My Friend Wellington

People ask if Nica is safe. It makes sense. But I rarely answer with crime statistics, and I don’t care too much about State Department bulletins. Mostly, I think about my friend Wellington.

Years ago, I spent a lot of time on remote rivers in the Amazon basin, days from the nearest road.  That, in fact, was the point.  We were exploring.  We looked for unknown whitewater, unfished rivers, and unexplored things. This was in a part of the country where the maps just kind of give up. I worked there with a guy named Wellington.  We got to be friends.

I've never really been able to properly explain that relationship.

In the city, chefs came out of their kitchens to greet him. In villages so far upriver they saw an outsider maybe twice a year, the children knew his daughter's name. He could get hold of things fast, and he would conjure them from a mess of unclear resources. And he had friends everywhere, real ones, the kind who lit up when his boat came around the bend.

He met every guest at the airport himself. He could produce a toothbrush or a Porsche on about the same timeline. So the answer to "can we actually go there?" was nearly always yes.

I went everywhere with him.  Crazy places I went with Wellington.

We had a plane we bought, too, a little two-seater with room for us and almost nothing else. The only reason it was cleared to fly, in that part of the world, was because it was, quite plainly, too small for smuggling.  We were not smuggling. Wellington would put it down on rivers no plane had any business landing on, in map quadrant that had probably never heard an engine. Then we'd climb out onto some nameless bank and walk around for an hour. Maybe more. No path, no plan.  And we would just see if this was Wellington’s kind of place.

Two of those places changed how I think about travel.

We were based for a while in Manaus, the big river city on the shoulder of the Brazilian Amazon. I learned, only in retrospect, that it was the lynching capital of world.  Manaus is a city that appears to have been dragged to the edge of a jungle and then left there.  It feels unprepared.  On edge. Neither city nor jungle. That turned out to be a tension Wellington resolved with a particular fluency. We got things done in a place where most things aren’t properly done.

Then there was also the episode at the homestead.  Getting to it meant a four-hour flight, a seven-hour boat ride, and a two-hour hike into the jungle, about as far from a road as you can physically get. More than one person told us, plainly with reliable evidence, that we'd be shot for showing up uninvited. Wellington found that to be as good an invitation as any.

Nobody shot us. A German expat put out a lunch that went on for far too long. He fed us lunch until the evening light gave out.  We left hours later, and Wellington had made a couple more friends for life.

A reputation never mentions any of that. The scariest dot on the map and the guy who will feed you for four hours and introduce his chickens at the door are often at the end of the same road. Which one you get has less to do with the place than with how you turn up: as a stranger, or alongside someone who can turn strangers into hosts.

Wellington had a line for it. "We don't need money," he told me once, and he was serious. "We have friends." He meant it literally – because, at that particular moment in time, we had run out of money, food and fuel and were drifting slowly and unaided down a tributary of the Amazon that I still can’t name. Out where he worked, the whole economy ran on favors and generosity instead of cash, and Wellington quite reliably generated his own currency.

It took me a while to see that Wellington wasn't just talented. He was a working theory of how to move safely through places that scare people, and I still think about it constantly.

Part of it was accountability. His name was on everything. When he took you somewhere, his reputation up and down that river was collateral, and people with that much to lose behave differently than people with none.

Part of it was just being there. Not a voice on a phone in some distant office, not a logo at the bottom of a confirmation email, but on the ground, in the boat, at the table. Problems got solved in minutes because the person who could solve them was sitting next to you.

He also met you at the airport, which sounds like nothing and is actually the whole thing. The riskiest part of any trip is the arrival: the transfer, the jet lag, the stretch where you're disoriented and don't know the rules yet. Wellington was there for that part, every single time.

And then there was the piece you can't fake. He belonged. His network wasn't a list of vendors, it was decades of real relationships, and when you travel with someone who belongs, a place opens up and looks after you instead of sizing you up.

What all of it taught me is that safety has less to do with where you go than with who you go with, and how deep their roots run where you're standing.

Because we built this company in Wellington's image, and on purpose.

When people ask if Nicaragua is safe, I try to give a fuller answer than a number. For what it's worth, it is statistically and reliable the safest in the region. But I've never watched a statistic actually put anyone at ease, and I don't think it should have to. What keeps our guests safe is how we work.

We’ve been in San Juan del Sur for a long time. It's our town. We pick you up at the airport ourselves, so the shakiest part of the trip is handled before you've even become certain what time it is. We stay with it, on the ground, the whole way through, rather than dispatching you somewhere and hoping it goes fine. And the network that took Wellington a lifetime to build is the one we've spent years building here: the boat captains, the cooks, the surf guides, the family whose porch you'll end up eating on. We know them. They know us.

Plenty of operators will sell you a gorgeous trip and then, more or less, drop you off. They hand you an itinerary for a place they know no better than you do. When something wobbles, and on a real trip something usually does, you're on your own in a foreign country, which is the exact thing you were worried about in the first place.

That's not us. We're fixers, and we're the ones standing next to you, because your trip is ours too.

I went to some seriously questionable corners of the Amazon and felt safe the entire time, because Wellington was there. The lesson stuck hard enough that I built a company on it, on another coast, in another country, chasing different things.

So when you ask whether Nicaragua is safe, here's what I mean when I say yes: you won't be dropped into Nicaragua, you'll be taken through it. We'll meet you when you land and hand you, friend to friend, down a coast and through a place we know by heart.

Come see.  We’ll wait at the airport.