I am well and happy, happy our trucks are in Costa Rica very safe and sound, no damage, no robbers!!! They are however still in the compound, we are back at the hotel after a very hot and sticky day at the dock trying to get them out!
We arrived at the port this morning; soon after 10 the boat was docked so, we asked the customs 'could we start the paperwork?', the answer was no we couldn't until the paperwork on the boat had been done. also we needed road tax and insurance documents; we explained that yes we knew this, and also that yes we knew we would have to pay for it. However what we did not know was that we had to go to the next town (30 mins away) to buy said document!!!! we asked a taxi driver belonging to an American couple if he would use his radio to get another taxi for us, which he did, turned out to be the same guy who had taken us from the hotel to the dock. He proved to be a great help, even rang his own insurance to see if they could help us, they could not, but he took us to the place that the custom's lady had told us to go to, waited for us and made sure we were in the correct place so this was quite quick. back at the port we were not so lucky, customs lady still could not help us, we had to go find the agents who were dealing with the boat, this proved not too difficult, but he spoke very fast; L + M found him very hard to understand, but did understand that it would be 2 hours before the trucks would be off the boat. It is by now just after 1pm we are very hot very sticky and beginning to get fed up, we found the coolest place to sit and had a snack and drink. Around 2pm Les went for a walk and found that the trucks were off the boat, we then had to go to the agents office which was an air-conditioned container, lovely, which we enjoyed whilst they photo copied all the necessary documents, then back to the customs lady and with the help of one of the agents she checked all the photo copied documents matched the originals, she then filled in a hand written document but was unable to find most of the information from the documents she had. we are getting hotter and stickier by the minute, Les took his shirt off. Then, the best part of the day. One of the agents who spoke english and was by this time helping the customs lady who could not understand we were English, lived in England yet on our passport says "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" good job Les and M have spanish. Anyway then the guy asked Les had anyone said anything about his T-shirt? Les laughed (as he does) the guy then said they would not let him go collect his truck in shorts and sandals!!!!! I truly believed the guy was joking. He was not!!! I had flip flops on but I did have long trousers. So when they had finally done the paper work customs lady got her high visibility vest on, she the agent and myself went to go to the trucks; I had to put a high visibility vest on and a hard hat, which would not fit on top of my sunhat (how silly did I look), but I was not allowed to go through the gate to the port for ages (standing in the hot sun) cause of the flip flops!!!! I have no shoes in Costa Rica says I, the agent chap said he would drive me in his car, this was ok and saved a long walk in the hot sun. I was very relieved and happy to see both trucks 100%, then back to the customs office for more paperwork but I cannot drive the truck off without shoes!!!! AND THEN their computer crashed, its closing time and we have to go back tomorrow!!!!
We do each have, at great expense, a "Carnet de Passages en Douane" this is an international document for the temporary importation of vehicles to which Costa Rica subscribes, this document takes less then 5mins to stamp and sign has all the information with regard to the vehicle that all the countries have agreed they need. However Costa Rica has promised to use modern equipment to speed things along !!!!!!
So I am back in my hotel bedroom, just had a lovely cool shower, washed my sticky clothes, written this and now I am going to watch "Forsyte Saga"
No comments:
Post a Comment