A Lesson Learned the Hard Way

Well, we made it to Nicaragua in one piece. Yes, we were robbed. Yes, we were lost. Yes, we cried. But we made it safe and sound and found our Hotel Tortuga Booluda (The Lazy Turtle) and plan to take it easy for the rest of the night.

Here is the story: We woke up at 2 am after a two hour "nap" and took a taxi to the TransNica bus station. We left at 3:30 am in a very comfortable situation. We each had an entire row on the bus which was comfortably air-conditioned. We each took two Benadryl tablets to knock us out, and I slept soundly until we arrived at the Nicaragua/Costa Rica border at 8:30. That was chaos as there was no organization and we ended up handed our passport to our bus driver, blindly, hoping that because everyone else was doing it everything would turn out alright. And it did. $8 to cross the border. I changed 50,000 colónes (half of what I brought) and I later found out that I should have changed it all because there are no places other than the border that change Costa Rican colónes to Nicaraguan córdobas. Well shucks.

We arrived in Managua and decided that we needed to go buy tickets for our return trip to San José on Friday. Guess what. Our worries were confirmed and there is no bus service on Good Friday. Sorry family, but I won´t be able to make it home until Saturday night at 9:00 pm. I am so sorry for my bad planning skills. We have tickets for the executive bus at 1:30 pm. We spent too much money on those tickets, and as we were counting up what we had left, we realized that we had only been given $70 worth of córdoba instead of the $110 we gave the trader. Stupid gringas. Targets as big as skyscrapers. Meg was very, very upset because she is already on a tight budget as it is. For some reason I was not as angry as I should have been, but now I am pissed because my debit card has a f%&$ing hold on it, so I can´t even get any more money. We´ll see how that turns out.

We got on a little, hot microbus to Leon and wandered around trying to find our hotel. After getting caught in an absurdly slow-moving mass of people in a religious succession, we finally made it and took nice, long... bucket baths :) Now, we´re in Leon central about to eat, call our loved ones, and try to get the whole thing sorted out.

Lesson Learned: Ellen is still a young person.