Two Crazy days on a tica bus!

I wanted to document these two days just to show my utter insanity! I decided that if Mark was going to come all the way out to see me for only 9 days, the least i could do for him was to take him back to costa rica for his flight. This invloved us catching the Ticabus from Rivas to San Jose and then me taking it right back up again to Managua the next day.

We had to leave Ometepe at 5am to catch a ferry and arrived early in Rivas for our bus. In a stroke of good fortune, we ran into a lovely kiwi couple, judy and rex, who we had originally met at the crater lake in granada and so had some companionship for breakfast and for the wait for the bus which was, of course, late! We would need all the good cheer we could muster that day as the border crossing took ages, even with the assistance of the Ticabus staff and the journey from the border to San Jose took 3 hours longer than it should have. We finally arrived into san jose at 6.30 (13 hours after we left Ometepe!) and, along with the kiwis and a danish couple decided to get cabsa to a nearby backpackers (Mark and i had booked the guesthouse next door) This in itself was a rigmarole as the cabbies all tried to rip us off at the bus station and wouldn't back down despite vigorous argument from me so we went and flagged two down in the street and asked for them to be metered.

I got into a cab with the danish couple, gave the cabbie the address and even showed him it on a map. We got stuck in loads of traffic so i negociated an off meter price but it soon became apparent that the cabbie had NO idea where we were going!

I repeated the address to him about 6 times and asked him if he knew the city. he kept saying yes but was clearly clueless and, in the end, i realised we were over the wrong side of the city and had to direct him back via landmarks! When we finally arrived he had the cheek to try and charge more,saying it had taken him longer than he expected!!! er.... not really my fauly mate!! luckily my spanish arguing skills extended to pointing this out so we got it even cheaper than we'd agreed in the end!

To take away the bad day, we all treated ourselves to dinner at a top end Argentinian steak house and i have to say it was rather lovely to have proper napkins and nice wine with a fat juicy rare steak! (damn the comeback of the parasite diet which meant i couldn't eat it all!)

So, today, i got up at 4.40am, saw mark off in a cab to the airport and repeated the whole bloody thing backwards, including an even worse border crossing that took 2 hours and was highly annoying! I have ended up in Managua, total dive of a capital, but at least i have had the chance to write up my blog and finally get up to date with it! Tomorrow I head toLeon which is supposed to be agem of a city, so fingers crossed for the beauty ofNicaragua to continue!