Man, time flies in Costa Rica. It’s hard to believe I’ve been in Heredia for
more than a month now! Week one: lived
in a $16-a-night hotel while taking group Spanish classes with a retired man
from Asheville who liked to talk more than anyone else I’ve ever known. Weeks two and three: I’m not paying the
language school to spend hours listening to another Gringo try to speak
Spanish, so I took private lessons (fewer hours, same price, learned a whole
lot more) from Jesús, a wonderful teacher who reminds me of a skinny jeans-wearing
Joe Cherof. And I finally got moved in
with a family that Silvie, Caroline’s host mom, knows well. (picture below).
Week four: A group of Davidson students came on a spring break mission to paint the walls at Hogar Escuela in Heredia (picture below), so I brought them in at the airport and helped them. Week five: waiting on the bishop and/or Ryan to tell me when they need help, so looks like I have a few days off to blog, write postcards, figure out family travel plans, etc.
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| from left, Doña Adela, her mother Socorro, and their Nicaraguan helper/ cook/ cleaner/ friend Payita. I feel so lucky to be with them! |
Week four: A group of Davidson students came on a spring break mission to paint the walls at Hogar Escuela in Heredia (picture below), so I brought them in at the airport and helped them. Week five: waiting on the bishop and/or Ryan to tell me when they need help, so looks like I have a few days off to blog, write postcards, figure out family travel plans, etc.
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| These walls were completely blank when we started! |
Now for the adventure part.
For some reason (it seems to be very arbitrary depending on the customs
agent you get and which side of the bed they woke up on that morning), when I
arrived in Costa Rica, they only gave me a thirty day visa instead of the more
typical ninety days. Wasn’t a big
problem, I just figured once I got to Heredia, I’d go to the immigration office
and ask for an extension to ninety days, and then when my ninety days were close
to being up, I would go to either Panama or Nicaragua for a day, and then upon
reentry be issued a new ninety day visa that would last until my flight home. But things change. First, after experiencing in person the
difficulty of all things visa-related, Caroline (everyone in her study abroad
program is required to obtain a student visa), told me she didn’t think it was worth
the hassle and the long hours just to try to get an extension. Second, I did some calculations and realized
that from the last weekend my visa was still valid (the coming weekend), it was
only 88 days until my flight home, meaning that if I left and reentered Costa
Rica and got a 90 day visa, that would be the end of all my visa worries. So on Monday of my second week in Heredia, I
decided it made the most sense to leave the country that weekend. I had originally been leaning towards a beach
resort in Panama, but after doing a lot of research, it became clear that going
to Granada, Nicaragua was a better option in many ways.
I’ve learned something about myself from this trip: I LOVE
researching and planning trips. So I
spent hours consulting Trip Advisor, Lonely Planet, my host family, Jesús,
Google Maps, and internet travel forums in order to plan the best trip
possible. And here’s where the adventure
started. We decided to leave Thursday as
soon as Caroline’s class was over, at 4.
The problem was that we weren’t sure whether or not we could make it to
the bus station in San José by 5, when the direct bus left for Liberia, which was
the last bus we could possibly take if we wanted to make it to our adventure/volcano
hotel before it closed at ten. I know an
hour sounds like plenty of time to drive the six miles to San José, but the
rush hour traffic here is ridiculous. I had
to take three taxis that morning to buy our bus tickets and pick up an official
letter from the Episcopal church asking the immigration official to give me ninety
days, and out of my three drivers, only two thought we could make it… So anyways,
we had the taxi wait for us at the university, jumped in, and I offered him a
ten dollar tip if we made it to the bus station before 5, which was AWESOME for
the first three minutes – I think our driver thought maybe he’d get a better
tip if he was showy about it, so he channeled his inner Lightning McQueen and passed
everyone at 100 miles an hour on these little two lane roads in Heredia (100 is
obviously an exaggeration), but after a while it wasn’t fun anymore because it made
our heads and tummies hurt… BUT it
worked, and we got there in plenty of time to catch our double-decker bus. Wolfed down dinner at the ten-minute bus stop
break halfway through. Made it to
Liberia, the capital of the northwest province of Guanacaste, at 9:15, and
immediately took a taxi with the second most talkative person I’ve ever met in
my life, who told us all about Guanacaste and Granada, and we pulled up to our
hotel, Hacienda Guachipelin, at 9:59… phew. They had told me
they would wait for us if we were late, but it’s a gated property and you never
know in Costa Rica… |
| Celeste y Carolina |
This hotel is right outside the national park of Rincón de la
Vieja volcano, and is not just a hotel.
For more than a century, it’s been a cattle ranch (we decided to skip
out on the 5AM cow-milking demonstration – it was udderly too early for us),
and now it’s also the adventure center of Guanacaste province. We purchased the $85 all-day adventure pass,
so after a yummy breakfast buffet, the 20 or so tourists in our group set off riding
horses. It was Caroline’s first time on
a horse and she loved it! Her horse was
named Celeste (a shade of blue) and was hesitant to walk through the several
small rivers we crossed, while mine was named Canela (Cinnamon), and liked
being at the front! Because Celeste was
slow and usually in the back, I would pull back on the reins to make Canela stop
and wait for Celeste (and Caroline) to catch up, but as soon as I let off the
reins, Canela would run right back to the front again, a slightly terrifying experience the
first few times! It took us 45 minutes
to make it to the river, where we began a relaxing 5km tube ride.
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| Caroline upside-down on the zipline |
Next day we were up early again on the road back to Liberia
to catch a bus to Granada, Nicaragua.
Instead of trying to take a string of cheaper, shorter, local buses and
trying to navigate the border crossing on our own, we decided to pay $27 each to take the
luxury (meaning onboard bathroom) international bus, which speeds up the
border process and means you don’t have to know what’s going on because they tell you
what to do (or rather you can watch what everyone else does). Good thing too because even with guidance,
the border was the most chaotic thing I’ve ever seen; I cannot imagine trying
to get through by yourself (Lonely Planet understates it when writing that going
solo is for “more confident travelers”).
It was a constant stream of handing your passport and entry money to the
bus employee (kind of a scary thought), getting off the bus, waiting for your
passport, getting back on the bus, driving farther, getting back off the bus,
putting your luggage on a table, waiting there for twenty minutes for the
inspector to come by and tell you you’re good without so much as looking at
your luggage, all the while declining dozens of solicitations to buy things. It was just madness. And to complete the story, I even got ripped
off by the certified money changers, even though I had researched the exact exchange rate (it’s
usually given in dollars to córdobas, the Nicaraguan currency) that day to avoid getting ripped off. I walked up, told
the two guys I wanted the exchange rate to be 23.5 córdobas, and then gave them
20 mil (thousand) colones. So the dude
whipped out a calculator and typed in 23.5 x 20 = 470, and handed me 470
córdobas. Perfect. Back to the bus. And then I realized my mistake – I had asked
for the dollar exchange rate but paid in colones, meaning they only gave me
half of what I gave them, as 20 mil colones is 40 dollars! Another stupid Gringo falling for a classic
trick. By then it was too late, but hey,
at least I learned a lesson, and it just seemed to fit perfectly with the rest
of the border crossing…
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| This is a just a random church we passed on our way out... |
Now for Granada. Easily
the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen in my life. First of all, all the buildings are painted
fun colors. So each street block is a
different rainbow. The churches are also gorgeous – I had read about of a few of the most beautiful cathedrals in
Granada, and for a while I thought each new church we came to must be one of
them, until I realized that all the churches look like that… It was so
different than any city I’ve been in – in the rest of the cities down here, gates
and fences are ubiquitous (just about every single building has them), as are buses
and trucks (and diesel fumes), and crowds and people you might not want to be
alone with in a dark alley. In Granada,
none of the above. Well, that’s not 100%
true, there was a crowd gathered in the central park Saturday night for an
international poetry festival… Given Nicaragua’s legacy as Costa Rica’s poorer and
more troubled northern neighbor, it was surprising to feel even safer there
than in Costa Rica!
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| Oh Gioconda... |
Anyways, some good plannin, some bad planning... I knew we weren’t going to have much time
there, so I tried to pick the absolute best for our one afternoon and evening. Trip Advisor showed absolute rave reviews for
a tour guide named Gioconda, who gives tours wearing a traditional Nicaraguan
dress, and even sings traditional Nicaraguan songs! So we booked her for a brief tour of Granada,
but did not feel the “magic” others wrote of, and were embarrassed enough even
without her singing! Lesson learned –
anything that draws stares and attention to the fact that you are obviously a
tourist is not fun. But we did get to eat
lunch with her and sample traditional Nicaraguan food, including the vigorón,
featuring fried pork rinds. Did we like
it? Let’s just say we went with
international food for dinner…
Next we met up with tour guide Ramón and another couple from
Wyoming for an afternoon/ sunset tour of Las Isletas (the islets). Granada is right on the enormous Lake
Nicaragua, only a few miles up the shoreline from Mombacho volcano, which
created the 365 islands thousands of years ago with a huge blast! Some of the islands feature the mansions of
some of Nicaragua’s (and the world’s) wealthiest families, some are uninhabited,
one has an 18th century fort built to protect the city from pirates,
but here were our favorites: 1) we got off at an island (well, a peninsula really,
but it felt like an island) inhabited by natives, and one of the local ladies
prepared fresh local coconuts for us to drink the coconut water. The couple from Wyoming had brought rum
specifically to mix with the coconut water and shared it with us, so we all had
“cocos locos!” 2) There’s a small island with a population of four monkeys, who
are very hungry and have even been known to jump on the tour boats to snag some
food! 3) There were birds all over the place – we saw hundreds of egrets - but
one island in particular was so full of them it looked like they were just
growing on the trees. 4) MANGOS! There were even more mangos than birds, so
many that the locals don’t even bother to collect them all, so you can
literally just pick dozens right of the ground and eat them – and we did! Mmmmm.
At one point I joked about jumping to pick one off a branch 15 feet
high, and Ramón said “I’ll get that for you,” picked up a rock, and first try nailed
it right above the mango, making it fall so I could eat it! Turns out baseball is king is Nicaragua and
Ramón used to play…
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| Beautiful. |
And to top it all
off, the beautiful sunset between Mombacho volcano and the city. Wish we’d had more time in Granada! But Sunday morning we had to wake up very
early again to catch the bus back to San José.
Border was still a mess. I was a
little nervous about reentering and how many days they’d give me on my visa,
but we picked a friendly-looking guy and he gave us both 90 days, no problem,
not even looking at my letter from the church, nor requiring proof of onward
travel from Caroline! Phew, what a
weekend!
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