The following day, we set out for San Miguel de Oriente, a town where 95% of the residents are master potters. The streets and outdoor stadium are decorated with murals and the goods at the shops include everything from traditional Mesoamerican sculptures to flower vases with Marimekko-like designs. My son purchased a jaguar head for his bedroom. It was Easter, but the town was uncharacteristically sleepy for a vacation week, as Nicaragua’s co-presidents Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo had issued a ban on public religious celebrations. (Their government also insists on reading every newspaper article before it is published.)

We then touched down on Caterina, a town that is overrun by floral nurseries (New York’s flower district has nothing on this quarter) before visiting Lake Apoyo—or “the lagoon,” as everyone calls it. The sapphire blue waters, heated by volcanic hot springs, attract serious swimmers and local children in life vests alike. My increasingly sulky teenage son dove underwater and came up with heaping handfuls of black, sulfur-scented sand, sporting a smile I hadn’t seen since he was five years old. He would have stayed there all day, had it not been lunchtime. (The lakeside tacos were delicious.) On our final day at the lodge, we took a boat ride around the lake. We spotted egrets and monkeys, as well as an intoxicating blend of lily pads, banana trees and mango trees.

“The mango trees are a mixed blessing,” Eva Avjean, the spa and wellness director at Rancho Santana, a luxury resort-cum-housing complex on the Pacific Ocean, told me. “Sometimes the monkeys grab a mango just before it’s ripe and throw it at my head.” A veteran wellness consultant, Avjean oversees everything from the daily rooftop yoga classes held beneath a bamboo roof overlooking the Pacific Ocean, to the facials and sound bath sessions. She lives on the labyrinthine property, whose 2,700 square acres add up to the size of 2,000 football fields. These are numbers that sound like numbers, but when you get lost trying to move from your room to the beach, or take a 20-minute shuttle bus from one beach to another, it starts to make sense. This place is massive. One morning, as I attempted to find my way to breakfast, I made a wrong turn and ended up walking up and then stumbling down a precipitously steep path. (My forearms are still banged up as I type.)