Bus-ferry-taxi-immigration-taxi-bus-bus-bus-ferry-bus

As I am pretty far behind, in order to kind of catch up I have also taken this entry from Laura´s blog.

Bus-ferry-taxi-immigration-taxi-bus-bus-bus-ferry-bus. That was the 16-hour mess we endured to get from Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua, to Santa Teresa, Costa Rica.  We woke up bright and early at 4:30am to catch the bus to a ferry to a taxi to the border.  Most of our border crossings have been quick and painless, but the Nicaragua-Costa Rica border is by FAR the biggest cluster-f*ck ever  (excuse my french).  Not only were the lines around the block and took forever, but there is about a full kilometer of neutral zone between the two that you have to walk.  Thats not fun when you have a 20 kilo bag on your back, let me tell you.  It took way longer than necessary and after suffering through that we still had a taxi ride, 4 different buses, and a ferry to take to get to our end destination.

the line for customs at the Costa Rica border - you can't really tell but it goes around the corner

The best part of the day was when we finally arrived via ferry, we needed to take one more 2-hour bus to get to Santa Teresa.  We dropped our bags off at the bus and then asked them (in Spanish) if we would have enough time to go to the bathroom before the bus left.  They told us we would, no problem, and we ran off to go quickly before the long bus ride.  On our way out, we were all joking at how funny it would be if the bus had left without us while we were in the bathroom.  The joking quickly became a reality when the bus was NOWHERE to be seen and had left us WITH all of our bags in the bus!!  Some guys that we had met on the boat saw this happen and luckily had a car, so all 9 of us piled into their car and took off chasing the bus honking and flashing our lights trying to get the bus to pull over.  It was honestly one of the most hilarious moments of my life.  Finally after cutting off the bus, the driver pulled over and allowed us on.  When we asked him what the hell happened and WHY he left us, he just said “sorry” so nonchalantly…gotta love Central America.

The good news is that all of that fiasco was worth it.  Santa Teresa is beautiful and has the most amazing beaches!

Since I was injured and couldn’t go into the water, Chloe and I bought paddleball to play on the beach.  We didn’t get too far into the game before one of the local dogs joined in and it became more like monkey-in-the-middle with the dog.  Every time we would mess up, the dog would run, grab the ball and then want to play with us.  So we would spend the next 5 minutes chasing the dog trying to get the ball back before starting paddleball again.  It was a futile effort as the dog won most of the time, and the majority of our paddleball game was spent chasing Diva (that was the name we gave her, because I swear we saw her in a different collar earlier in the day).  Turns out there were two dogs who were sisters.

We spent 3 nights and 2 days in Santa Teresa before heading to our next destination of Monteverde – the zip lining capital of Costa Rica!! (Okay I don’t know if that’s true or not, I just made it up).