It took us the best part of two days to get here but fuck me, it’s worth the trek. Little Corn Island is everything you want a Caribbean tropical paradise to be. The water is clear everywhere you look, even where the pangas dock. There are palm trees for days. It’s sweaty hot too which isn’t as pleasant but it’s a trade off I guess. Best of all? No fucking sand flies. Nothing will have a pop at you whilst you’re sprawling on your sarong applying motor impairment beverages to your facehole leaving you with itchy welts that you’ve no choice but to dig into a bloody hole. Take note, Bocas Del Toro!

We didn’t do much the afternoon we arrived on account of the fact the seasickness tablets we took melted large portions of our brains. The following morning we slept in even as the power clicked off at 6am, killing the fan and slowly heating up the room. Yeah so that’s a thing, the island only has power between 1pm and 6am which is actually plenty to be fair, it just starts getting a bit sticky when the fan stops. Good thing there’s a fuck tonne of clear, refreshing water surrounding literally the whole place.

Everything on the island is walkable, the only form of transport is bicycle and locals will let you know they want to get past by literally calling out, “beep beep!”. After I visited a dive shop to arrange some underwater fun we wandered around the east side of the island. There’s a trail marked on Maps.ME but I think a lot of it is part of the seabed now so you get to decide whether you want to wade through the kind of sand that wants to engulf your entire being or battle through fallen palm trees. We mostly opted for the latter.

We passed through some lovely looking accommodation but we were happy with our choice to stay close to the jetty. The paths around here were made of sand and, quite frankly, fuck trekking over that with all your kit. You do stroll past Yemaya, the island’s high end accommodation option, and you have to try not to get envy at the people sat chilling outside of their cabañas with their individual private pools. Yeah, well, jokes on you because I don’t even like nice things.

We got to Otto Beach and oh hello, little slice of perfect paradise! Okay so the shade options are all a little bit coconutty and you have to be very careful where you set up so you don’t get an accidental braining but what’s a Tropical getaway without the risk of taking a coconut to the head? There’s an obnoxiously expensive restaurant here too but we just spent the day meandering in and out of the water getting ever so slightly burned.

We did eventually tear ourselves away and walked the normal way back to the village through the middle of the island rather than Krypton Factoring it around the coast again, showered and changed and went in search of a sweet sunset view. Any of the bars along Pelican Beach will do the job really. You can sip a ridiculously cold beverage (like, how are they even this cold when the power only came on at 1pm? What sorcery is this?) whilst watching the fiery skyball fuck off for the night. Gods it’s a bit too good here isn’t it?

The next day we went for a bit of a snorkelling trip. We were taken by boat out to the north of the island and were deposited in the water to point our faces at the reef. It was really lovely actually, I was immediately enamoured by the big, purple fans. Obviously there were a plethora of colourful fish that I still can’t identify despite repeatedly submerging myself in Tropical waters. One day I’ll learn what they are. Today is not that day.

We got back onto the boat after a lovely drift and he took us to a site called White Holes.
“Here you will see nurse sharks,” he told us, “You will see more than one.” Bold claim there, buddy. It’s not usually the done thing to guarantee wildlife sightings but we plopped into the water and yeah nah, we saw four. Tarrant spotted them all before I did and I duck dived for a closer look. I love them. I love their beady little eyes and their perfect design. They’re beautiful animals. Nurse sharks are chill as fuck too, they just hang out on the seabed minding their own damn business.

We also saw a stingray which was pretty awesome, and a turtle wandered up to get some air so we stared at that for a little bit. Actually I frantically pointed whilst yelling, “Turtle! Turtle!” at Tarrant except I forgot to take my snorkel out to do so fuck knows how that sounded. You can show me a hundred turtles every day and I’m still going to get excited. The boat driver met us and pointed out where we should snorkel to next so we duly did that, then he sent us over a coral garden which definitely made my bumhole twitch a bit. Like, we had to maneuver between the corals as the surge pushed us one way then another. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful coral reef, it’s just that I generally like to be slightly further away from it. I was wearing fins so I had a bit more power but Tarrant was trying to get through with her regular human sized feet and all I heard from her was “Fuck fuck fuck fuck!”

It was a cracking couple of hours though despite nearly losing a layer of skin to the coral and I was so chuffed we saw the nurse sharks. I’d never seen one before and Tarrant had never seen any shark in the wild before. When we were at Coiba I saw reef sharks but by the time Tarrant pointed her face at them they’d buggered off. We did spend the rest of the afternoon at Otto Beach until my sand tolerance dwindled to “get this shit off me” and we wandered back to the hostel.

It’s so different to the rest of Nicaragua here, Tarrant commented that she felt we should have a new passport stamp. I think the main language is Creole followed by English then Spanish but I didn’t want to be that Brit that bumbles into a shop and starts gabbing in English, nor did I want to inflict my terrible Spanish on someone who would prefer English. Am I overthinking this? Is this just me? Am I projecting too much anxiety onto what is actually quite a simple situation? So basically what I did was just asked shopkeepers what language they preferred. It actually turned out to be Spanish on a couple of occasions and one Spanish speaker told me that whilst it’s mostly English spoken here she only understood a little bit. Okay cool, glad I asked.

We considered extending until the Sunday but really, what are we going to do? There’s only so much sand I can handle before my butt starts to chaff just thinking about it. I mean, I could probably spend it diving but whilst Tarrant doesn’t mind a beach day even she can only deal with so much before she gets a bit bored. I can definitely see why you would want to while away a longer time here and if we’d intended to stay the full week from the outset then I wouldn’t be ugly crying into my overpriced Victoria Clásica over it but yeah, I think five nights here will do us just fine.

Jump to “Useful shit to know…”

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Little Corn Island,South Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region, Nicaragua

Stayed at: Three Brothers Hostel, Little Corn Island

Useful shit to know…

• Please see THIS POST for information on how to get to Little Corn Island.
• We booked our snorkelling trip through our hostel for C$720 each. It gets cheaper the more people there are.
• I think most hostels can arrange it or there’s a yellow and blue shack that advertises snorkelling tours.
• A few people went on a fishing and snorkelling combo with a guy that approached them on Otto Beach. You go fishing in the morning, cook and eat what you catch then go snorkelling. They paid US$25 each. You could probably look for a guy cleaning fish with tourists on the beach around midday and ask him what the deal is.

• Little Corn Island has power between 1pm and 6am only.
• There are grocery shops on the island but they’re obviously more expensive than elsewhere in Nicaragua.
• I had H+ on most of the island with Claro.
• Cafe Tranquilo has good WiFi.