by Randy Denmon
There was no parking area so we just pulled over on the side of the road. We grabbed all our paperwork (I had two copies of everything made the night before at the Crowne Plaza) and stormed out of the car toward the line of people. The hawkers followed us, babbling away in our faces, and more annoying, constantly grabbing at our passports trying to pull them out of our hands. We got in line.
This border crossing was different than any we’d yet crossed. Half the fifty or so people in line were tourists, European or American. Twenty minutes in line and we got stamped out for a fee of ten American dollars.
I held my driver’s permit and showed it to the lady at immigration. “Tengo un coche.”
The woman pointed to an office next door. I proceeded there immediately, the hawkers still on my tail. They had stood in line with us at immigration, constantly bothering us. In the mumble and jumble at immigration, I had left my papers on the counter. Terrified, I ran back. Fortunately, they were still there.
In the customs office a man sat behind a desk. I presented my papers.
He complained, “No, no.”
I mumbled some Spanish: “Tengo un coche.”
The man pointed in the general direction of his right. I went back outside and saw another building where he pointed, but no signs. A man in a uniform was inspecting some luggage. We got in the car and pulled over to the building. There, we got out and approached the man, but he pointed to the building. I went in. The building had five or six offices. I held up my papers to show a guard. He pointed to a door. I went in. A woman sat behind a desk, going over some papers.
“Perdon,” I said, and held up my papers. “Tengo un coche.”
The woman looked at me, groaned, blew out a long breath, and shook her head. She mumbled something and waved me away.
I walked outside, back into the constant murmur of Spanish and general Latin disorder. I wanted to ask someone for guidance, but feared the hawkers. If I asked one of them, we’d never get rid of ’em. I leaned against the car, trying to locate my next option.
A young man who spoke English came out of the building to explain the situation. “The lady inside is busy. You need that man.” He pointed to a loading area and a large bus. “But he’s checking that bus right now. When he comes back over here, show him your papers.”
I lit a cigarette and waited. A dog looked up at me with its tongue hanging out. I had no idea what he wanted, but there are always a lot of dogs hanging out at the border crossings.
Ten minutes later the man arrived. I presented my papers, but he pointed to two uniformed women, leaning against another building. I walked over, offered my papers and pointed to our car. One of the ladies was telling a story to the other lady and a man. She instructed me to wait until she finished. In a few minutes, they laughed at the story, then the ladies followed Dean and me to the car.
The women went over the car real good, asking a bunch of strange questions, half-flirting with us. Everything looked good, but they were in no hurry to sign off. Did they want to flirt some more, or want a tip? Ten minutes later they finally signed and pointed to the first customs building I went to. I went there and waited five minutes behind someone else. I presented the papers and got the stamp.
“Bueno?” I asked, pointing south. “Costa Rica?”
“Sí, sí,” the man said and waved us out of his office.
Getting out of Nicaragua had taken about an hour and a half. In Central America, leaving a country is the easy part. Getting in is much more cumbersome.
We drove through the neutral zone to the Costa Rican border station. There are usually a few side roads utilized by the big trucks or the police, but no signs to lead you. This crossing wasn’t that bad, with only one side road where several trucks were parked, so I didn’t turn onto it. This crossing had only a half-mile neutral zone, so we arrived at the Costa Rican border station quickly.
All hopes of a quick crossing faded as we saw hundreds of people wandering around the dozen cars or small trucks and three buses. Again, no signs or places to park. A long line of people, more than a hundred, all standing idly, stretched down the road. Probably immigration. We pulled over and parked on the side of the road, locked the car and grabbed our papers to get in line. A man in uniform approached, waving his hands. We couldn’t park here. He pointed ahead, to a fence-line off the road where five or six cars were parked. I pulled forward and parked there.
Unfortunately for us, a bus stopped and dumped another fifty or sixty people in the line at immigration. Under a shed, the column weaved around in five or six lanes, like a TSA queue at the airport, then slithered down the road another fifty yards. We joined the procession. It took about forty minutes to get to the door of the immigration building. The only good news was that no hawkers or handlers appeared.
I passed the time smoking and viewing the travelers, more than half of them foreigners, a few tour groups of retirees, and a bunch of backpackers. Some of the tourists look pissed, all bent out of shape about the long wait. I’m thinking: you don’t know how lucky you are. You don’t have a car. Try this with a flashy new ride without an engine.
We’d been in line for forty-five minutes and in the jungle for weeks. A few of the female backpackers started looking pretty good. I didn’t know how often these backpackers bathed, but here, your imagination could run wild. There were two or three I’d certainly like to trade Dean for, especially with some soap, makeup, and a razor. I’ve never had a mistress with dreadlocks. Could this be the missing link that’s kept me from eternal love and happiness all these years? And riding with me would make them famous left-wingers, green crusaders.
As I considered if I should propose, we finally got to the door of the office. Inside, we filled out our paperwork. But we had a problem. We’d filled the paperwork out in pencil. We’d misplaced our pen somewhere. Dean guarded our place inside the building, and I went outside and begged a man for his pen. Back inside, we again waited to fill out our paperwork, this time behind three people.
Finally a stamp. The sound of the stamp thumping against paper is the most beautiful in Latin America. After all the explaining, writing, mulling over papers, conversation between bureaucrats, it’s more pleasing to the ears than any Beethoven symphony.
The woman shooed us away, but I asked about customs and the car.
She pointed across the street.
Off we went and found the customs house, just a hut with one agent. I set my papers on the counter and waited a few minutes for him to finish some paperwork. Through all this, I constantly went through my papers, now a disorganized mess, forever setting them down and picking them up, all critical for our departure.
Shortly, the fellow took my papers. This young man was somewhat friendly and spoke a little English. He inspected the car. I showed him that it was electric. He thought it was cool and five minutes later signed our papers. That was pretty quick and easy. No driver’s permit was required in Costa Rica, but the customs agent told us we now needed to get some Costa Rican insurance.
“Dónde?” I ask.
He pointed ahead. “Take the first right.”
Now that it was time to move on, I couldn’t find Dean. He’d slipped away a few minutes earlier to look for a bathroom. I walked across the street and into a small café. Dean was gobbling up a bowl of brown Costa Rican stew, not a very delicious sight. If we didn’t have enough problems, he seemed determined to slow us down, bedridden beside a commode for several days. My stomach had been growling, yearning for some real Louisiana gumbo, but the appetite was now gone.
We drove off, but couldn’t find the turn for the insurance. Turning around, we got crammed into a gargantuan traffic snarl. There wasn’t really a road, just a half-dozen big trucks and as many cars wedged hopelessly in every direction—a mass of mud and mechanization with absolutely no order or rules. Horns and voices echoed off the trees and through the cigarette smoke, exhaust, and gestures.
After acclimating to Central American driving, these traffic ja
ms just become part of the daily routine, something you get numb to, but the scale and mayhem of these debacles is almost indescribable with words. In Dallas or LA, helicopters would be buzzing overhead as hundreds of thousands of Americans looked on in awe at the utter chaos, reverse evolution, civilization breaking down. Somehow, we extricated ourselves in fifteen minutes and made another turn, driving through a large, five-acre, pothole-strewn parking lot hosting more than fifty 18-wheelers. Puttering around, we found two buildings in the back. One of them must be it.
Luckily, the first building I tried was the right one. I presented my papers. The young woman behind the glass started on the lengthy paperwork. This took ten minutes, but she needed a copy of my title and registration. I’d already passed out the two copies I had made. She pointed across the street. I walked over there and got the copies for a dollar, returned and gave her the papers. More stamps.
She handed me the papers and pointed to the other end of the building. “You pay there.”
There I went, presenting the papers to another man. I paid the fee for the insurance, about twenty American dollars. Another stamp.
“No más?” I ask.
“Good,” the man said, waving his finger.
Dean and I returned to the car to drive out of the customs area. We stopped and got out to take a picture in front of the Bienvenido a Costa Rica sign. The money changers pestered us, but I didn’t bother buying any colones.
As we pulled out of the border crossing, there was one more stop, a guard shed. By now, I was covered in sweat and mentally beat, my mind buzzing. The guard took our paperwork. I held my breath. Did we have everything? He nodded and handed me back the papers. It had taken about three and a half hours to cross the border. Off into the jungle we went.
Highway of Death
Our first sight in Costa Rica was a young man, white, hippie-type, riding a bicycle southbound on the side of the shoulder-less road in ninety-degree temperature. He made us look like we had some sense. There’s little to nothing in the border area of northwest Costa Rica, just hills, and thick, verdant vegetation. It was probably twenty miles to the nearest town of any size, and I’m not talking about Peoria—probably something more like a Spanish Tombstone.
Costa Rica, a world away from Nicaragua, is possibly the planet’s biggest natural amusement park. A third of the country is preserved, and its biggest industry is tourism, with almost two million visitors a year. Costa Rica only has four and a half million residents. The Ticos, as they call themselves, believe in the pura vita, the pure life, and they’ve had a good run sapping the tree-huggers and weekend adventurers. Walking around some of the ecotourism stops in Costa Rica is like roving the aisles of a Whole Foods in north Dallas.
The country has been peaceful and democratic since it abolished its army in 1948. No wonder the average income and general quality-of-life measurables here are significantly higher than its northern neighbors.
But here on CA-1, in the lightly populated northern border area, we were not on the tourist circuit. A few cows grazed along the road, and occasionally we got a panoramic view of the cloud-covered green volcanoes to the east (plain compared to those of Nicaragua) or the rolling tropical forest.
The traffic was light, and I wanted to speed up, but the speed limits weren’t posted. Costa Rican cops have ruined my day more than once over the years. In the old days, all you had to worry about were the local Barney Fifes trying to pick up a little extra cash to take their wives out for a nice dinner, really just lawmen/businessmen, but the drug traffickers have of late zeroed in on Costa Rica, and the police presence has increased considerably. Seems like we export a lot of the problems to Central America, be it gangs, CIA-trained death squads, or drug lords trying to get their valuable product to the ready market in middle-class America.
We drove on through the nothing toward Liberia. Every time I sped up, I saw one of the ubiquitous “cow warning” signs that reminded me not to get too gutsy. We crossed a neat old truss bridge on the Rio Liberia and rolled into the town of the same name, a little oasis in the jungle.
Liberia will give you some sense of the ecotourism craze that has swept through Costa Rica. In 1995, I heard they were upgrading the little airport here for international service. This was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. Then the town had maybe thirty thousand people. And it was in the middle of nowhere, seventy-five miles down rickety roads to the cloud forest in the Cordillera Tilaran mountains and about the same to a few dusty beach towns on the west coast. Today, Liberia has more than sixty thousand residents, and even in the off-season the airport has sixteen daily flights to the United States and Canada, greeting almost seven hundred thousand travelers annually.
Still, there’s not much to see around Liberia, and we drove on. The scenery was sparse, the road slicing through vacant green hills. South of town, the highway was under construction, being widened to four lanes. Thirty more miles to the ranching town of Canas, the only sight the raging Rio Tenorio, now just a boulder-littered rock garden around a trickle of water, but known for its rafting and Class Four rapids in the wet season. The traffic grew steadily, but we averaged 30 mph, the drive pleasant through the incessant, undulating hills.
Dean’s mood today was merry. He had borrowed my computer the night before and was again uploading videos and updating his Facebook page.
“What day of the week is it?” I asked.
“Does it matter?”
“I see another Walmart. I’m going to buy a second computer so you can stay happy, and I can get some shit done.”
I felt as free as a parakeet, though the construction of the modern highway removed some of the alluring alien experience of the setting, especially since the workers all looked almost identical to the concrete-forming crews along any American highway in the early twenty-first century (and probably spoke the same language). To help ease the grief induced by the beehive of construction and long line of new white concrete, I checked my cell phone to make sure I had no bars.
But everything changed in Canas. Here the road transitioned back to a winding, cascading two-lane asphalt belt, the traffic becoming unimaginably thick.
Before long, we bumped ahead at 20 mph in an endless line of vehicles stretching as far as I could see, which wasn’t far. Half the vehicles were 18-wheelers or buses, and the Ticos drove worse than the Guatemalans. The fifty-three miles to Puntarenas took over two and half hours, some of the worst hours of my life.
The big trucks passed each other everywhere. Oncoming, the idiots raced by without a thought and with complete disregard for the terrain. Everyone constantly slammed on their brakes to allow the maniacs to get back in their lanes.
Actually, the cars and trucks hustling around us frightened me more than the oncoming traffic. They whipped out into the opposite lane, barreling around me and forcing the row of vehicles in front of us to make a hole to let them back in.
A few times, I thought I was about to witness a suicide, but at the last moment in the deadly game of “chicken,” the trucks parted like the Red Sea and two tractor-trailers blew by each other only inches apart. My breath got heavy, my skin clammy. Were we about to experience a field experiment testing Mr. Newton’s laws of motion? We passed one wreck, the three-axle truck literally in the bottom of a small river.
The Tesla’s spunk was our only salvation. On several occasions, I passed a line of trucks, not because I was in a hurry, but because everyone around me was so bunched up and changing lanes, the brinkmanship was too much for my nerves. When I could, I puffed a few cigarettes to the filter wondering if Ticos only found out there was a blind spot in their mirrors as they were being whisked into an ambulance.
My concern growing, I almost pulled over several times. After all we’d been through, now I felt like we had the greatest chance to end our trip—and everything else—in an instant. I thanked my lucky stars that the Costa Rican insurance didn’t cover Dean to drive. Those complicated border crossings may be a blessing in disguise.
With Dean behind the wheel video recording, I would have likely given up cigarettes for whatever they were smoking back at Lake Atitlán in Guatemala.
Dean spent the time on the horrifying highway trying to distract me. As the traffic got very hectic, my hands gripping the wheel, eyes alert for an oncoming madman storming into our lane, he turned on his camera, trying to interview me about the trip. Or worse, cranked up some awful rap music, prompting me to “get down” for the camera while I drove.
Via another long-standing, classic, steel-truss bridge, we motored over the Rio Guacimal and into the outskirts of Puntarenas. To my relief, the traffic slowed to a snail’s pace. I’d never been through such a harrowing traffic jam, except for maybe Tapline Road on the Iraq-Saudi Arabia border during the Gulf War. I felt as if I had just survived an armed robbery, the assailant wanting to take only my wallet.
Dean and I deliberated on our destination. It was about four in the afternoon. I guessed we had about seventy-five miles left in the tank. Dean pulled out a few notes on some towns we’d researched the night before. Sixty miles to San José and forty-five to the beach resort of Jaco. We decided to get our toes wet in the surf. I was in no mood for more traffic.
We drove on past Puntarenas, not much of a tourist town, but a pretty nostalgic place. Once known as the Pearl of the Pacific, it was a major port in the last century, moving Costa Rica’s coffee off to market. Plenty of Americans pass through the town to catch the ferry to the beach towns on the Nicoya Peninsula, but rarely do they slow down to marvel at the rusting relic of yesteryear, its weathered old piers and docks of a bygone era poking into the sea.
We drove across an old railway, the Puntarenas to San José line, long abandoned. The story of Costa Rica’s rails and the American who built them, Minor Cooper Keith, is a dramatic novel unto itself, something similar to the construction of the Panama Canal, completed forty years after Keith began his work.