Aero: Kelly Bailey – Costa Rica 2016 – Travel
Creative Commons Image via The LEAF Project
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I have left the United States once before this trip so I was prepared for the long airport lines and running to catch flights. Someone always gets held up by security at some point. When flying to Costa Rica we had little to trouble. Same when we left Costa Rica to enter Nicaragua. The airports in both countries were full of hustling people from all over the world. When we were in the united states I noticed a lot of service people flying. This wasn’t the case in Costa Rica because they have no standing army.
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Kelly Bailey
When we got to the border of Nicaragua by bus we had to get out of the van and stand in line with our passports to be granted entry. Once we all climbed back in the van we were then stopped many more times by immigration police then Nicaraguan military where they checked that everyone’s passport was stamped. When standing in line we were approached by Cuban beggars. These trapped runaways were not being granted access into or out of Nicaragua.
Then when we tried to reenter Costa Rica we got to experience what it feels like to be trapped at the border for awhile. Our whole group besides the Costa Rican tour guides we stopped and not let back into the country because we did not have copies of our plane tickets with us. The immigration officer that was stamping passports wanted extravagant proof that anyone leaving Nicaragua to go to Costa Rica was in fact planning on leaving Costa Rica if they were not a citizen.
After a lot of arguing and sitting around the officer finally agreed to stamp our passports only giving us another three-day pass to be in Costa Rica. These precautions were probably a result of the number of Nicaraguans that illegally go to Costa Rica to work.
When reentering the United States there was many more lines to wait in and lot of paper work about what we were bringing back into the country. Luckily it has never been me, yet some one in my group always get slowed down by extra questioning. Two of the students traveling with wrote on one of the forms that they had recently been to a farm. So, security pulled them aside and cleaned their shoes before letting them proceed to our connecting flight.
Kelly Bailey
LEAF Contributor
ML@FLCC: Costa Rica 2016
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