Bienvenidos a Nicaragua

Sunday, 9 July

After leaving San Jose Monday evening (July 3) in a torrential downpour (this seems like the norm when I visit San Jose these days!), we traveled Northwest on the PanAmerican highway back to Puntarenas, and then on toward Liberia. We stopped for dinner at the bottom of the mountain below Monteverde at the new Monteverde Cheese Coop Restaurant – quite the place (it is probably the nicest, cleanest restaurant along the entire PanAmerican Highway!), and it has good pizza too! We got into Liberia about 7:30pm, and found a non-descript hotel for $30 per night; kind of a Costa Rican “Motel 6” or “ETAP.” Clean, simple, w/ AC, and only 6 blocks from the Registro Nacional offices. In the morning we had our first piece of good luck. As I was checking out of the hotel, I asked the desk clerk if she knew the location of the Libraria Rebaco (a book & stationary store), which I had been told sold some blank forms that I needed to take to the Registro Nacional. As it happened, her farther, who was sitting there drinking his coffee, happened to own the Libraria! And it was only 4 blocks away, and opened an hour before the Registro. Perhaps the stars were starting to align…

After getting the forms (a set of “Certificados Literales”), Dan & I got some breakfast at a little open air restaurant just off the main square and waited for the Registro to open at 9:00. Oddly enough, the Registro is located in an office enclosed in the Banco Costa Rica (this is equivalent to the county clerk’s office being located inside a main branch office of CitiBank or Bank of America). As was typical, a line formed outside the bank long before the 9:00am opening; this was exacerbated by it being a Monday, and apparently there had been a bomb threat at another bank in town the previous week. So it took about 10 minutes to get in side, and after passing through the security check, I got to the office of the Registro Nacional. The clerk was very nice, and informed me that I also needed copies of my vehicle title, so out the door I went in search of a copy shop across the street. Back through the line, this time I needed a set of stamps called “timbres,” available from another vendor across the street. After my third time in line, seeing that I also wanted my “permiso” to be valid in Panama as well as Nicaragua, I was informed I needed another type of certificado literate called a “boleta,” so out again I went, back to the Libraria. This time, it appeared everything was in order; the clerk actually applauded! Even bureaucrats sometimes see the humor in the ridiculous hoops they make ordinary people jump through;-) After signing a half dozen forms, and getting everything dually stamped & notarized and leaving a set of copies for their records, we were ready to go. “Nicaragua or bust!” I said to Dan as we climbed into the truck; and I hoped sincerely those words would not prove prophetic…

Central American border crossings do not have a great reputation in terms of their speed, or ease of transit. There seems to be the general opinion that if you “wanted to enter the country easily, you should have flown into the airport.” Borders are somehow an old fashioned nuisance and seem primarily reserved for truck traffic. Clearly no one at the chamber of commerce has considered the impression crossing one of these borders has on the typical tourist! It isn’t as though there is the foreboding that used to be present at borders between eastern & western Europe. There doesn’t seem to be a real effort to find “bad” people or catch smugglers, it is mostly just confusing. One doesn’t just drive up to the border crossing booth like most places and have a Customs official examine your documents. No… you arrive at a set of unidentified buildings with cars and trucks parked haphazardly about on every spare inch of semi-level ground, and many people wandering around somewhat aimlessly (the sheep) in search of where to go. Scattered among the sheep are a small number of well organized but entirely unofficial “helpers” or “expediters” (the wolves). If you are among the lucky sheep, you will only be slightly fleeced by the wolves, as they guide you through the maze of lines to acquire your exit stamp in your passport, and your approval stamp on your vehicle’s Permiso documents. They will also help you get more photocopies to leave at the appropriate stops. In our case this cost $21 per person. My guess is there is too much opportunity to use the border as a revenue generation opportunity- it’s actually a thriving cottage industry. Live & learn we decided; and this was just the Costa Rican side of the border!

After the Costa Rican side, you drive across about half a kilometer of no-man’s land and reach the Nicaraguan frontier. First you have to drive through a fumigation booth that sprays your car to kill whatever it may have picked up in Costa Rica (I think this is for Hoof & Mouth Disease), for which they charge you about a dollar. The Nicaraguans (Nico’s) then at least have a few signs identifying a building that all cars need to visit. Here we were greeted by the Nico expediters, who tried to convince us we needed their help again. This time I refused; actually I was out of cash, so I didn’t have a whole lot of choice! I at least knew I needed to enter the building in front of me and I figured once inside there was a reasonable chance I could figure it out. Fortunately, inside the building was a desk manned by a wonderful staff person from the Nicaragua Ministry of Tourism. I wish I had written the man’s name down, because someone should give him a raise, or a promotion, or both! He explained everything I needed to do (buy Nicaraguan insurance for the truck ($12), get a Nicaraguan version of my truck’s Permiso ($2), get an inspection of the truck and our bags by a policeman (free!), and get a tourist card with the entry stamp in our passports ($5); best of all, he charged no fee, so I tipped him 50 cordobas (about 2.50)) he then even made us a hotel reservation in Granada a a place that turned out to be fantastic.

All went well with the recommended tasks until the person examining my truck’s documents noticed that one document said the truck was blue (the title), while another document (the registration) said it was beige. She asked to look at the truck. Sure enough, it isn’t blue, it’s beige (with a teal green stripe). Sorry- “No es posible a permiso entrar en Nicaragua” she says. I managed to decipher all this (NO isn’t too difficult to figure out), and haltingly get out in my Spanish that I don’t know why the document says it is blue, but the VIN number and engine numbers all match- that’s what’s important, right? Fortunately, the policeman who signs the final approval on the paperwork was watching the whole episode unfold, and asked to look at the documents. He looks out the window at the truck. He then says (as best I could translate) “Well, there are many shades of blue, perhaps the person who completed the original title document felt this color was among them.” Almost everyone in line began to laugh, and the clerk making the fuss even decided this was pretty funny, so ultimately, everything got stamped, notarized, sealed, etc. again, and finally, after about 2 hours at the border, we were officially and legally in Nicaragua!

Our first destination in Nicaragua was Grenada, the oldest colonial city in the western hemisphere. To get there, we crossed about 80km of picturesque countryside, mostly lush, tropical ranchland or rice paddies along the edges of Lago Nicaragua. Like the Great Lakes between the US and Canada, Lago Nicaragua is BIG, so big, you can’t see the other side. There were 3’ breakers blowing in onto the western shore as we drove north along the coast. Unlike the Great Lakes, Lago Nicaragua also sports a couple of volcanoes in the middle of the lake, at least one of which is active. It is also the home to the world’s only freshwater sharks (the lake is connected to the Caribbean Sea by the Rio San Juan, and I guess the sharks swam up and adapted to the lake). We saw the volcanoes, but I can’t say as we saw any sharks!

As we approached Granada, signs of Nicaragua’s poverty became more evident, as many of the houses (if one can really call them that) along the road were little more than one or two room, dirt floor, mud-brick huts with rusty corrugated steel roofs. Chickens, pigs, and cows roamed freely in the road (now I know what that big brush guard on the front of my truck is really for!), and the odor of burning garbage and waste mingled with the heavy tropical air. Over the past several years I have heard a number of complimentary accounts from travelers visiting Granada; several favorably compared it to a smaller version of Havana, Cuba, with its historic architecture gracefully suffering from a certain salutary neglect. I was optimistic after these reports, but not at all prepared to find Grenada in the midst of a small tourism & restoration boom! While Nicaragua clearly still struggles with chronic poverty and the lingering effects of the long civil war (hostilities between Contras & Sandinistas officially ended only in 1990 ), Grenada’s heritage tourism boom offers a light of hope for the region. Costa Rica, which in my opinion has neglected its built and cultural heritage in its efforts to capitalize on ecotourism, could learn a few things from Grenada’s example too. Over an area of perhaps 20 or 30 blocks, Grenada’s historic Spanish grid is lined with superb examples of small scale shops and houses (many meticulously restored and maintained), interspersed with grander structures (such as the nearly completely restored 16^th century cathedral) at important intersections or facing onto the Parque Central. Good hotels, restaurants, cafes, and interesting shops abound in a wonderfully walkable atmosphere that is both comfortable and, at least in the center of the city, safe from most crime.

We arrived at the old center of Grenada in mid afternoon, and easily found and checked into our hotel. We stayed at the Hotel Patio del Malinche, which I heartily recommend to any other trevelers, located just a few blocks off the Parque Central. The entry onto the street is very unassuming, however, the interior and its courtyards are beautifully restored examples of Spanish colonial architecture. A new wing with very well designed veranda, patio and pool have been added recently, and our room was in this section. After getting settled, Dan and I wandered the streets of the old city until dark, and then headed back to our hotel for a swim before dinner. While we relaxed by the pool with a local Cerveza Victoria, the entire city went dark- apparently a complete power failure. Our hotel owner soon appeared with emergency lights and assured us this was typical, nothing to be worried about. As he later explained, electrical power generation and distribution in Nicaragua is provided by a private Spanish company which is currently in the midst of a dispute with the Nicaraguan government. The preferred method of negotiation to resolve the dispute seems to be a kind of tit-for-tat brinksmanship. Each day, all the lights go out at a slightly different time, usually for several hours in the morning, then for about an hour each evening. I’m told during these periodic blackouts they then sell the unused power to Costa Rica at a nice profit! Perhaps the Spanish are trying to capture a particular bureaucrat in an elevator and get him to blink and finally pay their bill… “Quien sabe,” as they say here (who knows!). By the time we headed out to look for a place for dinner, many stores and restaurants had lights running by generators or had simply lit candles all over the place.

In the morning we got up early and walked around taking photos of busy streets with children in uniforms heading for school, men on bicycles heading to work, and the general bustle of a city coming to life for the day. After a few hours wandering and a little shopping (prices for all kinds of things were very reasonable!), we packed up, checked out of our hotel, and headed out to our next destination, a day at the beach in San Juan del Sur, just shy of the Costa Rica border. Unfortunately, Dan needed to be back in Monteverde by Thursday evening. So off we headed in good spirits and under sunny skies.

San Juan del Sur is reputed to be one of the up and coming destinations for tourism in Nicaragua. It has a booming residential real estate market, driven, just as in Costa Rica, by adventurous Americans and Europeans looking for a California beach house on the cheap. While the prices in San Juan del Sur are probably a bit less, my advice for those considering a central American beach home is: stick to Costa Rica. San Jaun del Sur has all the right physical characteristics—a gorgeous crescent of beach, about half a mile long, between two rugged headlands providing a nice protected harbor for boats. All this with a small village nestled below a ring of rugged, tropically vegetated hills with great views out over the bay and ocean beyond, complete with envy inducing daily sunsets. Unfortunately there is another side to the coin; the same poverty that, while present but not overpowering in Granada, is much more evident here in San Juan del Sur. Even with all the sprawling gringo mansions and condos springing up on the hillsides around the town, very little economic benefit seems to be trickling down to the average Nico resident. In similar boom towns in Costa Rica, every able bodied male seems to be employed building things, to the point where many travel significant distances to supply the labor needed. Here unemployed homeless vagrants and panhandlers seemed to be everywhere, sleeping on the beach, even wandering in to shops and restaurants to pester the patrons. And unlike many places, these people weren’t the old, or the physically or mentally handicapped, but able-bodied young men in their teens and twenties who seemed to have decided hustling a living at the beach suited them. While poverty and behavior like this exists in many places around the world, here there seemed to be an unspoken threat in the eyes of many faces: “you’d best give me some money, or if you aren’t careful, I’ll just take it.” Perhaps we just got a bit more exposure than average gringo as we stayed in one of the less expensive hotels along the central beachfront, as opposed to in one of the pricey gated and secured resorts at the edges of the town. Needless to say, when we left on Thursday morning, we were happy to be heading home and counting our blessings that neither Dan nor I had managed to get pick-pocketed or worse.

While we were happy to see San Juan del Sur in our rear-view mirror, I can’t say we really looked forward to the border crossing to get back into Costa Rica a half hour down the road. A certain sense of foreboding seemed to gather as we approached the frontier, complete with the obligatory black cloud on the horizon. About a kilometer from the border, it started to rain, complete with a few strikes of lightning! This time, I figured we could manage without the “expeditors,” and aside from needing to wander around finding a place to get yet another photocopy of one of our documents, we got everything taken care of in Nicaragua in only about 20 minutes. Much easier in this direction! After going through the fumigation again, on to Costa Rica… We drove along a narrow section of highway lined with trucks and no signs or directions through the no-man’s land again, and then passed through the customs check point where the officer glanced in the back of the truck and pronounced us fit to proceed. We then drove another kilometer or so… and we were in Costa Rica! Unfortunately, something was too easy, and we hadn’t gotten our passports stamped with entry stamps. We stopped at one of the many police checks along the PanAmerican highway about a kilometer later and asked about our passports and if this was a problem. The policeman rather emphatically directed us back to the border to get our passports stamped! Somehow in the snarl of parked trucks we had missed the appropriate driveway that lead to the building with the Immigration authorities in it. This time, however, once we found the building, I knew where to go, and what line to stand in, and avoided the extortionary expeditors. In less than 5 minutes we had our passports stamped and ready to go. Home, sweet home, Costa Rica- Pura Vida!

On the way home, we stopped for a detour at Liberia to do some shopping at the big “Do It Center” hardware store near the airport. Most hardware stores in Costa Rica, like those in the US fifty years ago or more have a front counter and then shelves stocked with everything from screws and nails to power tools receding into the back of the store. If you want something, you ask the shop clerk for what ever it is, and they go find it. This is fine if you know precisely what you need, including its exact size, color, thread pitch, etc., in Spanish. While my Spanish vocabulary is increasing daily, asking for many things is almost impossible, and often in Monteverde, even if they know what I’m asking for they don’t have it anyway. Eye bolts larger than 1/8” in diameter, for example, just can’t be had… Well, the “Do It Center” is the Costa Rican equivalent of Home Depot, and they had almost everything. Plus it is all laid out warehouse style, so if you're not sure what you are after, you can just browse until you do.... Curtain rods, check; screw eyes, check; small barbeque, check; even comfortable pillows, and a pasta ladle!

The other excuse for heading 20 kilometers out of the way of the PanAm highway was to keep going another 5 kilometers to the Playa Hermosa catfish farm for lunch. While visiting in March we discovered this place and ate there several times it was so good! Fish tacos similar to Baja style with sort of a Louisiana Creole sauce… mmmm! I then drove the remaining 5 kilometers into Playa Hermosa to show Dan what a beach on the Pacific should look like, without feeling like you should have someone watching your back all the time. It took about 30 seconds for Dan to decide next time he went to the beach, this was the spot for him!

After an uneventful ride back down the PanAm highway we arrived safe and sound in Monteverde. The car performed flawlessly, and after filling the tank with fuel, we calculated our trip mileage at an amazing 32 miles to the gallon! Not bad for a car almost as big as a Chevy suburban (it seats 9). I guess the engine overhaul did actually get done, and it seems to have been done pretty well. Even with a diesel that’s remarkably efficient for a car with approximately 120,000 miles on it. With luck, it’ll run just as well when we set out for Panama at the end of August.

Well that’s about all for this week. The past two days I’ve spent installing curtains, and other chores to get ready for Norma and Niall to arrive on Wednesday. I’m really looking forward to them getting here and having a family around the house! To finish up this post, I can also add one new animal sighting, which I managed just today on a nice walk to Las Nubes (about 8km north of here): a “tayra” or a “tolumuco” is the local common name. A tayra is a BIG member of the weasel family, sort of like a fisher or otter. My first reaction was that it almost looked big enough to be a wolverine! It was about a meter long, and they weigh as much as 10-15 pounds. The one I saw was grayish brown with fairly long fur, and he crossed the road only about 10 meters in front of me about a kilometer from our house. Pretty cool!

More from Monteverde after Norma and Niall get here…