Bureaucracy

Perhaps this will be more of a vent than a post, but you can always skip it.  Also, I promise this will be my last post until I return stateside, at which time I’ll post another travelogue on the trip through Honduras, Guatemala, Chiapas and Oaxaca.  I did spend a lot of time this week looking for places to go and have come up with a travel plan.  For anyone interested in playing “Where in the world is that crazy old gringo,” I’ll put my intended itinerary (and “plan B”) at the bottom.

My first complaint is domestic and relates to Wisconsin and the new voter ID law.  With the new law, absentee voting via the internet is no longer possible and I left too early to personally pick up a ballot for the spring elections.  Mail to Nicaragua is too slow to turn-around fast enough, especially in my remote location, so mailing the ballot wouldn’t work.  Susan’s trip’s timing also did not work out for hand-carrying a ballot here.  The only way to vote now was to make a (minimum) 9-hour round trip to Managua to the US embassy in order to vote.  If it had been the recall, I would have done it, but for local elections (apologies to all my former school board colleagues!), the price was a bit high for me.  Thus I became one of the disenfranchised voters for the spring elections which should be occurring just about as I write this.

The second complaint deals with immigration and the annoyance of bad timing.  When I arrived in Nicaragua, I received a 90 day visitor’s permit, which seemed perfect because I would be leaving Nicaragua in about 86-87 days.  However, with the intent of making border crossings easier and more efficient, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala (and El Salvador as well, but I’m not going there) have a common visa system.  Therefore, leaving Nicaragua for Honduras within 90 days is not really leaving since I’m going to another CA-4 country—I have to be out of all those countries within 90 days.  So…that led to a trip to the immigration office in Ocotal the end of March.  BUT… I made the mistake of going a couple of weeks before my departure, thinking it best to get things in order before the last minute.  The good news was that they said it could be done in Ocotal without going to Managua or sending my passport to Managua (both of which I’d heard might be necessary), the bad news was that a) it costs C$500+ (about US$ 25) to renew the card and b) it can only be renewed within a 3-day window right before it expires (they are not really trying to optimize convenience!).  The guy at immigration told me I could come back the Monday after Easter (April 9, my last full day in Sabana Grande, and not a day that I wanted to be running errands), that the office would be open and they could renew it then.  However, at home I looked at the calendar more closely and saw that Monday the 9th is actually 4 days before expiration, so I was nervous the whole time waiting for April 9.  I spent Semana Santa (no work, so lots of time) working on alternate scenarios in case I failed in Ocotal on Monday:

• Given a failure in Ocotal, the best-case scenario I could imagine was to see if I could renew it at the border crossing the next day, and if the answer was “yes,” then simply take a few minutes extra for the paperwork and accept the (hopefully) short delay the next morning.  (Although if this were practical, one would have hoped to have been told of this option the first time I was in the office.)
  
•  If border stations can’t do the renewal, the next best scenario seemed to be going to an immigration office in Honduras, but I really wanted to avoid doing business in Tegucigalpa (the guide books say it may be half a day or more there, plus finding a place to stay, plus all the taxis), but internet searches failed in trying to find out exactly where other immigration offices might be in Honduras, although I did find sites that said that renewal could be done “in any immigration office.”  So if this were indeed what I ended up doing, I’d have to ask at the border where the offices are (and hope they know where and hope there is at least one somewhere along my route).  If necessary, I could also take a little side trip to an office.
  
• If it appears too difficult or time-consuming or there are too many roadblocks to accomplish a renewal with at most a couple of days delay, my last option is to “make a run for the border”—Mexico, that is (hence, a “plan B”).  I’ll just have to take buses all day and crash at night and get to Mexico before the tourist card expires—certainly possible, but not much fun.  (I also briefly toyed with a completely alternate route via San Salvador and Guatemala City, which is probably the fastest way to Mexico, but it involved arriving in San Salvador late in the evening and catching a 5:30 bus the next morning.)

And after all that sweating, it turned out that the 3 day thing was not all that important, BUT when I arrived, he needed photocopy of my passport and entry stamp, which, of course, I had securely in my wallet in case of surprise immigration inspections.  So I handed him the copies (full-size, but cut down to actual passport size to fit better in the wallet). BUT he needed them on full 8.5x11 paper, so I had to walk to downtown Ocotal to get photocopies.  Upon returning I filled out a long form asking for all kinds of information such as names and places of birth of my parents and my wife (but interestingly, nothing about where I was staying in Nicaragua), handed over my money and was expecting a nice little piece of paper, BUT his response was that I could pick up my passport on Friday—5 days—has to go to Managua!  So I should have been sweating for another reason…  I got my money back (except for 5 Cordoba, which is the price to fill out a form) and walked off with my passport heading to Honduras in the morning without an extension to my tourist card.  So I’ll be following the bulleted list above and hopefully stop at bullet 1 or at worse, bullet 2.  I’ll let you know how it turns out when I post again from home.

And, I’ll add a final, completely unrelated comment just to demonstrate what a compressed world we live in, not only spatially, but also temporally.  I was getting out of the shower yesterday morning (Easter, 2012) in rural Nicaragua about 7 and the radio was on.  On came the song “In the Summertime,” in English.  Only those of you considerably past 50 will likely remember the song, if you do at all, as I’m not sure it was as popular on this side of the Atlantic.  I think it was Mungo Jerry who sang it and it was hugely popular in Austria the summer of 1970 when I was there with a high-school group.  It was played at least hourly in every discotheque in Salzburg!  It brought back a flood of fond memories from my first overseas trip, so I hope that’s a good omen of things to come on the bus travels northward.  So this is signing off until I’m back home…

                                                                        

Tentative itinerary:

April 10:  Leave Sabana Grande and get to La Esperanza, Honduras—5 different buses plus a colectivo—Sarah are you jealous?

April 11:  Bus to Gracias, Honduras (only about 2 hr);  spend day and night there  (maybe take a pick-up truck if the bus schedule isn’t favorable)

April 12, 13:  Bus to Copán Ruinas (about 4 hrs);  spend almost 2 days/2 nights there (a UN World Heritage site)

April 14, 15:  5:30 am minibus to Antigua, Guatemala;  spend 1.5 days/2 nights there

April 16:  Early bus to Panajachel, Guatemala (Lake Atitlán in Guatemalan highlands);  spend day and night there

April 17, 18:  6:00 am inibus Panajachel-San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas;  1.5 days/1 night in San Cristóbal

April 18/19:  Overnight bus San Cristóbal to Oaxaca;  11 pm to 10 am  (Sorry, Sarah, 1st class—but not lujo!)

April 19, 20, 21:  3 days/nights in Oaxaca

April 22:  Morning flight w/ Chicago arrival just after 8 pm (and if lucky, on the Van Galder bus for Madison at 9:00)

April 23:  To Platteville in the morning

Plan B:

April 10:  Leave Sabana Grande and get to La Esperanza, Honduras—same as before;  simply can’t get much farther

April 11:  Bus to Copán Ruinas, Honduras and spend the night (hopefully catch about 2 hours of sightseeing)

April 12:  5:30 am minibus but get off in Guatemala City and spend the night (again, maybe 2 hours of sightseeing)

April 13 (the day my card expires):  Early bus from Guatemala City, arriving the Mexican border about 3 pm.  Perhaps make is as far as Comitan de Dominguez (I’d like to get away from the border ASAP).

8 days to figure out what to do in Chiapas and Oaxaca.