ODO: 323,410
Today we’re in the capital trying up some loose ends before we leave Honduras. Our list is short, but errands take three times as long down here. First stop, yarn. Google leads us into a very crowded market area where the rules of the road do not exist. Luckily all of our potential yarn stops are on the same road. Unfortunately they are all a bust. The stress of the market streets means we need a break, so lunch time it is! Hot tip: If you want a good salad bar, find an American chain restaurant. During our salad bar lunch a large storm rolls in and we lose power several times while eating. Several. Since yarn was a bust we move on to the next stop: alternator. We’re hoping a new alternator will fix our electrical gremlin. A yonke (junkyard) sells us a used one, fingers crossed. KoKo finds one more potential yarn place, so we head towards it on the way to our final task: shipping the drone to Panama. Nicaragua does not allow drones, so DHL ships a lot of them around Nicaragua. Most people ship to Costa Rica, but we don’t want to chance missing it at a hotel, so we send it to the company that will be shipping the truck to Colombia.
Our next yarn adventure is also a bust, the store doesn’t seem to exist, KoKo goes for a little walk down the street to see if she can find it. She stops to ask two ladies if they know where the store is. After attempting to get directions in Spanish, KoKo heads off in the right general direction. At her first turn (she was making the wrong one), one of the ladies comes running up to redirect her. And once again further down the road, at which point the lady asks if she can just lead the way. And she does. Across the VERY busy street, down the road, across a couple more streets and around a corner. About half a mile away from where KoKo first met her. She then waits and walks KoKo all the way back! The kindness of strangers is one of KoKo’s favorite things. Yarn acquired, we get the drone in the mail and drive through another crazy lightning storm towards the boarder. We’ve heard this is a rough border crossing so we want to start early. We find a hot springs resort where we can camp about an hour from the border. Shortly after we get set up, another storm knocks the power out for a little while and we get to see the fire flies. Berne hadn’t seen fire flies before this trip, so he’s double excited anytime we get to see them.
Boarder day….Nicaragua border day. As we pull up to check out of Honduras a swarm of very aggressive “helpers” surround the truck. Aggressive to the point where we don’t want to get out of the truck. Exiting Honduras is a very easy process, and requires no external help at all. Entering Nicaragua, not so much. We decide to use a helper to enter Nicaragua because there is only one guy, and he already helped us navigate around the long line of semi trucks also waiting to enter the country. Things start off very normal, we give documents to a person behind a desk, and they start typing away on a computer. And then the question that starts the problem: Do you have yellow fever vaccines? The answer is no, because you do not need this vaccine to enter Nicaragua from Honduras. In fact, you don’t need a yellow fever vaccine until half way through South America. Several times our helper asks us how much money we have, and how much we’re willing to pay, otherwise we will have to drive back a couple of hours into Honduras to get shots. We refuse to pay him, and continue with the border process.
All of our luggage (3 duffle bags and a backpack) are removed from the truck and taken inside for scanning. There is rumor that the truck may also have to go through a scanner, but the only upside of the “helper” so far is that he gets us out of this. Two separate people come by to inspect the cab of the truck and camper. And all the while our helper keeps checking in to see how much money we have to pay our way into the country. After going through the border process for more than three hours, we finally cave and hide a $100 bill in one of our passports. Our passport is given to an official, and we receive our medical clearance stamp. Our “helper” was very specific, the money was NOT a bribe….which we decided makes it institutional corruption since it involved actual border officials. This does not start us off feeling good about Nicaragua. On the bright side, the roads are great so far, and we find yarn right away. We drive for a handful of hours until we come across a delicious Italian restaurant for dinner. We had a beach spot picked out for the night, but it just keeps getting farther and farther away, so we end up in a terrible truck stop where a large dog scares KoKo. Sometimes it just needs to be a safe spot and nothing more, and this spot checks that barest of minimum boxes.
We are up and out very early, headed towards the beach. The highway is a beautiful tunnel of trees for a couple of miles. We make a quick stop to check out Ometepe, the island in Lago Cocibolca, the big lake in Nicaragua. The island is made of two volcanos, it’s quite the sight. Our early start gets us to the beach for breakfast. We find a nice place on the water, and enjoy a little bit of Nicaragua. Our shipping date is coming up, and on our check in today we discover we may need to move our ship date if we want to split the cost of a container with someone else. We can either pull it forward a week, if the people earlier than us are willing to wait a week, or, we can bump it back a week and hope the people later than us are willing to move forward a week to join us. We choose to pull our date forward a week…..Now we need to hustle.
It’s not far across Nicaragua, so we have arrived at the opposite border already. At the southern end of Nicaragua the “helpers” are official, with a uniform and much less hustle since they don’t work for tips. Once again they remove all our bags and take them for scanning, only this time, because no “bribe” is being paid, the truck also has to go through a scanner. Berne has a couple hours adventure going back and forth between different offices, getting different stamps, while KoKo sits behind the customs building waiting. With no bathroom, no water, and no book. After the first hour a friendly cats wanders by for pets. After another three hours we are out of Nicaragua, and five minutes after that we are in Costa Rica! The vibe is immediately more relaxed. Now that we’re on a schedule, we HAVE to make our planned camp spots. We drive until we arrive at a very fancy JW Marriot resort in norther Costa Rica. We are very grateful for all our hotel points, and the upgrades our high status get us! We make the most of our fancy night out/in and head to the hotel bar for a couple of drinks before having dinner delivered to our room.
Up early again, we get to see the ocean view we were upgraded to. Our room leads straight out to the private beach, so it’s time to enjoy the water! Our other good perk is ultra late check out at 4pm, so after our swim we order some lunch and settle in to do some work. We enjoy our luxury break until mid afternoon. It’s time to leave if we want to catch Bizarre Shirley’s (our lead on yarn) before it closes. And then its off to find a nice beach camp for the night. We try one that looks like a viewpoint, but the road is so steep we cant get going after we make a quick stop. Instead we head back down the hill to the last place we checked out and called it good for the night.
Today is a long day of driving. That is what’s ahead of us from now until we put the truck in a container. The yarn we bought yesterday is kind of cheap and crappy, but on the outskirts of San Jose there is an actual yarn store! We haven’t seen one of these since Mexico. KoKo buys a much nicer ball of grey cotton. In a small town we find a nice beachfront restaurant with music that is much too loud, for dinner. Costa Rica is made of nice beach camping spots, it doesn’t take us long to find a good spot for the night.
Costa Rica is known for its amazing surf, and we wake up to discover we camped in the parking lot for one of these awesome surf spots. We are in a packed parking lot, so we get up and hit the road. The plan is just a short day of driving since the long days are getting to us. Pavones is a beach town that is some work to get to, tucked near the Panama border and down a pretty rough road. The town is small enough that we can only buy jug gas, haven’t seen that since Mexico! There are several amazing beach spots in this town, and after exploring all of them, we pick our favorite. Its a wide grassy spot right on the ocean with horses casually wandering through. And as soon as the sun goes down we have it all to ourselves.
And just like that, it’s time to cross another border. On our way in, we may have forgotten the Baja rule of “fill up when you get to half a tank”, and gotten to our spot last night on empty. Lucky thing we have the spare gas tank! Unfortunately we forgot to fill it back up last time we used it. But luckily we wont have to dump out 5 gallons of gas when we load the truck on the container next week, and double luckily the jug gas gas station is able to give us enough to get back to a big gas station. We get all our meetings done along the side of the road where we can see the Panama border. Leaving Costa Rica is easy, and entering Panama is also quite easy. Nicaragua has scarred us. As we pass though a large town we stop for groceries on our way to Panama camp spot #1: Los Cagilones de Gualaca. It’s a small canyon and swimming hole, and very quiet for the night.
