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Published: April 12th 2011
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Today we are on a mailing mission. We have to package up another box with our hammock and a bunch of trinkets, cross our fingers, put it in the hands of the Nicaraguan mail system, & hope it gets home! Of course, our mail experience was a bit of a journey. We get to the post office with box in hand, very very well taped (like half the roll on the box because the one box that made it home, we were told, was in bad shape) & find out we need a copy of our passport for them to attach to the package. OK. Off to find a fotocopia store (they're all over for some reason, maybe because of this need?). Find one, buy some OFF, pay for the copy & head back to the post office. Then to find a bank because we're low on money & have no idea how much this box is going to cost. Find bank, withdraw 16,000 Cordoba = $540 (to get us through our time on Ometepe where there is not an ATM). Back at the post office we find out that they want to open the box that we so lovingly taped
because they have to personally search it to make sure we're not mailing any of the clearly posted things you are not allowed to mail. Those are: pharmaceuticals, weapons, tobacco, & currency. We had 2 of the 4 not allowed items in our box so we had to take the box back to our hostel, open it, remove the cigars & currency, leave it open, bring the tape with us to retape after inspection & walk back. Too much! We were cracking up though because so far every post office experience has been a bit more than we bargained for. This one takes the cake so far. At the post office the lady searches through the box, deems it acceptable to mail, we retape with a lot of tape & weigh it. 4.9 kilos (probably .9 kilos in tape alone) & $30 later, we were finally done. Wowzers. It took us about 2 hours to mail one box. Good thing we had made George Bowls again for breakfast, we needed the food energy to get us through that undertaking.
Back at the hostel, another round of packing, goodbyes to our NY pals, strap our family on our backs &
off to the ferry terminal. It was a good walk to the terminal, but we stayed in the shade whenever possible to avoid heat exhaustion, tee hee hee....At the terminal, we purchased our tickets & waited. The ferry doesn't look very big & the waves on Lago Nicaragua look very big, so this should be an interesting 4 hour ferry ride. Good thing I took a dramamine, I was warned about the ride. While waiting for departure Geoff bought the biggest hot dog I've probably ever seen. It was at least 1.5 feet long with a bun that it fit into. And it had real pickle relish! Apparently the city of Granada has found pickles. First city in Central America that we've had them.
Pretty soon we are boarding the boat. It's funny because on this boat they seperate the locals & the tourists. The tourists are all 1st Class, meaning we sit upstairs. The locals are normal (?) class & sit downstairs. Kinda weird but that's their rule & they shuffled us off into the upstairs. The boat ride wasn't terrible but it wasn't great either. The ferry was ridiculously slow, probably because we were heading directly into
Looking good...
Thank God for Dramamine! the wind, which was strong & gusty. The ride took 5 hours but the dramamine worked. Phew! They even played a movie for us on a little TV for the second half of the ride. "Predator" in Spanish. It was really entertaining actually.
Once we arrived in Altagracia we were herded into minivans & carted off to a hostel in town. Gringo mobiles! We stayed the night at Hotel Castillo. It was alright ($13 with a semi clean bathroom) but their food was pretty decent & they had wifi so that was nice. We stayed up playing on the computer & blogging for a bit & then off to bed. Happy to be on solid ground & even happier to know we don't have to take that ferry back to the mainlaind! Started to get a little stircrazy at the end....
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