May 5, 2013
by Tina
Comments Off on Nothing Corny About It
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Little Corn, Nicaragua – There are basically two ways to get to the Corn Islands, which are located off the coast of Nicaragua in the Caribbean. You can take a five hour bus ride from Managua to El Rama and then a 90 minute boat ride to Bluefields followed by a six hour ferry ride to Big Corn Island, where you then take a half hour boat ride from Big Corn to Little Corn, making it at least a two day journey. We’ll call that the “adventurous” or “Stuart’s preferred” way of getting there. We flew. It took an hour and a half from Managua.

Flying from Bluefields to Big Corn Island.
When we arrived at the airport in Managua for our afternoon flight, we had to first check in at the airline’s office and pick up our paper tickets and then go check in for our flight. They weighed our luggage and we just barely made the 30lb bag limits. It was all very low key though – I’m not sure they even asked for ID. The plane was open seating and we were lucky enough to be seated next to a group of really obnoxious Americans.
Sometimes I am just amazed at how uneducated young Americans are about the rest of the world. These college kids, in addition to being loud and rowdy, were having a conversation about how Americans are banned from traveling to Russia (!!!). Lucky for us, when we landed at the airport on Big Corn Island, they stayed while we headed for the dock and took a boat to Little Corn.

Looking across to a fancy hotel; The path used to cross the island.
Choosing between the two islands was really simple. Big Corn is more developed and Little Corn is more laid back and has much better diving. After arriving on Little Corn we walked right past the touts greeting us at the dock and headed over to the other side of the island to Grace’s Cool Spot, which we heard was a decent and cheap place to stay. And cheap it was: fifteen bucks a night got us a (very basic) room right on the beach. It wasn’t much, the electricity only came on from 4pm to 6am, it was noisy (the walls of the room didn’t go all the way to the ceiling) and we had to use a shared bathroom with cold showers. But right on the beach for $15 – it was hard to complain about any of that. Okay, I did complain a little – mostly about the noise.
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