We made it! We made it! We made it!

Day 14 Friday, July 29, 2005

We made it! We made it! We made it!

Here we are in Costa Rica! We arrived last night after a 3 day marathon of border crossings. Before we left San Diego, we had an inkling of the complexities and frustrations, but reality was even more of a Dickensian runaround than we’d guessed.

Since the last posting, we’ve crossed Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and entered Costa Rica. Our passports are bloodied with fuzzy impressions of entry and exit stamps. We have a file of paperwork about 3/8’s of an inch thick. If we stacked all the pages generated and left in the file baskets of the various countries, the debris of our transit visits is probably a full inch high.

Each country has both entry and exit procedures – similar amongst them all, but each with its own peculiar twists and sequences. Each border is a few kilometers along the highway. You know you are there only by the swarms of ‘helpers’ that you can hire to walk you and your paperwork through. The helpers provide some assistance, but the government-issued passes that they wear are really hunting licenses, or rather fishing licenses … and we were the fish.

The offices are camouflaged in buildings with no identification on them, or even better, with identification that’s completely wrong. My favorite example is the immigration exit office of Honduras, housed in a building labeled as a duty free shop. Nearly all the forms are typed on manual – not even electric typewriters, vintage 1940’s or so. The makers of carbon paper still have a market here, where all forms are typed in triplicate or quadruplicate.

I suspect if you are in transit by bus, it’s a very easy process show a valid passport and that’s it. But we were traveling with a car and a dog, and each one required permissions, fees, and inspections. Oh, and the pesticide car wash in most countries – and the accompanying fee.

We’ve now imported the Landcruiser into four countries. Bentley has had his pink ‘passport’ stamped officiously in each country. we’ve paid ‘fines’ one of which was legitimate, all the others bogus. We got a traffic ticket in Nicaragua for driving the wrong way on a one way street. The $11 fine was well worth the escort we got which got us on the correct road south to the Costa Rican border. We were excused from the restrictions on importing watermelons into Costa Rica, as long as we promised to eat it north of Liberia. (It was delicious!)

The handsome young crook in the photo is Alex; he’s a smart kid, totally fluent in English and Spanish. He was quite helpful in getting us the appropriate stamps, signatures and getting past our problem of entering Honduras without the appropriate stamps in our passports. But we also suspect that he inflated the fees and set us up for a similar problem at the El Salvador exit. When we paid him, he insisted that he get most of the money out of sight of his partner, so that he only had to split a smaller amount.

You can see that this process is beginning to wear on us!

I’ll elaborate later, but to summarize, I can’t recommend that anyone make this trek without a very good command of Spanish and some guidance from those who have navigated the borders.

Our one night in Honduras was most magical. Stay tuned for the full story.

We’re now in the area of Canos Dulces, about 2 hours south of the Nicaragua/Costa Rica border. Spent two nights here getting some R&R after twelve days in the car. My spine has probably compacted a few inches and we were both pretty stiff. This resort, Hotel Borinquen, has natural hot springs, bubbling volcanic mud, a great swimming pool. This morning, we took Bentley and hiked up to a waterfall on the property. (The hotel has horseback and ATV tours, but a walk sounded a whole lot better to us!) Yesterday, we took the mud treatment. We look like different creatures when coated with gray mud. After rinsing off and a great massage, I felt cleaner than any day in the last 2 weeks.

Next, we’ll be moving on to the area of Los Inocentes, a national park known for its wonderful wildlife.