Rosi Cornwell
So I had seen a few videos, and someone even told us the day before about something along these lines happening to them.
You don’t even think it will happen to you. But here I am, $50 dollars down ( okay it could have been much more), now have a stamp in my passport, and cannot travel back through Nicaragua from Guatemala… As if I’m some sort of criminal!
So after being picked up at 4am and being in the crammed mini bus for 2 hours, we stopping at the Honduran border and I watched the guy look through the pages of my passport repeatedly (because there was no entry stamp)… So then I had to go down to the office with our bus driver.. (Thank god he spoke English and was very nice), It didn’t make any difference that I had my entry ticket with a stamp or my boarding pass. They also asked if I had another passport, because this one only had 1 stamp in because its new… Like why would I carry my old passport with me… I was told I can get a stamp for 5 days and if I wanted to come back to Nicaragua (which we do) then I would have to fly in via Belize or Mexico within these 5 days. This is obviously not what I wanted to do, because we are due to volunteer in Guatemala for a month!
I really just wanted to do all I could to leave this place and get my stamp, even if it involves getting a flight to Costa Rica and meeting Hollie there.
If there is anything I can say ‘Thankfully’ about, then it is the fact I had Edwardo the shuttle bus driver helping to deal with the situation. He spoke Spanish and English thank god, and said this happens a lot. Or was he in on this, and did he pocket that money.. Who knows.
I guess you don’t think to ensure that staff in the airport do their jobs properly, but life sometimes is about learning lessons the hard way. At this point though, when anything bad happens I just think ‘well at least it will make a good story for the blog’.
Oh and all of this happened before 8am.
We left the Honduras border and when we arrived at the El Salvador border everyone got their passports checked and when it came to mine they asked if I had paid and if I had a receipt. I explained that no I did not have a receipt , because they told me to hand the money to the bus driver outside of the airport because of cameras…so they are hardly going to give me an official receipt for some currupt scam. I was worried I would have to hand more money over, but I didn’t.
The final border at Guatemala was the easiest and quickest, but they still had my passport for longer than the others!
Aftr 18 hours we arrived at our hostel, Hollie had to run after the mini bus as she left her bum bag with all her worldly belongings in… She caught up with it thank god. Much to our delight, we had a cosy little room, shared with one other, no bunk beds and it was cool and cosy for the night before we start volunteering and live in a tent.
