Hello Costa Rica

The blue red and white striped flag of Costa Rica was now behind us. We’d seen the flag from Nicaraguan customs flying high over the wall that separated the two countries. Now we’d driven through the gap in the wall waving goodbye to the smiling Nicaraguans and waving hello to the lone military guy sitting under an awning on the Costa Rican side. The guy in green said not a word to the folks in blue fifty feet away. 

We showed our passport and chatted a few moments before the guy in green fatigues sent us off to be sprayed with disinfectant. I walked to the woman in the shed and she slid open her window. “What?”

“You need money surely?” She smiled. “Not us. Welcome to Costa Rica!” Huh, I thought, this place really is different. We’ve been charged five bucks for every fumigation since Belize. But this fumigation was real, more like a car wash, thick with disinfectant. We parked our streaming van and went off to join the circus. If you ride a bus or a cab to the border you can hire a lady with a hand cart to carry your luggage for you:

The whole process from checking in to the Nicaraguan side to driving out of the Costa Rican offices took an hour and forty minutes. We got our passports stamped, filled out the usual Temporary Import Permit form for GANNET2 and we immediately had to buy car insurance, an office in another container in the back. The whole Costa Rica border post was a bunch of cream colored containers with blue painted covered walkways. It was hot and sticky but the officials were charming and anxious to guide us through the steps. Easy peasy. They all crowded into GANNET2 to “inspect our home.”  Layne was sure they were going to confiscate the contents of our fridge but they didn’t care about our eggs or fruit and vegetables. Paying Rusty’s $35 fee while her colleague actually took a peek at our ever patient dog:

We drove out wondering what we were going to find. Our last visit to Costa Rica was a slow sail down the Pacific Coast in 1999 anchoring in the many and various indentations particular to Costa Rica along the coast. It was rainy season just as it is now and I remember the rain as we swam in the downpours in the quiet anchorages in the coastal indentations safe from the Pacific rollers which crashed ashore outside the protected bays along the exposed coastline. We rented a car and took the dogs inland but we don’t  remember much from that trip, certainly not enough to inform our drive this year into this country.