Bordercrossing to Costa Rica

After being in Nicaragua for almost 3 month it was time to leave for Costa Rica. Luckily I wasn't leaving by myself. Rozsa had decided to come with me to Santa Teresa and Anna was joining us till Rivas from where she was heading to Granada.
Of course my last night at the surfcamp involved some passionfruit mojitos but as we had a long day ahead of us we had decided to leave on the 8:30 shuttle from Playa Maderas. So I enjoyed one last free hangover breakfast with eggs and gallo pinto. Packed my pancake as a snack for the journey and said my goodbyes to everybody. It wasn't easy leaving the camp after over 6 weeks of working there but I was also excited to be back on the road and see new things. But first we had to make our way to Santa Teresa. I knew how to get there but wasn't quite sure if it was possible to get there in a day as the last ferry from Puntarenas to the Nicoya Peninsula was leaving at 5pm. So I figured to just take one step at a time and just stay somewhere overnight in case we can't make it.
So Johannes gave us a ride from the surfcamp to Casa Maderas from where we took a shuttle to San Juan del Sur. Here we probably jumped on the wrong bus which was leaving 30 minutes later as the busdriver told us the other one was going another way. I was a little annoyed by that but decided not to get into it. This 30 minutes won't make us miss the ferry in Puntarenas, right? Also I could use the time to by some rope as new straps for my little backpack in SJDS.
We took that bus to Rivas. Back to that crazy bus station where you can't trust anybody as everybody is just trying to sell you a taxi. Again they told us the next bus to the border was running in an hour but it left almost immediately after we got on it.
The bordercrossing was fairly easy as I had been here before on my visa run a few weeks ago and new exactly where to go. Once we made it over to Costa Rica the bus for Liberia was already waiting and again left right after we got on it. Things seemed to work out fine. Until we made it to Liberia. It was 1:30 by now. From here we had to take the bus to Puntarenas. The next was running at 2:30. According to the one bus driver this was taking 2 hours. According to another it was 3 hours. So all we could do was hoping the first one was right so we would make it in time for the ferry at 5. We met Laura at the bus stop, a girl who was also going to Santa Teresa. She was Colombian living in Costa Rica. Funny thing was that she came over to asking us how to get there. We told her what we knew and traveled together from now on.
It would have been a pleasant surprise if the bus would have made it to Puntarenas in the promised 2h. But unfortunately the second bus driver was right - we made it to Puntarenas at exactly 5:30pm. Half an hour to late - maybe that half an hour we lost due to the wrong bus in SJDS? ;)
But luckily there was another ferry running at 8:30pm. This one just didn't have a bus waiting on the other side bringing us to Santa Teresa. We decided to find a restaurant with WIFI to figure out what to do next.
Turned out hotels in Puntarenas were really expensive and as we all just wanted to get to Santa Teresa we decided to go for the last ferry and pay a taxi taking us from there.
We spend the time waiting for the ferry in the restaurant with greasy hangover food while Laura told us the story of her life. She was so funny and open hearted. It was fun listening to her and it definitely made the waiting less annoying!
The ferry ride was kind of interesting as it was completely dark and you couldn't really make out where we were going. The following taxi drive was pretty crazy and fast but still it was 11:30pm when we finally arrived at our hostel. This 14hour journey was a nice welcome back in the world of traveling :)Read more