 After several days spent exploring Managua it was time to move on. Everyone we met said Grenada was very popular, so we hired a taxi for a trip there.. It is one of the oldest cities in the Americas and on the edge of Lake Nicaragua. It is an almost universal fact that taxi drivers will try to over-charge you if possible. As it turned out we paid about $15 too much for the 45 minute trip.
Now I have to admit that Grenada is pretty. It’s a restored Colonial city and many of the huge old Colonial buildings have been turned into hotels, B&Bs, shops, restaurants and other businesses. We found a small, clean hotel, Hotel Cociboloca. This hotel is actually 2 Colonial houses converted into a hotel and it is within walking to everything worth seeing in Grenada. Cost was $65 per room per night, including breakfast.
Note: Every hotel we stayed in during our trip had small rooms and they only offered the bare necessities. A shower, air conditioning and a TV, period. The hotel rooms we offer for rental on Isla Margarita are at least 3 times the size with queen beds, kitchenette with microwave and coffeemaker, hot showers, TV. & DVD player, dishes, glassware etc., and are lower in price than the lodgings in both Nicaragua and Honduras. Most hotels on Isla Margarita have some sort of kitchen facilities for coffee making and snacks.
The focal point of downtown Grenada is of course the plaza or the Parque Colon. It is the pride of the city and very clean. There are kiosks scattered around the plaza selling soft drinks and all manner of tourist items. Everyone we encountered was very pleasant and not “pushy”. You can rent a horse-drawn carriage here that will take you on a tour of the city. A variety of hotels and restaurants line the square. We found these to be adequate for a tourist city, and several were very good. Most seem to be run or owned by expats from all over the world.
 As luck would have it, we ‘stumbled’ on a great source of local information for Gringos. Wayne's Zoom Bar (Locally called Wayne’s World).
Wayne is an American expat who is a veritable fund of information, and a nice guy, too. He knows everything from real estate prices to what the taxi fees should be (see the $15 dollar overcharge above.) My ol’ pal Roy and I spent many pleasant hours drinking cold Tona beer and learning about Nicaragua from Wayne and his customers. It seems the days of any “bargains” in real estate are over. Anything in Grenada is priced pretty high for Central America. A two story 3 bedroom house on the edge of town in a ‘borderline’ neighborhood that needs lots of work was $140,000. A very large Colonial house in the center of the tourist area needing complete restoration was $600,000.00. Of course, those are asking prices, and cash talks.
While these prices might not be too high for some, our mission was to investigate affordable options for middle income people. One major problem we found was the cost of electricity. To air condition a house the size of mine -3 bedroom, 2 bath- on Isla Margarita (cost for central air, water heater, electric stove, fans, 2 refrigerators and small washer dryer is about $65 a month). In Nicaragua it would be $300 or more. That is why most hotels, restaurants, and businesses there have no air conditioning and use florescent or low watt light bulbs. Add that to the price of gasoline @ $3.50 a gallon and living starts to get expensive.
We checked out a couple of local supermarkets. They had a good selection of everything our families buy on a regular basis but vegetables, meat, fruit, etc. At first we thought “wow! That’s cheap! But then we found theses items were priced by the pound, not the kilo as it is on the island. Prices on some specialty products were comparable to those in the U.S., but most prices were considerably lower.
We rented a car for $50 a day for our trip to Leon and the beaches to the north. As to Leon, there is nothing interesting I can say about it. It’s an ugly old Colonial city. We could not find a decent restaurant for lunch. So on to the beach. Driving out of Leon we ran into terrible roads with HUGE potholes and washboard roads that felt like the car was being torn apart with each jolt. After about 40 miles of this we finally arrived at the village of Las Vernitas on the Pacific Ocean.
This place has seen better days and they have long since passed. The Ocean was beautiful as the Pacific always is, but the beaches were “ash” grey as a result of the volcanic soil. By this time we would have headed on back to civilization but it was late and the prospect of driving literally “40 miles of bad road” again convinced us to seek lodgings for the night. The choices were slim- -IMF & some government agency had the best rooms in the best hotel.
After checking several we settled on one that did not look too bad - at $45 U.S. per night. Bad news - I was maybe only the third person to sleep on the sheets since they had been washed. Good News. The other 2 people must have been pretty clean. No hot water and the a/c smelled of long-dead fish.
We were up the next morning before most of the hotel staff. One of our rooms had no water so they graciously filled a bucket for Roy to wash in. We got the impression they thought this was giving good service. Did we ‘high-tail” it back to Grenada? You bet!
We had plans to visit the town of Masaya and the volcano there but on the day we were to go the volcano growled and 200 people got “ash-ed on” and many were evacuated. Perhaps the ‘gods’ were angry and we did not want to the chance of being the sacrifices so went instead to the city of San Juan del Sur on the Pacific Coast.
Out of Grenada about 20 miles you turn off the Pan American Highway on to another “road”. In the long distant past this road was paved, but now it’s a lunar landscape. The interesting part of the drive is watching buses and 18 wheelers swerve from one side of the road to the other dodging the holes, but this entertainment soon loses its glamour as your bones and muscles try to part ways. We passed many farms and ranches as this is mostly cattle country. A few of these properties had For Sale signs posted.
At last we arrived in San Juan, and it was almost worth the trip. San Juan del Sur is charming in a 40’s-50’s kind of way. It reminds me of Key West back in those days with the brightly painted clapboard houses, corrugated tin roofs and narrow streets. We found a nice hotel, the Hotel Colonial- for $65 per night with good a/c. The rooms were small but clean and the staff was friendly and helpful. San Juan del Sur is popular with tourists, retirees and ‘snow birds’. As usual, the retirees are making the price of real estate rise rapidly. We were told that about 300 “foreigners” owned property there. One complex consisting of 500 units is designed to appeal to retired expats. There were beaches, bars, and not much else to do. We checked into going Sport fishing, one of my all-time favorite things. A 23’ center console boat was $500 for half a day. As you may know, most center console boats offer little shade and don’t have any way to escape the hot sun, so we passed on that.
 Later in the evening we happened to meet some expats who invited us to join them at a beach bar. It seems that every Thursday night from 7 to 9 p.m. these people get together for “Swing Dancing”. Sort of Lawrence Welk-type music, but they seemed to have a good time. The other big thing to do there was water aerobics 3 mornings a week….so since we were seeking just a little more excitement we spent the day exploring. The bay is beautiful. It is very picturesque and surrounded by some very expensive homes. We talked to several people and everyone mentioned the frequent power outages and other infrastructure problems that private developers were ‘working on’. To be fair this place will probably boom in the next few years if they ever fix the roads.
After 10 days in Nicaragua we decided that there was no comparison between our Isla and this country. We just about have it made on Isla Margarita. So on to Honduras…
We arrived in Tegucigalpa around noon. The airplane descent into the mountains is something else! The plane flies through mountain passes, tipping from side to side. At times it looks as if the wings will hit the treetops. An interesting flight.
We found a nice hotel in the central area of the city for $70 a night. It had a good restaurant and the bar was full of business people. Next day we set out to explore the city. After the heat of Nicaragua the temperatures in the 80’s here were very welcome. There is what could be a beautiful river running through the city, but it’s full of trash and garbage.
Tegucigalpa is an interesting city because it is built on hills and mountainsides. There do not seem to be any building regulations at all. If you look at the nests of phone and power lines along the streets it looks like a ball of snakes. We contacted a realtor and he showed us 3 properties. One was a 2 bedroom furnished apartment with no pool for $90,000. It was not bad. The two other properties were new townhouses (3 bed, 3 bath) and the construction was some of the worst I have ever seen in all my travels. Roy is a construction engineer and he said “This construction is pitiful!”. The price was insane - $175,000 for each. After we pointed out just a few of the construction flaws to the realtor, he did not want to show us any other properties.
The traffic in Managua was bad, but was nothing compared to Tegucigalpa! Driving is a nightmare there and trying to cross the street was downright scary! We got the impression that they were actually aiming at us. They’ll lay on their horns if you try to cross, but no way will they slow down. Horns are blowing continuously and the resultant noise is even worse than Panama City!
We had plans to visit the Bay Islands but after talking to some people in the hotel who were from there, we decided to give it a pass. They recounted several stories about going without power for days at a time and the infrastructure damage that resulted from Hurricane Mitch still hasn’t been completely repaired. We learned that one American recently bought a 1.5 acre lot for $300,000. That’s all - just the lot, no electric, water, sewer, etc. It did have an ocean view. One man from Louisiana who has owned a small (8 room) hotel on Utola for 18 years said he pays 35 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity and if his hotel is rented he pays over $1,000 a month for electricity. On Roatan it’s about 30 cents per kilowatt hour. He said he would go elsewhere, but he owns about 65 acres there and is waiting for the island to become more developed. Phone service is sometimes nonexistent, same with internet. Most people have generators, but gas/diesel fuel is over $3.00 a gallon. Considering these drawbacks, we both decided that we wouldn’t want to give up what comforts we have on Isla Margarita to live there, and as an investment opportunity we thought the Bay Islands were already overpriced.
The bottom line is…we actually have an extremely good life here on Margarita. The infrastructure is very good and we see efforts to improve even more. The roads are good all over the island and we have the cheapest energy in all of the Americas, and the cheapest gasoline and diesel at about 10 cents a gallon. Drivers are more courteous here and the traffic is manageable. Liquor is inexpensive here. A bottle of decent Rum is $2.50 and beer is about 23 cents a bottle. Excellent shopping malls and food stores, real estate prices are still reasonable, no volcanoes, no hurricanes, and the most beautiful women in the world. I call it the ‘Land of Milk & Honeys”.
We got back to the island just in time to see World Championship Windsurfing Contest at Playa El Yaque. The top windsurfers/kite surfers from all over the world and their ardent female fans in dental floss bikinis were there to cheer for their favorites.
For more info the good life on Isla Margarita, please visit my website at www.discovermargaritaisland.com
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A few months ago I decided to check the merits of Panama vs Isla Margarita where I am now living - (see the article in Escape from America Magazine). This time in my wanderlust and never ending quest for the perfect affordable retirement and vacation destination I checked out Central America, specifically Nicaragua and Honduras. Roy, one of my business partners, decided to join me on my journey. 
