Costa Rica – San Jose and the Border

A final word on the Darien:  We messed up, and the two videos in the Darien post were not working for part of the day on which we published that post.  If you did not see a 49-second video of the mama harpy eagle on her nest, you missed the best part!  Here it is on youtube:  https://youtu.be/AZxttsPQATA

After the Darien, we planned to stay 10 days in San Jose, Costa Rica, despite all guidebooks suggesting we do anything but that.  On our flight from Panama City to San Jose, Peter sat next to a woman who could not believe that we were not going anywhere other than San Jose.  In our defense, we had been to Costa Rica in 2022 (described in an earlier post on this site), and on that trip we wisely skipped San Jose, flying into Liberia in the north instead, so we figured this would be something new to us.  And because it is at elevation, it would be much cooler than Panama.  We’re here to report that the guidebooks are right, there is no reason for a traveler to spend more than maybe a day in San Jose, and only then if you want to see a museum or two.  The Jade Museum was good, but I wouldn’t take a day out of a short vacation to see it. The other museum that is supposed to be good is the Gold Museum, but we skipped it as we had been to two gold museums in Colombia.  In general, Costa Rica is also very expensive.  Even the grocery store prices shocked us, so we were thankful for the short stay for that reason too!

Our Airbnb was the most interesting (and surprisingly very affordable) part of San Jose.  It’s harder than it should be to find houses/condos to rent that actually have enough space for both of us to work on laptops with external portable monitors while not driving each other nuts.  To get that space, we end up having to rent places far bigger than we’d need were we not working.  About 100 years ago in a neighborhood called Barrio Amon, coffee barons built mansions.  Barrio Amon is still a nice neighborhood, so we rented a coffee baron mansion on Airbnb.  It was part museum and part palace, it felt like we were stepping back in time, including back to a time before central heating.  It was luxurious in that bygone era kind of way, but chilly!  I wore my single pair of jeans and single long sleeve hoodie every single day.

Our next stop was Granada, Nicaragua, which we will write about later.  There isn’t a direct flight between San Jose and Managua, the capital and main city in Nicaragua.  We had a choice of a $300-400 one-way flight (each) that would take us at least 10 hours with the connection, plus whatever it took to get a shuttle from Managua to Granada, or a $33 bus ride that would take 10 hours direct to Granada with no chance of losing our bags.  We’d rather travel by bus than fly if it’s a comfortable bus because you see so much more.  And for 10% of the cost of the flight, it was an easy choice.  Our last day in San Jose we were at the Tica Bus terminal before dawn for our 6:00 a.m. bus ride.  The seats were comfortable enough, even though we were in aisle seats with no view, and we left only 10 minutes late. Off to a good start!  There would be no point in boring anyone with any details of a transportation choice and a bus ride were this happy path to continue.

We arrived on time at the border, and the Costa Rican immigration wasn’t too uncomfortable, it took less than an hour and since we could leave all our stuff in the bus, it wasn’t painful.  Next came the horror show that was Nicaraguan immigration.  We saw probably 500 people standing in a line that started at the door of a building and stretched along a sidewalk.  To the end of that line we all traipsed, trundling all our belongings.  It was hot, mostly sunny and hot, this was not a covered sidewalk, and the line moved in fits and starts but was mostly not moving.  It was really hot.  There was nowhere to sit down, other than on the curb, which I did a few times.  Three times while in this line it started to rain on us and our stuff.  All the while we had no idea how long the line was inside the building.  We assumed there were three people working and they were rotating so two of the three were constantly on break.

When we finally arrived inside, we saw about 200 people in front of us, but the line eventually started to move a bit.  Finally!  Peter and I are convinced that if there are two lines to choose from, no matter where these lines are leading, we will always choose the slowest. Our Nicaraguan customs officer choice confirmed this theory.  He reminded us of Flash the sloth who worked at the DMV in the movie, “Zootopia” (if you haven’t seen the movie, you really should see that funny scene, which may give us negative flashbacks going forward:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHKwnUa3txo).  Our guy started out smiling and seemed okay, then turned stern and took  f o r e v e r, and we saw all of our fellow bus riders, including all those behind us, get through.  Minutes that felt like hours passed, our guy yawned a few times and continued to type with one finger. 

I started to worry a bit that our bus was going to leave without us as a big group of surfers was now holding up the baggage scan line, which was next, and no one from our bus was anywhere in sight. We finally got through, practically ran to the bus (impossible with all our stuff), to find it waiting for us.  Thank goodness.  That was not fun, but our reward for that 3+ hour ordeal was that the people in the front seats with the million dollar view had left the bus, so we snatched their seats and had a great ride from there on out.  We saw many small fruit and vegetable stands along the road, kids playing in yards, fields with horses and a few cows, and families sitting in rocking chairs in front of their houses.  It was a scene that was a throwback to simpler times, another kind of bygone era.  We made it to Granada, where we’d stay for two weeks, more than two hours after the bus normally arrived, but our Airbnb host was waiting for us.  Thank goodness.

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