Onward and Downward

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The oppressive heat of Granada convinced me that I needed a serious change of scenery. I decided that the best option to would be a strike into Costa Rica where I might find some relief from the heat in the highlands. This was a spectacular drive which began with some tricky driving through the heart of the market area in Grenada. This would be akin to driving your car though the mall at Christmas time if you were allowed to do such a thing because here you could and the market is always that busy. I was pretty sure that I was going to run somebody over but it turns out that it isn't all that difficult if you keep pace with the flow of traffic. The way was clear after I broke out of Granada and the driving easy with relatively little traffic. I passed a spectacular landscape of volcanoes as I drove along the lakeshore of Lago Nicaragua toward the border where the red tape was lying in wait. The unofficial Nicaraguan border guides greeted me more than one kilometer from the border where the line of trucks waiting to clear customs ended. I duly employed one of them who joined me in the Scion and directed me to drive around the long line of trucks. We had to ditch a couple of times to let the oncoming traffic pass on this two-lane road that had been reduced to one by the line of trucks but I wasn't phased because that's pretty much standard operating procedure in this part of the world. This border was the worst. It's a busy place with a lot of traffic that hosts an unbelievable battery of intertwined bureaucracies that seem to have been created for the sole purpose of collecting fees. My car was "searched" twice on the Nicaraguan side but not by the official in charge who had the stamp that I needed to proceed. We had to go looking for this guy who was just hanging out in the crowd somewhere smoking a cigarette. My car had to be fumigated somewhere in the middle of this process and I had to pay in dollars which was complete surprise because none of my handlers forwarned me. I'm not sure what the deal was on the Costa Rican side but after I went to one office to buy insurance, I had to go to another office to get the paperwork in order, and a third office to get the paperwork approved and properly stamped so that I could proceed. This wouldn't have been so bad except that the computers went down in the last office where I had to wait an extra hour with about 20 truckers who were likewise waiting for their turn to enter Costa Rica. I am convinced that the most patient people on the planet must be the Central American truckers who have to deal with this bureaucratic nonsense on an ongoing basis. I was relived to be back on the road until I reached the first town where the one-and-only ATM machine refused to give me any money. I ended up driving on to Liberia in a where there were plenty of banks and a McDonalds that didn't charge an exit fee for leaving their restaurant.

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