We are still sitting here.  Waiting.  Trying to stem our boredom of sitting, waiting for a whole month to get the car released from the clutches of a bureaucratic customs system that refuses to allow foreigners cars into the country after 15 days without paying extortionate import taxes.

On a lighter, less depressing note - Greg is a published author.  For those of you that have given up reading these emails, you can read an exciting summarised version of our first half of our trip then buy his ebook online by going to BEASTLY ADVENTURE.  We have also put some new piccies on the Costa Rican section of our trip!

Puerto Caldera (Costa Rica)

2nd August  - 24th August 2007

So from our last update nearly 3 weeks ago, we are still sitting here, in Puerto Caldera after a lot of desperate phone calls to the Embassy, Head of Customs, Ministry of Tourism and anyone else who is unfortunate to pick up the telephone. 

After coming up against brick wall after brick wall we resorted to tears of absolute frustration.  We were fortunate enough to meet David Jacobs of CWA who was trying to get his ship docked at Puerto Caldera.  David was working with one for the leading P and I clubs (insurance companies) here and his working partner here in Costa Rica, Roberto Jimenez (son of the famous Costa Rican artist Max Jiminez) who lent us one of his translators, Ignacio.  Ignacio would religiously come with us to the port to persue the daily task of talking to the head of customs, talking to the customs lawyer, talking to the Ministry of Tourism, talking to the valuators at the Ministry of farming (they also deal with customs!) or just talking to whoever would listen to our cause.  Meanwhile back in the UK, Alexis’s father, Andrew, valiantly used every waking hour to fight our cause on the international front, contacting the British and Costa Rican Embassy, Ministry of Tourism, Customs and even managing to get through to the President of Costa Rica’s office before letting his fury loose on the British press. 

Eventually, after 3 weeks of public holidays to hinder our cause and bureaucratic and Weasel like (see previous blog!) bureaucracy we were presented with the option to import our car fully into Costa Rica.  We couldn’t receive the number plates as we would have to wait for a year to receive them and we had been told that we could not officially import the Beast as it was right hand drive…  So the option available to the Costa Rican customs authority was the only one available where we had to pay a potentially enormous import duty.  Strange that!  So we asked them to evaluate our car as it was not listed on their Tica system for import costs, so Greg traipsed around with the Ministry of Farming advisers, showed them our car, inside and out, the engine etc and they took photographs.  Greg told them that is was a Land Rover Defender in order to speed up the process but we were still told that we would have to wait 5 days for them to invent a price and then enter it onto the system in order for them to fine us for our shipping company not knowing the Costa Rican law.  So we waited 5 days for them to invent a price.  The Costa Rican import costs are 79% of the perceived resale cost of the vehicle.  So after waiting for a total of three weeks for a result, waiting for a response from the customs office here, paying for a hotel, for a hire car (as we have had to drive back and forward to San Jose – a mere 2 hour drive), for food, we have been told that we have to pay nearly $2000 for our car, OUR CAR, to be purchased back and released from customs to drive around Costa Rica on a full import.  All other 1976 Land Rovers imported into the country have an import value of about $500, we got the astronomical amount because it was big – the Tica link for our vehicle (you pay 79% of their estimated cost (valor importacion))!  The Costa Rican law has no acceptable bendability to allow for a fine to be paid, purely because if you do not pay the import duties they confiscate your car and after a year they sell your car to the highest bidder, contents and all.  I don’t want to say anything but I smell a whiff of corruption there and money going in someone’s back pocket!  See the section on Costa Rican law for further information (all in Spanish) – we can give you a summarised and rather cynical version if you require!

We got the car released from customs and after three hours of paying our taxes, getting the correct paperwork, paying port storage charges, getting a low loader into the port to put the car on the back, we took it to a garage to be repaired.  We discovered that whilst the car has been parked in the port, port workers had decided to steal things from our car and break into our petrol tank.  We discovered the reason that they had broken into the petrol tank when we finally arrived at the garage… they had tried to start the car, when they couldn’t, they thought it had run out of fuel so broke the lock off the tank and put diesel into our petrol tank!  To top all our worries off, we had a bag stolen from our hire car with all the spare parts for the Beast in….what fantastic luck we are having!

It has been very difficult for us to promote Costa Rica after the crap we have been through.  It is a wonderful country with the most amazing and diverse wildlife and the best preservation programmes in the world and some of the nicest people, but it is a third world country aspiring to achieve first world bureaucracy without understanding the rules of the game.

After 4 months of the car being stationary in Costa Rica and in Peru during repairs and being Costa Rican property, being dragged forwards in reverse whilst at Puerto Caldera and having driven on some of the crapest roads in the world in South America with an accumulation of soil, mud and stones the transmission box had become rusty oxidised and has jammed all the gears.  We are at present waiting for our new faithful mechanics to have an overhaul of another part of the engine….. waiting, waiting, waiting.

An enormous thank you to Facebook and our wonderful friends who have been avidly playing Scrabulous against us across the oceans who have managed to keep our sanity and stop us from killing each other when the depression hits hard!  Shame on the national British press though… one of their own is being subjected to corruption, ransom and bureaucratic nightmares and the national press would much rather cover Jordan’s breast implants!  Thank you to our local papers though, the Yorkshire Evening Post and Cambridge Evening News for their continued support with a great story in the paper (and 20,000 webpage hits!) and thank you to our wonderful supporters at home and around the world for all your fantastic emails of support.

Notes on Costa Rica:

• A total of 35,000 people were moved from Costa Rican beaches in the fear that the tsunami from the earthquake in Peru would devastate the beaches of Costa Rica.
• Costa Rica has 2 ports – Puerto Caldera (Pacific) and Puerto Limon (Caribbean).
• If your product, car or otherwise is left at the port for 15 days or more it is considered abandoned and therefore becomes the property of Costa Rica unless import tax is paid to release it.
• In 2005, there were 19,000 cases of Dengue fever in Costa Rica.
• See the section on Costa Rican law for further information (all in Spanish) – we can give you a summarised and rather cynical version if you require!