Travelling to Costa Rica

...15 May, 2011


The trip to Costa Rica from Nicaragua was supposed to be easy and uneventful.


For us it was going to be a very long day. The plan was to get a ferry from Ometepe Island in Nicaragua to the mainland, a taxi from the ferry to the town of Rivas, a bus from Rivas over the border into Costa Rica to a town called Liberia, and then another bus from Liberia to La Fortuna.


Things didn't go exactly according to plan - and in more ways than one.


We left our cabin on Ometepe at 4:30am in a taxi that took 1hr 15mins.
At 6am we got the ferry from Moyogalpa town on Ometepe Island to San Jorge on the mainland of Nicaragua (just over an hour on the ferry).
From here we had a short trip in a taxi to the town of Rivas, and then at 9am we got on a bus to Costa Rica. This was a San Jose bound bus, of which we were only getting it for a portion of the entire trip.


The bus had a driver and an attendant. The attendant's job was to help everyone get through immigration and customs at the border, and to announce the towns that we arrived in along the way. Shortly before the border, we gave the attendant our passports and US$20 to cover the Nicaraguan exit fee. We were due US$13 change, which the attendant conveniently put in his pocket after getting our passports processed, without saying a word to us.


It was at this point that we're convinced our journey started to go wrong.


I asked him for our change and after saying that he didn't understand, he finally (very begrudgingly) gave us our change. And then when we arrived in the town of Liberia, Costa Rica, the attendant got off and didn't let anyone on the bus know, so there were about half a dozen of us on the bus who had missed our stop. Once we all realised, it was too late; particularly for us as we had no chance of getting back to Liberia for our connecting bus.


At the end of the day, we decided to head on to San Jose, and travel to La Fortuna the next morning. More of an inconvenience than anything else: an extra four hours on a bus that we didn't need to be on, and losing out on the pre-paid ticket from Liberia to La Fortuna. The flip side was that we got to see quite a bit of Costa Rica - albeit from a bus window...


Arriving in San Jose as darkness fell, we decided on a hotel with another couple we had met on the bus and checked in, headed out for dinner, and for an early night. First thing in the morning, we got a bus to La Fortuna.


It wasn't until a few days later, however, that we realised that when we were out for dinner that night, someone broke into our hotel room and stole a number of things from our room - most importantly though, three bank cards. To date, about $3,000 worth of transactions have been attempted (that we know of...the banks say they're still processing some more transactions), of which about $1,000 were immediately blocked by the banks. It will be interesting to see how this one pans out with the banks and travel insurance...hopefully all goes well.