Two nights in Costa Rica...

Nov 28, 2013 Managua Nicaragua to Liberia Costa Rica 215km.

We started the day off at a decent hour.  We decided to divert off the Panamerican Highway for a bit avoiding driving through Managua.  We cruised beside Lake Nicaragua heading for the border.  It was very windy with lots of white caps on the lake.

Huge wind farms along the lake

We arrived at the border early, bracing for a long ordeal.  Other riders have said this crossing can take 4-5 hours.  2hrs+ to get out of Nicaragua and another 3hrs to enter Costa Rica.   As soon as we pulled up on the Nicaragua side we were approached by a teacher and his family on Sabbatical from Yellowknife Canada. They were staying in Costa Rica but had to leave every three months to renew their visas.
Got the passports stamped.  So far so good. Now we needed to find the guy in the orange shirt to stamp our bikes out.  Supposedlyhe  was just wandering around.   We fluked out as he approached us after just a few minutes. We also needed to find a special police officer to check our papers before leaving that was also wandering around. Found the officer and all done in about 20 min.  So far so good.
Off to the Costa Rica side.  We arrived just a busload of people did.  After about 20 min in line we got our passports stamped in.  The easy part. Now for the bikes. Started the process at aduanas and about 10 min in the guy just stands up and walks out of the office, locking the door.  Someone behind in line said it was the end of his shift.  Haha, great!  About 10 min later a new guy showed up.  More photocopies and we were off to the second aduanas office.

 Here we found evidence of other travelers in the form of ride report stickers. We added ours on the bottom right.

At this second office all our information is entered into the computer.  We met some riders traveling 2up on a bmw 1200 from Quebec and also Jorge riding from Mexico to Venezuela on an 800 bmw.  Together we worked through this border.  We purchased mandatory insurance for $32 each.  On the wall beside the stickers somebody had wrote "worst border ever!"  All in all it took about 4.5 hrs!

We headed for Liberia for the night.  We stayed near the center and enjoyed pizza and beer.

Not bad for $30 a night

Things are a bit more developed here in Costa Rica. However, Costa Rica is incredibly expensive.  For comparison gas is about $1.60 a litre!

Nov 28, 2013 Liberia Costa Rica to Piedras Blancas, Costa Rica 400km.
We left in the morning unsure of how far we would get today.  There were countless beaches and many white people living here.

Large ships in the Pacific Ocean.

Rain clouds threatened all day, however, we didn't bother to put on our rain suits.  It was too warm!  1/2hr of driving would just dry things out again.   That strategy worked fine until the last storm.  We got absolutely soaked!  It was getting dark so we pulled into the first hotel we saw.  Again $30 a night....

This time the hotel had 5 beds in random arrangement.  Lots of room to dry all of our stuff.

Parking inside of the hotel, just outside of our rooms!

This hotel was interesting... since it was raining we stuck around.  We were the only ones staying in that hotel that night.  They powered up the bar for us. Nobody came the rest of the night.. The bar was two stories and could probably house 150 people.  We had a couple of beers and checked emails (only place wifi worked).  The music was loud and the disco lights made it hard to work on the computer. 

Just another day....

Into Panama tomorrow.  We still have a long ways to go in order to arrive in (and be ready to leave) Panama City by Dec 5th.