Teri’s had increasingly severe back pain since the end of July, so we’ve done less exploring together than we expected. We have, though, had a quick tramp around one place to which we’ll definitely be returning: the Knepp project, a pioneer of rewilding half an hour’s drive from Worthing. 

  Until 2000, Knepp’s heavy clay soils had been intensively but unprofitably farmed. Then it was returned to nature. Where there were fields of maize, barley, wheat and dairy cows, there is now a shifting landscape of open-grown trees, scrub, grazing lawns and thorny thickets. Where there were tractors spraying pesticides and fertilisers, now there is only the trampling, puddling, rootling and rubbing of free-ranging herbivores: longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs and red, fallow and roe deer. The pigs turn the soil; the cows, with their grazing and browsing, do the coppicing; and jays plant acorns wherever they fancy. Conventional conservation is about preserving what remains; here, they say, they have embarked on “restoration by letting go, allowing nature to take the driving seat”.

  The result is a place where rare creatures, from turtle doves and nightingales to purple emperor butterflies and the Bechstein’s bat, are making a new home. To take a walk there, just 16 miles from Gatwick airport, is more like taking a walk through the African bush than the 21^st-century British countryside — the African bush, that is, minus the apex predators, so Knepp culls the deer and cattle and sells venison and beef. A few hundred yards from the shop where the meat’s on sale, you can gaze up into an oak where storks are nesting.

  I’d read a little about Knepp, but only because Isabella Tree, who runs it with her husband, Charlie Burrell, is a familiar name as a travel writer. Now I want to know more.

  Knepp runs to 3,500 acres. Our own back-door plot is more of a courtyard, and we’re still trying to work out how to make the most of it. Indoors, though, we’ve begun to put our stamp on our new home. A photograph or a painting will go on a wall in one room (often in a place where there’s already a screw or two and we’ve left them because we’re not ready to redecorate) and then a couple of days later be moved to another room. 

  At the moment, the downstairs loo is offering a window on to the teeming rainforest life of Central America. Trees with giant leaves reach for the sky, offering perches on the way for monkeys, a toucan and an owl. Up in the blue, there’s a flock of white egrets; on the ground, a deer and a paca (a large rodent with dots and stripes on its sides) nose through the undergrowth. On the water in the foreground, as well as what I now know is a swamp-hen called the purple gallinule (Porphyrio martinicus), are half a dozen other birds I can’t identify. All this natural abundance is celebrated in an oil painting on canvas I bought in May 2007 from the artist, a young man living in the Solentiname Islands of Nicaragua. A country best known for coffee, natural catastrophes and revolutionary politics was turning to tourism as a way out of poverty; I went there to see what it had to offer potential visitors. On my second morning, I was held up at a roadblock and came face to face with the devil. 

  The roadblock was in the northern town of San Rafael del Norte. It was mounted not by soldiers in fatigues but by grinning schoolchildren in the national uniform of navy and white, taking part in the Nicaraguan equivalent of Children in Need. They drew a rope across the bonnet of our car, jingled their buckets at the windows, gratefully accepted a few córdobas and then waved my guide and me on our way.

  And the devil? He was in the church, a magnificent structure for a town of 15,000, with an altar of rocks taken from a solidified lava flow on Masaya volcano, about 120 miles to the south. On the left of the entrance is a depiction of the temptation of Christ, in which the devil has a strangely familiar face, a face we had seen on several roadside billboards. That virile moustache, the piercing eyes, the beaky nose — it was the spitting image of José Daniel Ortega Saavedra, the president of Nicaragua.

  Daniel Ortega was used to being demonised – but by the United States. He was one of the leaders of the Sandinista Revolution of 1978-79 that ended 40 years of dictatorship by the Somoza family, a dynasty which, it is said, owned only one farm but that farm was Nicaragua. If the Sandinistas’ swift spreading of literacy was miraculous, Ortega’s first spell as president, between 1985 and 1990, was closer to disastrous. He encountered fierce opposition at home – particularly for his censorship of the press – an economic embargo from the United States and armed rebellion by the US-backed counter-revolutionaries, or Contras. 

  Since being elected again the previous November, he had been at pains to assert that he was a changed man. Nicaragua, the second-poorest country in the hemisphere after Haiti (nearly half her 5.4 million people were subsisting on less than a dollar a day), desperately needed jobs, electricity and infrastructure, and Ortega saw tourism as the means of providing them. He hoped to accelerate a boom that had seen backpackers, surfers and second-home buyers flock to the Pacific coast and colonial cities since the Contra war ended in 1990. Tourism had already overtaken coffee as the country’s main source of earnings. Visitor numbers reached 770,000 in 2006, representing an increase of 11 per cent in the previous six years, and revenue totalled US$230 million.

  Among those 770,000 were 15,000 from Britain, a market Nicaragua was particularly keen to nurture. For the moment, though, the bulk of visitors was from the United States, whose citizens – or those of them who had noticed the Contra war was over – saw Nicaragua as “a new Costa Rica”.  

  Nicaragua is bordered to the north by Honduras, to the south by the original Costa Rica, to the east by the Caribbean and to the west by the Pacific. Its geography is dominated by two great lakes, Nicaragua and Managua, and more than 50 volcanoes. It’s the biggest but also the least populated country in Central America, a region characterised by Nicaragua’s greatest poet, Rubén Darío, as “esa América que tiembla de huracanes y que vive de Amor” – “that America which trembles from its hurricanes and survives on its Love”.

   Colonialists and natural catastrophes have both left their mark, but to this newly arrived visitor the legacy of the latter was more obvious. From my fifth-floor hotel room I looked out on a capital that had fewer buildings than trees. Managua, levelled in minutes by an earthquake in 1972 in which 10,000 people died, had never quite recovered.

  There had been rebuilding, and in its Metrocentre it had a pink-and-cream mall as shinily superfluous as anything in Miami, but it remained a city with a hole at its heart, where most streets were unnamed and where directions were often given with reference to landmarks that no longer existed. I couldn’t gauge its size or make sense of its layout until I was driven to one of its heights, in the Parque Nacional de la Loma de Tiscapa. There I looked down on it alongside a giant image of the man from whom the Sandinistas took their name: Augusto César Sandino.

  Sandino (1893-1934) was Nicaragua’s Che, a fighter against both US imperialism and home-grown despots. Like Che, he was assassinated but never died. As with Che, too, his silhouette — or even just his hat — is enough to stand for the man. Throughout my 10 days he was a constant presence: on posters in the countryside, on murals in the cities, in sculptures and paintings in galleries, and in the briefings with which my guide, Juan Carlos Mendoza, illuminated my viaje de relampago, or lightning tour.

  Juan Carlos, 46, confessed that his military career had been less illustrious than Sandino’s. In his teens, with hostilities at home about as bad as they had ever been, he was sent by his family to live with a relative in California, where American food and American football made him a bigger-than-average specimen of Nicaraguan manhood. When he returned, he was conscripted. Expecting that his size would mark him out for early action, he found himself assigned, instead, to a ceremonial guard in his home city of Managua. 

  He was living there still and, with tourism picking up, expected to be spending less time with his wife and daughter. For the moment, though, he reckoned numbers hadn’t reached the levels of the 1980s, when, he says, “people came to see what a revolution looked like”.

  Nicaragua’s outdated image was the problem. In reality, at the time of my visit, it was one of the safest countries in Latin America, with 12 crimes for every 100,000 citizens, compared with an average of 24. Juan Carlos attributed this to intelligence-gathering of a high order, which the Sandinistas had developed when fighting Somoza: “They know how criminals work – they used to conspire against the system in the old days.”

  The British Foreign Office broadly agreed. Before I left London its website was saying: “Road safety, or lack of it, is probably the biggest single hazard to travellers in Nicaragua.” I found myself seconding that as we drove around, first north from Managua to the coffee-growing country, with its fresh mountain air, then to two places that are hotter both in temperature and as tourist destinations: the cities of León and Granada. We met riderless ponies, plodding oxen pulling sugar cane, drunken pedestrians, and families of four wobbling along on one bike. New roads were everywhere being built and old ones mended, but there were also stretches where the craters and the unmarked sleeping policemen severely tested the suspension of our Toyota Yaris saloon.

  Students were a presence in both colonial cities. In León they were Nicaraguan, gathered in groups of four or five, sharing a litre bottle of the local beer, Victoria, round a circular table; in Granada they were American, in ones and twos, tapping emails into MacBooks over caffè lattes.

      Granada, with horse-drawn carts that gave it a distinctive sound and smell, was more immediately appealing. Shadier, too. León was a place of stifling heat, where, according to Omar Cabezas, one of the chroniclers of the Sandinista struggle, even the dogs went round with their tongues hanging out. But it had a soul that hadn’t yet been mortgaged to tourism.

  After León’s massive cathedral, where a grieving lion guards the tomb of Rubén Darío, I had been keenest to see Darío’s house, but found it offered little sense of the man. Much more affecting was a place I had written off but which Juan Carlos and his colleagues suggested I ought to see: El Museo de Leyendas y Tradiciones (the Museum of Legends and Traditions). I had assumed it would be a collection of kitsch. It is. But it gains power from its setting – in one of Somoza’s jails. In former cells, the floors of which are painted the colour of dried blood, mannequins representing nursery rhyme and nightmare are posed in front of walls painted with scenes of actual torture: a man being kicked by a soldier, another having his teeth filed, a third being hanged upside down from a mango tree. Given what happened here, a note about the mannequins, “No tocar los personajes” (Don’t touch the figures), takes on unbearable poignancy. 

  Dictatorship and revolution, one suspects, aren’t subjects mentioned often in the Granada office of Snider’s Realty. A leaflet in its window was offering “Beachfront Condos on Iguana Beach: 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, fully furnished with A/Cs, 915 sq ft, Private Gated Community.” Americans had also been snapping up real estate among Las Isletas, the 300-or-so little islands formed 2,000 years ago when Mombacho volcano blew its top, in giant masses of rock, ash and lava, into Lake Nicaragua. We took a boat trip through this refuge for weekenders and wildlife. Within half an hour we had seen three species of egret — great, little and snowy — a green-backed heron, a white-throated magpie jay, a family of spider monkeys, and a great kiskadee flycatcher, guarding its nest on a tipsy navigation marker.

  “And that,” said Juan Carlos, pointing to a marsh bird about the size of a chicken with blue and green feathers, long yellow legs and a red bill with a yellow tip, “is a purple gallinule. “We’re lucky. It’s difficult to see because it’s kind of shy.”

  That evening, I walked at spider-monkey height from my room to the restaurant at Morgan’s Rock, a 4,000-acre private reserve with views over a semi-circular beach and the Pacific. A suspension bridge links its rooms — or, rather bungalows — with its restaurant. Going down to dinner, I found myself eye to eye with a juvenile howler monkey and, coming back — thank goodness for the wind-up torch given to guests — came closer still to stepping on a skunk. 

  In my bungalow, with its king-size bed, sofa bed, solar-heated shower and fussily sculpted taps, I was a prince for a night – albeit a rather awkwardly solitary prince, for Morgan’s is most popular with honeymooners. It’s a retreat in more ways than one: as in those “gated communities”, the only Nicaraguans you are likely to encounter will be the staff.

  The Victoria Hotel in El Castillo, where I spent the next two nights, was a more modest establishment, beyond the reach of interior designers, but compensating in the warmth of its manager, Magdalena, for anything it lacked in frills.

From Managua, El Castillo is a 45-minute flight to the grass airstrip of San Carlos, followed by a five-minute taxi ride, followed by a three-hour boat trip along the Río San Juan, which forms the border with Costa Rica. I sat on the right behind the co-pilot, close enough to see the sweat on his colleague’s face, and perfectly placed to snap the volcanoes of Ometepe Island, Concepción and Maderas, shouldering through cotton-wool clouds.

  En route from San Carlos, and over the next couple of days, we had a guide from El Castillo, Efraín. He was a softly spoken man, his Spanish drowned by the boat’s engine or snatched away by the wind, but together he and Juan Carlos ensured that I missed little of riverine life. One moment they would be explaining that that farmer tumbling a cane over and over was measuring his field; the next they would be alerting me to look over there, for the heart-stopping swoop of an osprey.

  El Castillo, a settlement of stilted houses with tin roofs, is named for the fort that overlooks it, which was once captured by Nelson. On its ramparts in late afternoon, I was transfixed by an osprey’s eye view of the river, a mini Amazon snaking sparkling through the green. I tore myself away only because of the promise of a feast of river shrimps, which were as big and as succulent as promised – and worth ignoring the usual travel advice to avoid shellfish.

  Another normally observed counsel is never to smile at a crocodile. Juan Carlos and I ignored that, too. On a night mad with stars, we stepped into a boat, fastened our lifejackets in the dark, and went off in search of a cayman. 

  The boatman in the bow, Hernando, swept a searchlight across the water and directed his younger companion to take us where the yellow eyes glinted back. We saw a fish-eating bat and a Jesus Christ lizard – so-called because it seems to walk on water. We puttered in under trees where kingfishers, flycatchers and a purple gallinule were fast asleep. And we — or at least Hernando — jumped on to a bank, hauled a cayman out of its nest and held it up so we could get a good look at its teeth. It was only about a foot long, and two years old. Juan Carlos had told me that the mothers stopped guarding their offspring after a year. But what if he were wrong…? And how could those canoeists who had slipped passed us without even a torch possibly see where they were going…? “They have eyes like the cayman,” Fernando said.

  Our two hours on the water was a fascinatingly surreal experience, made more so when Fernando’s mobile phone went off, with a snatch of that 1980 chart-topper “Funkytown”: “Gotta move on…”

  From San Carlos, centre of this water world, we headed next for the Solentiname Archipelago, in the south-east of Lake Nicaragua, an area whose lush vegetation and bird life have been wonderfully captured by a community of artists. On arriving there in the 1960s, Ernesto Cardenal, priest, poet, sculptor (and minister of culture under the revolution), was shown some cups that had been engraved and painted by a local farmer; he saw that the man had a gift worth developing, and quickly realised that he wasn’t the only one. Cardenal brought in the painter Rogér Perez de la Rocha from Managua to offer workshops. So began a movement in which schooling and talent have been passed down generations.

  On Isla La Venada (“Doe Island”), we met two of its graduates, Rodolfo Arellano, 66, and his 20-year-old grandson, Julio. I bought one of Julio’s paintings, which put me in mind of the landscapes of Rousseau: lush and full of life — including that purple gallinule that, by this stage, despite its shyness and without my resorting to binoculars, I had managed to see in the wild three times. 

  For that and other experiences, I felt privileged to have visited Nicaragua. I felt apprehensive, too, on its behalf. It was a beautiful and well preserved country partly because it was a poor and underdeveloped one. One could see how needed tourists dollars were, but also the damage that might be done with them. Already, on the Pacific coast, ecologically minded hoteliers were complaining that ugly apartment blocks were popping up like toast.

   In Solentiname, tourism was still low-key. On Isla San Fernando, Juan Carlos and I ordered dinner for seven o’clock. An hour later we were still waiting, for all hands were at the pump. To ensure we could shower in the morning, a pipeline into the lake was being extended — in the dark. 

  Next morning, low water was again a problem: as our boat entered the lake on our return from an outing, we got stuck in the shallows and had to get out and push. But no one minded, for the outing had been Julio’s painting come to life. 

  Eduardo Mairena, whose family owned the cabins we were staying in, had taken us across the lake and into the Río Papaturro, a narrow, rushes-lined river that is part of the Los Guatuzos Wildlife Reserve. With us were two American women, who had been volunteering as English teachers on the island of Mancarrón. 

  Eduardo had promised them some great wildlife-watching and – a change from their usual beans and rice – lunch in San Carlos. He certainly delivered on the former. In a couple of hours we saw howler monkeys, turtles, caymans, Jesus Christ lizards and iguana, several species of heron and kingfisher, and – half a dozen times – a blackbird that, because of the bright red chevron on its wing, is known locally as the sargento, the sergeant.  

  “Many sergeants,” Eduardo joked. “The army is on the river now.” It was the sort of army for which, I hoped, Nicaragua would soon be better known.