On the Run

Hello again! It´s hot, hot, hot here and I hear that it´s below zero in a lot of parts of the U.S. How are we all on the same planet? I just got back from Nicaragua on Thursday night so I have a lot to share, so get a drink and a snack before you start reading this! Actually, the keyboard I am on is a bit uncooperative, so it might not be that much after all.

In Costa Rica, as with a lot of Central American countries, when you enter the country, you are automatically given a 90 day visa to stay in the country. After 90 days, you have to leave the country for 72 hours and then return so as to renew your visa. People who live here call it doing a "visa run." I didn´t actually have to go on mine until January 1st, but the town will be absolutely packed by then, so I figured it would be easier now. I went with two of my neighbors, one from the states, one from Germany, and we decided to go up to Nicaragua (the other obvious choice being Panama). Another neighbor from El Salvador also went with us, but left us and kept heading north after we stopped in Nicaragua. He had been in Costa for a month or so and decided to go back home.

We left Monday morning, caught the 630 AM direct bus to San Jose (about $12, we got ripped off because that´s the price to go all the way to San Jose, which we weren´t doing). From Mal Pais (where I am, in case you haven´t been paying attention to all the Spanish names), the bus took us to Paquera, on the eastern side of the peninsula. From there we took a ferry to Puntarenas, a port down across the gulf, got back on the bus, got off up the hill from Puntarenas at a little cross roads called Barranca. Then we caught a bus north to Penas Blancas, Nicaragua. As we stepped off the bus at the border town, we were bombarded with guys waving handfuls of money in our faces. "Cambio! Cambio! Cambio!" they yell, as your trying to successfully get off the bus, hold onto your money and guard your pockets, and collect your bags from underneath the bus. It´s a little overwhelming, but not nearly as bad as it is in some places, like some airports in Mexico that I´ve been through. Nicaragua uses the cordoba, which is an easy conversion from the dollar, 20 cordobas is one dollar. Costa Rica uses the colone, which I´m not a huge fan of. It fluctuates all the time and is worthless anywhere else. The exchange rate goes anywhere from 525 to 580 for the dollar. I never really know how much I´m spending in dollars, unless I do the actual equation. It´s all rough estimation. Anyway, we changed a little bit of money, thinking we would just go to the bank in San Juan del Sur the next day.

We entered a little building, filled out a piece of paper, got our passports stamped, then walked across the border to Nicaragua. It´s kind of a funny experience, you walk down this little dirt road, come to a hut on the side of the road, show your passport again, and then again at another one, fill out another piece of paper, pay $7, an then you´re in Nicaragua! It feels simultaneously monunmental and yet so trivial. I was so excited to be another country, but borders are always a little bit of a let down because there´s nothing immediately different, and you end up thinking, "What was the point?"

So then we got a cab up to San Juan del Sur, a little colonial town on the coast of Nicaragua. We drove right next to Lake Nicaragua, which is HUGE!, and has a volcano island sitting right in the center of it. Next trip, I´m definitely going there! The landscape reminded me a lot of Cuba, something that I kept feeling throughout our trip, so of course I took a shine to the country immediately. As we drove out of the border, we passed miles and miles of semi trucks lined up on the road, waiting to cross. They were from all over Central America and they wait for days to cross the border! It seems like such a waste of time and money that I wonder what they are transporting that the receiving country couldn´t just make or grow it themselves (cocaine? people?). We also passed huge wind turbines, so yay for wind energy! There is a strong wind that comes off the lake, as Marcilena kept saying, "Offshore winds means barrels at the beach!" (She´s a really good surfer, and has only been doing it for 11 months!). Anyway, we got into town, checked into our hostel, and set out for dinner. Dinner, yes, because it took us roughly 14 hours to travel approxiamately 300 kilometers. Efficiency in transportation is a huge theme in Central America, can you tell? But Nicaragua actually has paved roads! And I mean really paved. Smooth asphalt, light reflectors, and painted lanes! Joe guessed, and this sounds good to me, that it´s probably because they have an army, so easy and quick travel is not only important, but probably in their national budget.

The town is a lot more touristy than I would have thought, but really cool, colorful, and I could definitely see the colonial influence. They were having a huge festival there, I´m still not sure what it was in honor of, but something very Catholic. All the little girls were dressed up in very fancy white dresses with gloves and white shoes for their First Communion. There were religious floats and statues and a marching band that played all. night. long. On the hill above the town there is a monstrous statue of the Virgin Mary, I guess as an imitation of the famous statue they have in Brasil. Is that where it is?

So that night we had some inexpensive Nicaraguan rum and beer and explored the town a little bit. The next day we walked around, went shopping, because everything is cheaper than in Costa Rica, swam a little bit, and went out to explore the bar scene again. We also found out that the banks weren´t open because of the holiday, so our bank accounts dipped a little as our wallets were still full of useless colones. We figured the next day we would be able to exchange them for Nicaraguan cordobas. Well, the next day, we discovered that the banks in Nicaragua do not change colones, despite the fact that we not that far from the border. Apparently there is a little bit of tension between the Ticos and the Nicas, so they don´t want to accept Tico money anywhere. So we had to get into a cab and pay $20 to drive to Rivas, a town farther north, to find a street money changer in order to get rid of our colones! Rivas is a really cool, busy town that feels like little Tijuana or something because of all the markets and street vendors. It was so different than our village in Costa Rica! And we got a few lessons in the politics of Central America. There are a lot of illegal Nicas living in Costa Rica because they earn twice the money doing half the work. The Nicas think that the Ticos are lazy and don´t want to work out in the fields or in construction or any manual labor. So basically, the Nicas do all the jobs the Ticos don´t want to do. Sound familiar yet? Every country has their version of Mexican immigrants. As a side note, because I bought a newspaper while we were in Rivas, the newspapers here show everything. In the states we don´t really show gruesome pictures, not even dead bodies, or bloody injuries. Remember the newspaper that got in trouble for having pictures of Virginia Tech students being carried out of classrooms after the shooting? Well, here, car crashes, shootings, drunk driving, they show it all. It´s a little hard to get used to, but maybe I´m just an oversensitive American.

Anyway, because it takes a full day to get there and back, we only had those two full days in San Juan del Sur. The trip on the way back was even longer, partially due to the fact that we were stopped three times in one hour by police checking for illegals on our bus! At one of the checkpoints, I also saw them looking in the back of a transport truck for people hiding in there. They are really serious about illegals here, although not so serious that some dollars might be a good replacement for a legal passport stamp.

In a about a week Mal Pais will be bombarded with Ticos from all over the country on Christmas vacation. There is a huge festival going on here, supposedly in order to raise money for paving the road in January, and they expect 20,000 people to show up between December 22 and January 4! This is a town of a population of about 700 locals. The beaches are going to be packed to the gills with campers. Where is all their trash going to go, where is everyone going to go to the bathroom. I think it´ll be a lot of fun, but at the same time, the town is going to be destroyed after they leave! If anyone is still reading, I hope you´re staying warm and enjoying the holidays!