I have previously written about my time in Granada, Nicaragua – my first real travel adventure after a long sojourn between 2011 and 2014. What I thoughtlessly left out of that post was the real reason I went to Nicaragua in the first place: To sun my buns on a fairy tale beach. 
When most travelers talk about beaches in Nicaragua (and this is a regular topic of conversation, right?), the topic usually veers toward the more populated beaches of the San Juan del Sur area, about 2.5 hours south of Granada, on the Pacific Ocean side of the country. They filmed Survivor there! You can get yoga certified! But I like to make things a little more difficult, and chose to spend ten days on the rather remote Corn Islands, with the majority of our time on the smaller of the two – aptly named Little Corn Island.
This is not to say that Little Corn Island is not well trodden by tourists – it most certainly is. And the time we chose to vacation there (March of 2014) there was not an open bed on the island, much to the chagrin of the Dutch women sitting next to us on the rocky panga (think a ferry, but with more people puking) ride from Big Corn to Little Corn. We had booked our bungalow at the Little Corn Beach and Bungalow months before.
I should preface that this was also my first trip to Central America, aside from a short stint in Puerto Vallarta and Yelapa (yes, go to Yelapa) in 2010. When it came to beach vacations, I was used to cocktail buckets on Ko Samet in the Gulf of Thailand, with maybe a ladyboy show here and there. Little Corn was a more mature type of beach vacation – replace the cocktail buckets with bottled water by the gallon, and the ladyboy shows with casual conversations with the resident bungalow parrot (shout out to Lola) and sunset restorative yoga. Oh, and books. In our ten days there I read 7 books – my kind of Spring Break!
But the beach was magical – we ate fresh fish every day, made close friends with our yoga instructor (we had the class to ourselves nearly every day), and took trail runs along the only road through the island. The course is still etched in my brain: across the island, through the town, take a right at the school, run up the mountain by the yoga teacher’s house, across the baseball field, and end up on the private beach of the most expensive resort on the island. I ran it every morning as the sun rose, and made it back to our bungalows in time to take a quick dip before coffee was served. Are you envious yet?
Aside from eating, sunning, and running, we didn’t do much of anything. So little was there to do, in fact, that I read seven books in ten days. I developed hammock-sores. We had taken the vacation to get away from the dreary Seattle winter and my worse than dreary Seattle boss. Little Corn Island was the perfect place for a recharge.
That said, if you need more than just a great beach and some hippie shacks selling coconut oil and shaky bud, you might be better off in San Juan del Sur, or Puerto Vallarta, for that matter. The website of the bungalows we stayed at (the Little Corn Beach and Bungalow – it’s the stuff of lore on Nicaragua’s gringo trail) warns of power outages, limited water resources, and potential boredom for those used to more excitement in their vacations. 
But, as we hadn’t come to Central American to zip-line (no dis to you zip-liners, but zip-lining is dumb), sitting on the beach with nothing to do was about exactly what we were looking for. And when the only thing up in the air is what you’re going to have for dinner, or if the island mercantile has received any Coke Zero from the mainland, life is pretty sweet.
When we went, in 2014, there were still no cars on Little Corn Island, and I believe this to be true even today. I hear folks talk about the Nicaraguan government prioritizing the maintenance of LCI as a conservationist destination – but I feel like this is a story I’ve heard before, only to be withdrawn once big investor dollars arrive. The point is, go to Little Corn Island ASAP, before the Sandal’s moves in.
Getting to Little Corn Island can be as difficult as you want it to be. We took it easy on ourselves and flew from Managua (the domestic terminal is tiny and located next to the larger international terminal) to Big Corn Island on La Costena Airlines – a local Nicaraguan outfit that wasn’t nearly as shady as I wanted it to be. At the Big Corn Island airport there are cabbies waiting to take you to the panga. Pro tip: make friends on the plane to share the taxi, it should only cost a buck per person. The panga will take you across the choppy or calm seas, depending on the day, and once on LCI, it’s easy to find your spot with the help of any of the local people (or foreigners, for that matter). It’s wise to book ahead of time.
