Erin Miller

It’s not the first 20 hours of a bus ride across Central America that really gets to you, its the last 5.
The week before last was Semana Santa in Central America. A week in which virtually no one has work and everyone celebrates a week long party in honor of Easter. In honor of the occasion, I decided to make a pilgrimage to Costa Rica to visit an old college friend. And, due to the buses being a tenth of the cost of a flight, I wanted to go by bus. Time is something I have, while money is harder to come by, plus I figured it would be a good way to see some more of the countries of Central America. Nick (the only other volunteer who thought that a 25 hour bus ride to Costa Rica sounded like a good idea) and I had spent the first evening of our adventure in Tegucigalpa (Teg, Tegus) , Honduras’s capital city. Monday we made our way to Managua (the capital of Nicaragua.) Crossing into Nicaragua went incredibly well and we were only charged 4US dollars more than it should have cost to enter the country, which wasn’t too bad I thought, considering that while standing at the border crossing I admired a nice plaque honoring the soldiers that had died in the war against America. Nicaragua is “una tierra de largos y volcanes.” And even from the bus it was striking. However, the part of the city of Managua that surrounded the bus station was not as charming. As soon as we existed the bus station we were surrounded by boys trying to lead us to the hotels that would give them a commission for bringing in the gringos. About 5 of them surrounded us, touching us, and our bags, and they even walked into the hotel that was recommended in the guidebook and said it was full (which it was not). Once we managed to check into the hotel that was not full, and put our bags in our clean and exceptionally well guarded room, it was dark. There were signs everywhere warning tourists that if they needed to go to an ATM, they had to take a taxi because it was too dangerous, even in daylight, to walk down the street with a pocketful of money. Nick and I had both changed about the equivalent of 10US dollars at the border and became determined to make this amount sufficient for not only our hotel but also dinner. We asked for a dinner recommendation (that wasn’t expensive) and were told of a great little place only a few blocks from the hotel, followed by the friendly advice, “If you are going to go out now, take only a little bit of money in your pockets, no credit cards, no cameras.” This much we had figured, and of course, we only had alittle bit of money. We picked out our food from behind glass counters, asking, “What’s that, what does it have in it?” We were recommended to try the cheesy mashed potatoes that had been fried (that’s right, a fried ball of mashed potatoes.) The potatoes alone made the stop in Managua worth it.

una tierra de largos y volcanes
We left the following morning at 5 for Costa Rica. The border crossing into Costa Rica wasn’t nearly as smooth. We had to wait in a 2 hour line in the drizzling rain, to get our passport stamped. Then we had to take our bags out from under the bus which they did my calling one person’s 10 digit baggage tag number over and over again until that person came to retrieve their bag. This often took a significant amount of time as not all of the passengers were back at the bus. We had to wait for several people to return from the passport line, the bathrooms, or lunch. By now it was pouring rain. One could read from my facial expression that I was wet and furious and one of the bus operators came to me and said “tranquila, we have to get the bags out so that they can check for guns and drugs from Columbia.” I wanted to ask why they didn’t open both sides of the cargo area to make it go faster and then to point out that Columbia was not on this side of the border crossing, but I was too mad to form a coherent sentence. Once we finally gathered our bags and took them over to be inspected, the baggage inspector just waived through all of the white backpackers (that’s right, because white backpackers never carry drugs). We clamored back onto the bus and I slumped in my seat and tried to calm down. The next couple of hours passed uneventfully, aside from the police officers boarding the bus at every checkpoint to check out passports (which at least made me feel like waiting in the 2 hour line had been worth it). Then, sometime as we were finally making our way to the interior of Costa Rica, I began to completely lose it. We were 20 hours into our bus journey and I wasn’t sure I could take another single second of sitting on a bus. I didn’t like the Jackie Chan movies they insisted showing on the bus, I was sick of listening to my Ipod and bored to death of sitting in silence and far to restless to try to sleep. I began grumbling to Nick and rocking back and forth in my seat. This was before we had even gotten to the capital, San José. When we finally arrived in the capital, we had an hour to get to an ATM, take a taxi across town to the other bus station to take the 3 and half hour bus from San José to where my friend Robin lives on the Pacific coast, and use the phone at an Internet cafe to call Robin in Manuel Antonio to tell her that we might actually make it, and that she should try to meet us in Quepos, the larger town nearby. (I was afraid making the phone call, because I was pretty sure that actually saying out loud that we might make it to her apartment in her small costal town that day would jinx the whole thing.) The phone call did almost jinx everything. Our bus for Quepos was leaving San José at 6:00pm, but the ticket office closed at 5pm. So in typical Central American fashion we were told that we had to buy tickets before getting on the bus, and then learned that it was impossible to buy tickets at that hour. Thankfully, a kind soul took mercy on us and allowed us to board and purchase our tickets on the bus. The bus broke down once on the way to Quepos. As the motor quieted and we pulled over, I was nearly in tears. Miraculusly, they managed to repair it and we pulled into Quepos only a half hour behind schedule. I don’t believe I had ever been so happy to see Robin. Robin and her boyfriend Dave met us at the bus station. We popped to a nearby restaurant for a relaxing meal and then headed to their apartment in Manuel Antonio, where I got to see another old friend, Robin’s Australian Shepard, Motley. The rest of the week passed wonderfully uneventfully.
The first day was spent going to the beach and then in the evening we returned to Quepos to stock up on liquor. The Costa Rican government, displaying the type of wisdom unique among governments and yet seemingly universally so, closed all liquor sales on the Thursday and Friday of the biggest party week of the year, presumably in order to encourage its population to contemplate the holiness of the week. (The only other time they have shut down liquor sales in Robin’s experience is for elections.) What of course actually happens is that locals and tourists alike flood the grocery stores and the liquor stores, boxes in hand and strip the entire town of alcohol on Wednesday night.

Robin and Dave
Thursday was spent going back to the beach, this time with our newly acquired beer and cooler, to watch the sunset.

Robin and I on the beach
Friday Nick and I went to the national park for which the town of Manuel Antonio is named. We took a guided tour and saw white-faced Capuchin monkeys, Titi red-backed squirrel monkeys, (that makes three types of monkeys since I began my Central American adventure) three toed sloths, an anteater, lizards, and bats. We spent the afternoon lounging on the park’s beach, swimming in the calm waves, and guarding our peanut butter sandwiches and cheez-its from the Capuchins.

Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio

Capuchin

monkeys, monkeys, everywhere

Lizard

Sloth
Saturday Nick and I took a Canopy zip-line tour, which was basically awesome. It included the added bonus of seeing poison-dart frogs.

Canopy tour


Sunday was a fully scheduled Easter. We awoke at 11. Took Motley to the beach, struggled to find some freshwater source to wash off the ocean and sand (Manual Antonio was without water off and on all week due to the number of people that descended on the town during Semana Santa) and went out for dinner. The food was great, but not as impressive as the 1954 Model, Fairchild C-123 cargo plane that the restaurant was built around. On October 6, 1986 the sister plane of the C-123 at the restaurant was shot down over Nicaragua by Sandinistas, and an American CIA operative who had parachuted out was captured. The US had been funding the counter-revolutionary Contras in Nicaragua from profits reaped by inflated arms sales to Iran, and the CIA helped the Contras to buy, with the money they were given, several planes, including the plane that was shot down, and its sister that now sat across from our dinner table. On October 7th the US administration, State Department, CIA, and Department of Defense all denied that the plane that was shot down was in any way connected to the US government. On October 8th, President Reagan strongly suggested that he had actually approved the efforts by the Americans on board the shot-down cargo plane. And gradually, the Iran-Contra Affair was exposed. Due to the cargo plane being shot down over Nicaragua, it’s sister plane that was now at the restaurant was abandoned in San Jose. The plane was really neat. And now it also serves as a bar and nightclub.

Sunset in Manuel Antonio

The plane
We began our trip back to Honduras on Monday, spending our first night at a terrific hostel in San José where we met some awesome people. One man had quit is job almost a year ago and had visited 23 countries since. Another was about to leave for the Peace Corps because he had gotten too comfortable with his life in New York City and the 300 dollar bottles of vodka that came with it.

Sunset in San José
The border crossing back out of Costa Rica was shockingly more difficult than getting in. This time it involved waiting in a two and half hour line in the relentless sun, without shade or cover. Once we had gotten through the two and half hour line we got to wait in another line (under cover) that eventually meant we got to wait in another line inside to get our passports stamped giving us permission to leave the country.

The line to get out of Costa Rica
Nicaragua from the bus was again stunning, and once again we spent a night in Managua. This time we had changed more money at the border so that we could have two orders of fried mashed potatoes.

Sunrise in Nicaragua
We arrived in La Esperanza Wednesday. Tired, dirty, and pretty ripe smelling, but happy.