KAOSTIC

This last week has been extremely crazy! Lets start from when we got the car running in Costa rica sometime earlier this week. The day we recieved the car back from the mechanic we found out that the title for the car had been lost over the last 9 months in Costa Rica. This we knew would cause huge problems crossing the 6 or 7 boarders that lay ahead of us on our path back to the States. We also had no permit to be in Costa Rica, and the cars registration from the states was now 9 months expired. To say the least the car had not one thing legal about it in Costa Rica. We decided to bust it to the boarder and hope for some kind of miracle to get us through, even though we knew that there would be over a thosand dollars in fines and almost no way to get it into Nicaragua with out a title. We feared driving during the day because there are so many police check on the roads of Costa Rica, so we drove at night and hid out in some crazy places during the days. we avoided most the road blocks along the way except for one right before the boarder. The feeling was horrible as the cops questioned and asked for reasons why we had no paper work what so ever. To make matters worse, shawny some how entered the country with out recieving an entrance stamp into the country. The cops seemed more occupied by the fact that Shawny had no stamp then the car being illegal. We waited things out and they told us to take care of stuff at the boarder, which they reconfirmed would cost 1500 dollars to get the car out of the country.

As we went throught the steps of recieving our exit stamps on our passports we knew that getting the car out of the country would not be an easy task with armed gaurds everywhere, and no possible way to slip the car through the cracks. This did´nt deture us from trying though we hoped in the car and skipped the vehicle office in hopes that we could figure a way out with out them checking the car for the proper papers. As we aproached the exit gate a few cops stopped us to inspect the car for who knows what. They said the car looked weird and that we needed to open the hood. they looked under the hood and deemed the car ok. we proceeded on to the last gaurd before entering into Nicaragua. when we reached him he asked for our exit papers. We played dumb for a while and finally started flashing some bills in hopes that he would take the money and let us move on, but as soon as we showed him the money he walked to the gate and closed it, got on his phone and went into his booth. At this point we all felt doomed, the cars and our future looked bleek. We sent Ryan to the office to try and smooth things over but it just got more intense. We were holding up the line to get out of the country, there was a line of angry truckers behind us and no way to turn around. We were stuck with the gaurd calling for back up. just when we thought all was lost, a pesky boarder pirate who had been trying to rip us off earlier stepped in and did some negotiating with the boarder gaurd for us. after pooling all of our money together we came up with roughtly 140.00 dollars. To our suprise the Gaurd took the bribe and opened up the gate we were free of Costa Rica, with a whole new set of problems and a renewed hope that we could figure out a way to jimmy the sytem and get into to any country down here.