ‘city’ by your first-world standards. It’s an everyday sort of place devoid of anything to romanticize… in fact, it is exceeding hot and impossible to navigate solely on foot or public bus, but it’s a place where you can spend your day roaming around shopping malls, perusing the shelves of La Colonia supermarket to decide what to cook for dinner, watch plays and listen to live music, visit art galleries and poetry readings… you can even go and have a very decent haircut for $8 at Galería Santo Domingo, have your left-too-long-unshaved legs waxed, see the doctor if you have to, extend your visa at the foreign office (direct your taxi driver to Direccion de Migración y Extranjera), buy a ‘Joy Sport’ (a bastardization of ‘Jan Sport’) backpack for 50 Cordobas (about $3!) at Mercado Ivan Montenegro which looks perfectly good and seemingly hardy (we will see about the latter), chase down your long-overdue package from overseas from post office customs (Los Correos, near El Malecon)… you get the idea. It’s a place you can comfortably run your errands, so long as you know where to look. People fly in from the Corn Islands to see the dentist, that kind of thing.

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© Emily Ding - Central Park, Antigua, where the volcanoes are omnipresent

The small colonial town of Antigua, Guatemala, is the mecca of the package Spanish school, combining both study and travel and so-called immersion social activities and accommodation with a Guatemalan host family. However, having studied at Ixchel School for a week I can tell you that you won’t get much of a genuine immersion experience in Antigua - at least, not for the short term.

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It’s more exciting not to have anything planned, to have only one ticket in and one ticket out and know that in between anything is possible. That way, things never quite turn out the way you expect them to.

I now find myself in Antigua (the quaint little town in Guatemala, not the Caribbean Island by the same name, mind you) despite the fact that I never intended to spend any time here, or Guatemala, at all. I’d thought that from San Francisco I’d work my way immediately to Nicaragua, but that just didn’t happen.

People who know me can testify that I can - frustratingly - be a very last-minute person. I prefer to be described as ’spontaneous’ and I like to think that that makes me better able to deal with challenging situations under pressure, but I know my parents prefer the use of the unflattering adjective ‘haphazard’. Admittedly my last-minuteness hasn’t always proved to be a good thing, but more often than not I’ve found it to be quite useful, and it’s landed me in plenty of interesting spots I’d never have found my way to otherwise.

Basically, what happened was this:

I had a flight booked to Guatemala from San Francisco on October 16 at 8:05 p.m. and by 5:30 p.m. I still wasn’t sure if I was going to take the flight. You see, I’d fallen a little bit in love with San Francisco and wanted to stay longer, thought that perhaps later I could make my way down to Nicaragua by land via Mexico and Guatemala. But in the end, for fear of invalidating my return ticket home if I missed this segment, I decided to board my plane.

However, I had no onward ticket to Nicaragua and no accommodation booked in Guatemala. I thought that upon my arrival in Guatemala I would buy the next ticket out to Nicaragua, if there was one, or take a bus. Or maybe I would stay a night and make a little tour of Guatemala before moving on to Nicaragua, since I was already in the area. But honestly I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. So I waited till I arrived to survey what my options were.

In the end, what happened came completely out of the blue: two elderly women from Hong Kong adopted me for a little while and gave me a place to stay.

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