Costa Rica Border

Anyone want to hear another border horror story?

Me neither.  

However, in the interest of full disclosure, I am duty bound to tell you that the Costa Rican side of the Nicaragua/Costa Rica border was beyond insane.

We came through the Nicaragua side in about 1.5 hours, not too bad, since there was a large line.

The bike document process was a joke.  We hired a fixer, and he literally went around the parking lot, finding different official people and cops, and had them SIGN our Import document in various places.  There didn't seem to be a pattern nor a reason for the process, but when we left Nicaragua, it seemed to work, as they let us out.

As we rode down the street and around the corner, we were presented with our worst nightmare… the Costa Rican border was overflowing with people.

We got off our bikes, found the a few people who spoke a little english.

Most agreed the line to get Passport stamps 6-7 hours long.   Just to get the Passport stamp!

All our other border crossings that took 4 hours, the Passport stamp portion was about 5 minutes.

We were stunned.  We might be here for days.  

Just then, one of the fixers came by and made us an offer.  He could get around the line, and have us out of here, in 30 minutes.  

At this point we weren't quite ready to believe anyone, so we talked about it for a while, and then agreed to his price.  $80 in bribes.  $20 for him.  $100 in total.

We worked out a deal, $20 up front, and $80 for him when we had our stamps. That seemed to work, so we handed over our passports and bike documents, the process was underway.

Our fixer escorted us to the 2nd line, which was manned by cops, and with our fixer in tow, we were ushered through the line to another office, where we started our bike paperwork, and another guy watched the line, and waited for an opportune moment where they slipped us in with the crowd to go get our passports stamped.  

After passport stamp (about 5 minutes), we were back in to the bike office for more photocopies, and then we were out without much problem.  There were a couple more stops for turning in our unofficial paperwork for the official paperwork, and then we were through to the last checkpoint and into Costa Rica, and hour later, and $100 in bribes poorer.

Hopefully, in the coming days we will have something other than border crap to report.