You Say Granayyyda! I Say Granada!

I’ve been sitting on this blog post for some time now. Needless to say I’m extremely happy to finally begin writing it all the while being stuck next to some fat smelly guy on my left and the drink cart to my right with the silly ass airline attendant spilling soft drinks on me.

In order for me to stay in Costa Rica legally (wink wink) I need to do a visa run every 90 days. Basically I need to be out of the country for a total of 72 hours or 3 whole days. Lots of people have ways of getting around this like paying a resident Tico with connections at the Nicaraguan or Panamanian boarder to get the necessary stamps for another 90 days.

If you don’t do a visa run every 90 days you stand a very good chance of getting deported.

O in case you are still wondering about how the fat guy next to me is doing….he’s licking his chocolate covered fingers up and down. He’s also using his shirt as a napkin. Tasty ain’t it? I thought so. Yuck!

Back to the adventure. If you are stopped without your passport or copies of your passport with your stamp you run the gamble of getting locked up in the local smell hole, no Chase we ain’t talking about your shoes. They hold you there until someone can show up with your passport and prove you have been out of the country in the last 90 days. If you can’t show proof then you get deported and you cannot return to Costa Rica for 5 years.

Knowing that I thought it would be prudent to get out of the country when the time arrived. I ended up choosing Granada, Nicaragua as our destination. Ms. Ullrich and I forced ourselves to make this a non-surfing escapade. If you are wondering, yes there are plentiful of juice empty waves to be had in Nicaragua.

The plan was to drive to Liberia, which is about an hour away from Tamarindo, and hop a bus bound for Nicaragua. Total cost for the bus was a whopping $12 bucks. From Liberia to Granada was about a 3-hour drive.

Once we got to the boarder we had to unload from the bus and get our exit stamp from Costa Rica and hop back on the bus to head into Nicaragua.

The Nicaragua boarder is notorious for being an extremely long wait. Thankfully for us it only took an hour. But I’ve heard that during Easter it can take up to 8 hours to get over the boarder. Efficiency at it’s finest huh? Below are a couple of pictures I took at the station.

So we arrived at the Nicaraguan boarder with no problems. At the boarder their security is airtight. I think the slack jawed TSA agents I had to deal with this morning could take a page out of the Nicaraguan immigration services book.

Get this, when you go to customs (picture a run down building that hasn’t been painted in ages and lunch room tables setup) they pick you randomly using a stoplight. Well it looked like a stoplight. You give your passport to the customs agent and while he looks it over you are required to push down on a button that triggers the stoplight. If it’s red you get searched. If it’s green you go bananas and run circles around the security guy thanking the Virgin Mary! Why? Because you now have the go ahead to enter the Land of the Sandinistas. my friend! A picture of my gamble with fate are below.

We got to Granada and checked into our pad. I figured I’d splurge a little bit and got us a room at one of the nicer hotels in the town. It was pretty sweet for $150 we got a private pool, Jacuzzi, and a king size bed. Costa Ricans are poor but compared to the Nicaraguans they are like the oil sheiks of Central America. So you can imagine how far $150 will go there. Below are some pictures of the pad.

Granada has a lot of charm and plenty of sites to see. Unfortunately we were lame ducks and decided to just chill around town. I highly recommend doing a little more than what we did. There is a ton of eco-tour stuff to do and a massive volcano near by that’s supposed to be breath taking. Below are some pictures I took around town

Ok this picture is pretty interesting. This is a picture of a kid holding a bag of some type of liquid. Can you guess what it is? It’s Coca Cola. You’ll see this all over Nicaragua and frequently Costa Rica. Because bottles are so valuable they pour the soft drinks into little plastic bags and chill them with a straw hanging out for your drinking pleasure.

Hey Mr. Fat SMELLY Guy to the left of me, wake your silly ass up it’s time for your wet willy!

7 Responses to “You Say Granayyyda! I Say Granada!”

1. Bennassi says:

   January 2, 2009 at 6:20 pm

   Naw, my man you got it all wrong, fat boys drool-snore-choking next to you appreciate a good ol purple-nerple, trust me and try it next time.
2. Sarah says:

   January 2, 2009 at 7:10 pm

   dude, china decided to unblock your blog a week before i leave the country. >.<

   i have catching up to do. looks like fun!!

   cheers,
   sarah
3. Kristina says:

   January 4, 2009 at 3:28 am

   The bag-o-frozen-juice is way better…mmmmm…
4. Dennis Janssen says:

   January 31, 2010 at 2:36 am

   yeah those frozen bags are awesome…and cheap! i only drove through there heading to san juan del sur, but i hear if you get the chance go to the island in lake nicaragua. really cool hiking!
5. Angela says:

   June 23, 2010 at 5:08 pm

   Hello,
   Nice post, very helpful! Can you tell me what bus company you used to get from Liberia to Granada?

   Thanks!
   Angela
6. admin says:

   June 23, 2010 at 5:32 pm

   Check out the NicaBus or TicoBus lines.
7. Judd says:

   September 1, 2010 at 9:35 pm

   Thanks for the info. I am headed to the boarder now!