Main street in Fortuna

I can’t sleep – thinking about all sorts of stuff. The alarm goes off far too early but we are ready. The bus turns out to be an excellent journey. Aside from the views of amazingly rugged forested mountains (a continuation of Monteverde), it takes us directly to San Jose airport without hassle by 10:30am giving us plenty of time to catch our flight.
Inside we hand over just about all of our remaining cash to pay the departure tax We have $40 US left between us and the departure tax comes conveniently to $37 US, leaving us a few dollars to buy a coffee. The time goes slowly. Eventually as we near Houston the captain announces that a storm there has complete shutdown the airport and since he is low on fuel he doesn’t have time to wait in the air. We are forced to head back south to McAllen, a tiny airport on the Mexican border. This, we quickly realise is the end of our smoothly-running schedule and the beginning of an extra North American leg to our trip courtesy of Continental.
At McAllen (airport of the year 1996, but not used to dealing with large influxes of passengers) the plane is refuelled. Unfortunately, regulations specify that all passengers and hold baggage must be taken off the plane first and, to satisfy US Customs, pass immigration fully. Since we have been in transit in America only, we have never needed to go through US Customs till now. The planned half an hour stopover becomes an epic two hour struggle.
The US Customs are notoriously strict and seeing Al and I at the back of the queue with our beards, sweaty clothes and dirty rucksacks they must think Christmas has come (from Costa Rica too). They open and completely empty our bags, check all our duty free bottles, deoderant and toiletries, tablets and pills, including, in the process, Al’s dirty underwear bag and all the presents we have carefully bought and wrapped. Eventually when they begin to suspect we have nothing to hide, we have a joke about never coming back to Texas and then they tell us we have only minutes to get back on the plane. There is no one else around.
The comradely atmosphere between strangers accompanying any such delay in transport is inevitably present here. I also notice that considering the high numbers of Americans present, there is surprisingly little annoyance or whinging at the delay. Perhaps they already appreciate the likely devastation such a storm is wreaking in Houston. Later we see why the airport was closed. A tropical storm with 60 mph winds struck Houston badly and caused a lot of damage: trees on cars, a hotel construction site ruined and electricity off.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 31st, 2004 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Central America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.