Today was the second and final day in Nicaragua.
Marie and I headed out of Granada without ever having seen the place in daylight and rode south for the boarder with Costa Rica. I feel quite bad about this since it seems like a nice country with a few really good things to spend some time on. The only reason I'm doing it is so that I have the option to go to Columbia and because I have a definite intent to spend more time here on the way back (enough justification).
On the way South to the boarder (only about an hour ride) we got pulled over three times by the police and each time they want us to get out all our papers and ask us all the usual questions. No problems here but it takes about 20 minutes each time and at this rate it was starting to eat up serious time.
So, then we arrived at the boarder and had to get ourselves and the bikes out of Nicaragua and then into Costa Rica. Sounds simple but this was unlike the other four boarders that I have crossed. All the other crossings I chose were at quite small crossing points and there was not a lot of traffic. However down here where the countries get very small, the options become limited and where there were three or four roads to choose from in the past there is now just "the road". So after we had negotiated the continual police interest on the way, we had to face huge line ups at customs and immigration. The officials were in fact quite helpful and always pointed us in the right direction for what to do next, but the line-ups were just insane. It didn´t help that we did it one at a time either (the other person watched the bikes while the first person did the run-around) and the process to get out of Nicaragua took about four hours. Fortunately the Costa Rican side of things was much quicker and it only took another hour to get into the next country.
By then, we were running out of time to get to a sizable town to sleep (only about an hour away) so we promptly headed off South again and didn't bother with the fact that neither of us had eaten more than a handful of junk food for the whole day.
Costa Rican country side is absolutely beautiful and the country is clearly far wealthier than its neighbours to the North, but the local police are just as annoying!
Yes, we got pulled over twice more in that hour of riding - again for no particular reason other than to "have a chat". We made it to our destination right on dark, but it was a really full and quite stressful day when we had actually expected to have a fairly easy day of it. - silly us!
Tomorrow we run South again to get near the Panama boarder - more guilt about travelling so fast.
