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Published: December 2nd 2006
San Juan del Sur is all about surfing, it is the town most frequently mentioned by fellow travellers in Nicaragua as the place to ride some waves, so we headed there to see if we could actually get upright on a board.
Our mission in San Juan del Sur was to learn how to surf (or at least try!), so as soon as we had found a place to stay we were out on the streets hunting down the best surf deal. The beach in Suan Juan del Sur itself is more like a port full of fishing boats; the more beautiful beaches are along the coast, north and south of Suan Juan del Sur, which is where we wanted to go but surprisingly these fantastic beaches have not yet really been discovered by full blown tourism so the access roads are very steep, bumpy and prone to flooding and therefore difficult or pricey to get to.
We booked up for an hour lesson with a surf shop in town that took people out to one of the better beaches for the day - Playa Maderas. Later that evening we bumped into Holly and Lilly from Granada, and Stan 
Kev
fell off shortly after this but don't look too bad in the picture!!and Prisca (yet again - they were stalking us!!) from Utila, only to find out that they all had also booked for the same lesson the next day!
We all met up nice an early the next morning and were bundled into a van and truck with all our gear and the surfboards strapped to the roof. Kev and I also had our huge bags as we were planning on staying the night down the beach so we could surf again the next day.
We had hoped for a beautiful sunny day for our first surf lesson but instead we were greeted with clouds and a rather rough looking sea. We were rather shocked but impressed to discover that we each had our own personal instructor for the hour lesson. First we did the jumping up on to the board on the beach which is ovbviously quite easy as you are on stable ground. Repeating the exercise in the rough sea is one hell of a lot harder and that was with the instructor holding your board steady and telling you when to paddle. After the hour lesson was over we had to go it alone against the
Tash
You can see how big some of the waves were in the background!! big bad ocean! Needless to say we came off worse - by the end of the day we were covered in bruises and feeling rather battered. We did spend a good few hours in the sea and had kind of started to get the hang of it and enjoyed it enough to want to do it again!
We spent the night in our hammock as all the rooms in the basic accomodation we were staying at were full, but despite the bad weather we stayed warm and dry! The following day we braved the poor conditions and went back in the sea a few times, it was still very rough but we both managed to stand up albeit briefly before being knocked off! Our surf school was supposed to be coming back down to the beach again so that we could catch a ride back into San Juan but because of the weather they hadn´t made it down. It was starting to look like we were going to be stranded at the beach for another night until a guy with a pickup truck came and dropped some people off and very kindly took us back (for a price of course)!
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Andy Connor
non-member comment
Surf's Up!
Its amazing how being dressed head to toe in rubber and riding a plank of wood is so cool isnt it? Sound like your weather was the same as my first surf lesson! Looks like you're having an amazing time! I wondered when drinking Uno would make an appearance! Hope to hear from you again soon, lots of love Andy X