Passports please

Border crossings are normally an inconvenience that are just a part of trouble, however we were actually looking forward to the border crossing from Costa Rica to Nicaragua.  We had decided to go the less travelled route where the crossing involves a beautiful boat trip down a river, with a quick stop at an aquatic border post.  Unfortunately about a year ago they built a bridge across the river, so you can now take the bus.  Locals are very much in favour of the bus route and on arrival in Los Chiles we discovered the boat is nowhere near as reliable as it used to be.  Depending on who we spoke to the boat would arrive at 11am, 12pm, not until tomorrow and leave anywhere between 1pm and 4pm today or tomorrow.  We sat by the river watching tour buses arrive and all the tourists transfer to boats for tours down the river and debated what we should do.  Eventually we decided we would rather get across the border, than wait on a boat that may not arrive (it was 12pm on a Sunday by this point, so it wasn’t looking good).  We put our packs back on and traipsed to the other side of town where the bus stop is.  Here the confusion continued.  We struck up a conversation with a couple of locals, and after awhile they suggested we should just go with a car rather than wait for the bus given the price should be the same.  Jason went to find out the price from one of the taxis, only to be quoted four times the price we had been told it should cost.  Refusing to pay that high a gringo tax we went back to waiting.  However the taxi driver started talking about how the border would close at 4pm, and the bus wasn’t coming for another two hours.  After a bit more of a discussion with the friendly locals we kept to the wait for the bus plan and I enjoyed helping one of the locals with his German in anticipation of an upcoming trip to visit his brother who lives there. 

The bus did come, after approximately one hour of waiting and we were on our way.  The border post, was a few demountable buildings and a bit more confusion.  The first official wrote down our details in a notebook and looked in 3 of our 4 bags before waving us on.  We then had to figure out how to pay the departure tax as it involved using an atm machine without any instructions in English.  After a few attempts and asking for help, we discovered the trick was to slowly insert the credit card then quickly remove it - one of the few combinations we hadn’t tried!

After this things simplified, but still involved way more officials than I would think needed given we had to show about 10 people our passports on the way through.  It’s always amazing how things change when you’ve only walked a few steps.  In Costa Rica they don’t actually have a standing army, the first person we saw in Nicaragua was a soldier with a rifle.  We have seen so many armed troops, not to mention security guards sitting near atms with shotguns.  Then there was the evidence that we were on the drug smuggling highway, with frequent bag searches and having to provide our documentation to every third person (including 3 times on one boat trip).  It will be interesting to see how things change once we are on the other side of the country away from the drug smuggling route.