Yeah, it was a run all right. Our 90 day tourist visa expired last Wednesday. We have to leave the country every 90 days to renew our visa. We had talked to lots of different people who have been doing this for years in order to live in Costa Rica legally without having residency. Lots of people, lots of different answers. We also talked to a legitimate and highly recomended lawyer, who said this was legal. Leave the country and then you can come back in a few hours. Lots of people kept telling us you have to stay out of the country for 72 hours, that is a myth. You have to stay out that long if you are wanting the little card that allows you to purchase $500 worth of duty-free items per passport upon returning to Costa Rica. So, our plan was to go to Nicaragua, get our passports stamped, eat our lunch we packed, browse a little bit, then cross back over. PLAN I say. We knew going in that there could be a million variations of what ifs.
We left early last Wednesday hoping to be at the border between 10 and 11, get our stuff done, cross back over in the afternoon, stay the night in a town that was on our way home that is on the beach, and then get up Thursday morning and head back home. The kids were amazing in the car. They were quiet. They slept. They played quietly. Quite the little troopers actually.
Look close in this picture and you will see that, yes, we
are driving on the wrong side of the road and there is
a car coming .
And if you look really close at this picture you will
see the 18 wheelers ahead, 5 miles of them to be exact.
They are ALL in line to cross the border into
Nicaragua.
David read online that you are to not wait in line with these truckers but are to pass them and go to the front of the line. Because these truckers, literally, wait for days in line to cross the border. They apparently inspect every truck that goes through, and they are not in any hurry or have any system of organization.
We finally made it to the border at 10:45. Border crossing from Nicaragua was like going from night to day. You know organization to utter chaos. As soon as we made that crossing there were people everywhere following our van, running towards our van, yelling at the van telling us they can help us. Had to stop for the "officials" to open car doors, look in the car, sign a piece of paper, look at everyone's passports, and say we can proceed forward. Where do you proceed forward to? There are no signs, no lines, no lanes, just people everywhere. Chaos is the only way to describe it. We finally get to checkpoint B, getting the car sprayed for bugs. You have to pay for this. Well, they did not want our Costa Rican money. They wanted American Dollars or Nicaraguan money. Well, there were numerous unofficial money changers stalking ready to exchange money. Who could find the official place to exchange money? Who knows if we got ripped or not. David exchanged some money, paid the car debugger, and we were able to moved forward about 25 feet. Now where do we go? All this time the car chasers have not relented. David finally caves and lets a guy show us where to go, knowing this will cost some sort of fee. And when you agree they are like leeches who do not leave. We stop at a building to get the paper signed for the okay on the dog. Then that paper had to be taken to another little room, where another person (which half of these people do not look "official") signs something, go to another building to pay a small fee. Then we finally find a place where we can park the car, that is in a common central area of all these buildings. It is blazing hot here too!! David gets out of the car to go see what kind of lines we are going to be standing in. DOORS LOCKED! As soon as he walks away from the car, there are people yelling at us through the windows telling us they will watch the car, pasting signs to my windows advertising for this and for that, kids trying to sell things, people banging on the windows because now I am ignoring them, kids trying to open our sliding glass windows on the back of the van. And in all of this chaos, trying to look like this is normal, I lose sight of the direction where David has gone. We waited and we waited and we waited for what seemed like over an hour. David says it was not that long, but when you are in a car with 4 small children and all of that is going on around you and there is nothing official looking about the entire thing, it seems like an eternity.
He is gone so long, I finally feed the kids some lunch meat I had packed to make sandwiches (all the bakeries in Atenas were out of good bread, so we thought we would just stop at a bakery along the way...well, we never came across one). So, we had a lunch of some lunch meat and a piece of cheese and finished off the water we had brought. David finally returns looking very exasperated, that is saying a lot for my husband who is not easily ruffled. In that time he was gone he has been to building after building, little room here and down the hall, has now exchnaged more money (because he ran out of the first batch), and it appears we are only half done.
Bathroom break time now that he has returned and the fact that I do not want to stay in the car any longer and the kids are getting antsy. Open the car doors and more people flocking, you can barely get out of the car and get the kids because they are that persistant and are right there in your space. We give a guy some money to "watch our car," that is in a very public parking lot. Some of you may be getting bored with this, but you just had to be there and this is nothing in length compared to the real thing. And I am just now getting to the good part ; )
We make it to the bathroom.
You are kidding me?????
I notice these 50 gallon drums of nasty water when we walk into the bathroom and chose to ignore them. I gave Olivia very strict instructions on making sure she used all those muscles in her little legs to hover and not dare touch a thing, not even the toilet paper. We have our own...well, a good thing, because as usual there wasn't any there anyways. By the way, we had to pay for usage of these facilities. While I am standing waiting for her to come out of the stall I notice that the girl in the stall beside her goes to this drum of water, grabs the milk jug with the cut off top, dips it in the nasty water, bails it into the toilet a couple times, then flushes toilet. There are no flushers either. You have to stick your hand in the tank and pull on the lever inside the tank. All that said, I will let you decide wether you think I flushed this time or not. And if you know me, I am one who flushes public toilets with my foot.
Okay, bathroom event completed. Now we have to go pay some more fees, get more pieces of paper that have to be taken to about three different places, for someone to look at it, to send you to another little room, so you can pay another little fee. Finally we are to the point where we can acutally get our passports stamped!!!! So, we go wait in that line! Finally, almost 3 hours after crossing the border we have our passports stamped. Like I said before, our plan was to go somewhere eat our lunch, walk around a little and then start the process to exit. David turns to the guy who has "helped" us get everything done and asks him, "How soon can you "help" me get out of here and back to Costa Rica?" The guy had to make a few phone calls to some "people" and then he told us we could drive down the road a bit and head back in about a half hour. So, he gets in the car with us, we stop to get some drinks, and then drive down the road a bit and stopped right in front of one of the world's largest lakes.
When you fly to Costa Rica you can see this from the plane and it looks like it is the ocean it is so big. Our "helper" has lots of family who lives along this lake. While we are passing the 1/2 hour of time he tells us he has been "working" at the border since he was 9 years old. He probably started out like one of the little boys who was trying to open the window of the van. This is a country with so many people in huge desperate need. They come to Costa Rica for a better life of working for $2-3 an hour with the cost of living almost double that of the United States, because even that is still better than the hopes that you might make $3-5 a day in Nicaragua, if you can even find work at all.
Our "Helper"
From the minute we crossed the border all you could see was extreme poverty. I saw no schools. Children were roaming or working at the border crossing.
Notice the girl's shoes are several inches too small
Makes your heart hurt
So much of the world is this.....
Our "helper" made a few more calls after he and David went over all the fees we were going to be paying to get out and back to Costa Rica. David is out of all the money he brought, I hand him over the part I had, and tell him that is it. This is all we brought. Everthing all straight, we know what the "official" fees are and what the "tip" fees are that I am sure were divided between multiple people on the official side and non-official side. At this point we do not care. It is $75 and as far as we are concerned money well spent. We head back, get in line. Funny, but we realized there were a new crew of guys...well, we must have been waiting for shift change. We made it through the lines, sign-offs, and fees paid. OUT!!!!!!
Drove a few hundred meters, went in the immigrations office in Costa Rica to get our 90 day tourista stamp. Back when we flew into Costa Rica we had to have bus tickets to show that we had a route of exit in 90 days. Well, we didn't travel by bus for this 90 day trip. But David had called the guy who booked the bus tickets and asked him if we could push it out 90 days. He said that wouldn't be a problem. So thankful David did that and printed them, because they asked for them at the immigrations office. FINALLY!! We are done.
We made a stop a few miles down the road for a bathroom stop. I can't spare you the details because then you wouldn't get the full effects of this day. Again, we always have our own TP. David headed in first while us girls were still getting out of the car. When i can hear my husband talking to the boys about the conditions of the bathroom I know it is bad...REAL bad. Yep!! I walked to a stall that had rat poo all over the toilet, floor, everywhere. I know, bad. You are thinking go somewhere else. But there was no where else until we got to where we were staying. We were in the middle of no where at the border. No where to just go. I didn't even have to give Olivia the spill this time, she said, "My legs are not going to get tired this time. NO WAY!" She goes back to the car with David. I am holding Leia up, and I soon feel warm wetness going into my shoe and hear David trying to start the van. Yes, in my attempts to hold Leia in a 90 degree angle over the toilet, it just didn't go where it was supposed to : ) I didn't care, it was far better than the alternative. No running water in this bathroom. Thankfully I had a pair of flip flops in the car to change shoes, because I didn't want to rinse them with the 1/2 cup of drinking water we had left. You know since our car won't start and we are in the middle of no where in Costa Rica and a couple miles from the Nicaraguan border.
David calls our mechanic who has worked on the van. He is such a nice man. He told David I am coming. I will drive there and help. He is almost 5 hours away. It is now 3:30 in the afternoon and it gets dark at 6:00 pm here, pitch dark. There were a couple guys at the gas pump and I told David to see if they knew anyhting about cars. David under the hood is about like sending me to draw commercial building plans in AutoCad. The guys came over, pointed to something they thought it was. Mechanic calls David back and tells him to find someone to push the van and get it moving while David tries to start it. There is a TON of praying going on. Talk about scared to death we are going to be stranded here at dark. He tries that and it is not working. One of the guys that is helping us is trying to tell David something, but David isn't really understanding him. So, David tells him to get in the car and try. The man was able to finally get it going after several tries while they are pushing it across a parking lot. PRAISE THE LORD!!!!
Now our plan is to just get to where we are staying the night and not stop the car until we are there. We know we need to stop at this one main town to get something for us to eat. At this point we are all very stress, tired, and HUNGRY. David pulls into the parking lot of the Golden Arches that Leia spotted. She literally was asleep napping, opened her eyes, and said, "Go there, GO there. Mcdonalds. I see Mcdonalds." We had just come up on the intersection where there was a McDonalds (they are few and far between here). David pulls in and had said he was going to park, leave it running, take the boys to the bathroom, and then we would switch out, and then get our food to go. All that said, he parks, and then pulls out the key. Dead pan silence in the car. We both kinda smiled and said, "Better start praying while we eat inside."
We enjoyed our McDonald's and PRAYED!!! A LOT! Got in the car and it started right up. Thank you Lord were the words uttered from all of us. Olivia said, "God started our car." He was with us every step of the way.
That was our 3 month RUN. Just a little side note, we will be trying Panama next time, Lord-Willing. : )
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