Corn Island Travel Blog

One of the things that Jean and I tried to do in order to make a living back on Corn Island was help plan people's vacations. We had a service of booking hotels for people and recommending good and safe places to stay and where to eat. Many awesome hotels and restaurants don't have websites and are not listed on tourist maps so one can miss out a lot without some insider information. As well, some of the "best" hotels and restaurants online have long since gone out of business or are run down and don't offer many of the services they claim.

Well, since we obviously can't do this anymore even though it was doing alright and we made some great friends in the process... I've decided just to share our information publicly. Below are some of the custom maps we made for our clients. You may notice the Little Corn map is a bit lacking but that's because we didn't have any clients who went to little corn yet. You may also notice a recommendation to steer clear of a few places. I have nothing against these places, and perhaps you may like them yourself, its just that having been there in person and seeing what they have to offer, and more importantly what their competition has to offer I did not feel their prices were justifiable.

Big Corn

Little Corn

Here's some good hotels on Big Corn:

Treehouse - Private cabins on long bay, absolutely amazing. Hot water, kitchen, wifi (thats hard to get on Corn Island by the way) and great service. Around $50 per night

Picnic Center - Best beach on the Island, possibly best beach in Nicaragua. Rooms around $40 per night. AC, hot water, stylish.

Hotel Morgan - prices ranging from $20 to $40. Very nice location, breezy. Good looking rooms with AC. Restaurant has good food for good prices with big portion sizes.

Alal Suite - Upstairs rooms have an amazing view of the ocean and all day breeze. AC not necessary. $25 per night

Some places to avoid:

Arenas beach - Looks pretty fancy. They have gazebos on the beach which are nice. We wanted to go there one day and they wanted to charge us $20 per person (5 of us) to sit in the gazebo. We asked the people next to us what they paid (they were Nicaraguan) and they said $10 for their entire group, which was 5 or 6 people. We asked to speak to someone inside and they simply said "The price changed, sorry". On top of that everything is 2x the price of Picnic center which is literally right next to the place. That being said its really a nice looking place if you're OK with being lied to about the prices and taken advantage of for being a gringo.

Paraiso - Used to be a very nice place, unfortunately it hasn't been maintained and has become quite run down. Some friends stayed there recently and left after the first night because of the poor conditions of the room. A lot of the services they offered online weren't there (like hot water).

Little Corn hotels:

Mostly, just wanted to add one we recently discovered while staying for a wedding on Little Corn. the aptly named "Grace's cool spot" which located right where "elsa's" is on the map above. $10 a night for a simple room, $20 for a private cabin. Probably one of the coolest places I've ever stayed in. All the cabins are actually on the sand, on the breezy side of the island, with the waves splashing just a few steps from your cabin's door. One of not so many hotels on little corn owned and run by local islanders.

As for the ones listed as overpriced, its just that. Too darn expensive. Yemaya for example is supposed to be a "resort" for $300-500 per night. I've been to resorts in Mexico. Yemaya is not a resort. It is a hotel. They also offer a private boat to pick you up from Big Corn, but if I were you I'd stick with the panga. Yemaya's boat is tiny.

Speaking of boats, if you're thinking of going to Corn Island, here is a video tour we made of the largest of the passenger boats that takes you from Bluefields to Big Corn. In this video we are on our way to Rama from Corn Island.

Camping Little Corn

Over the last few months we have done our best to keep up with the meetings and trips to Little Corn every two weeks. Seeing as the pangas leave at 10 in the morning, and we have to return at the mercy of the cargo ship it often leaves us little time to accomplish our work there. So we decided this time to do something a little similar to Pearl Lagoon congregation.

Interior of Little Corn

We decided that this time we would spend the night, and spend the following day following up on return visits and bible students. This sounds very simple, there are a lot of hotels here and restaurants as well. However many of us simply cannot afford to stay in them, and most of the restaurants are not exactly economical either. So we decided we would camp out, and cook our own meals over an open fire. We didn't know where we would be spending the night when we arrived on the Island. Our plan was to just get there with our supplies and see what happened. We checked out a few locations, realistically we probably would have been fine just hiking some distance into the bush and camping there, but we felt it might be safer and more convenient to camp on someone's property that we knew. So we asked one of the bible students we had on Saturday if we could use his land to set up camp, and he was very agreeable to the idea. He even offered to let us use his kitchen, and offered us coffee in the morning, however we were actually looking forward to cooking on the fire so we carried on with our original plan regardless.

Campsite

Supper time

Both days were very successful, as was the meeting. There were four of us camping, the other couple had to return on the first panga at 1:30 PM though, because he had an assignment at the Spanish meeting on the big island. meanwhile Jean and I stayed until 4:30 to try and do some business to finance our trip. We've started making necklaces, bracelets and other jewelry as a side business to our pizza making, and our hope was to sell a few while we were there to help pay our passage. Unfortunately, we seem to be timing our attempts to sell our products very badly. Our first attempt was that Sunday afternoon on Little Corn, but the street thats usually teeming with tourists was dead quiet and nearly empty, not that we were expecting it to be very busy on a Sunday... Our next attempt was on a day when all the pangas were cancelled due to bad weather... So, we are yet to see how this latest scheme will pan out. If only there was a mail system here, maybe we could sell them on ebay.

Our display

Wild monkey came to check us out

We are all excited to see what future developments will take place with the work on Little Corn, our goal is to keep going every two weeks so long as our circumstances and the weather permits. Hopefully more will come to help conduct the meetings, and follow up on bible studies. The couple that camped with us is going back to their country for some time, and seeing as the meetings are in Spanish there is a real need for brothers who can speak it fluently, on both Islands.

Sunset on the way home