Peñas Blancas: The Border You've Never Heard About

Driving north for an hour from Liberia, Costa Rica, passing skinny cows in postcard-green meadows, one wonders if civilization is ever going to reemerge. Then the taxi driver slams on his brakes. He comes to a smoking halt behind a row of eighteen wheeler trucks at a standstill spanning as far as the eye can see, inching forward like a row of dinosaurs migrating north.

The driver makes the sign of the cross and then whips into traffic going the wrong way, laying on his horn, and swerves into a ditch to avoid being hit head-on by an oncoming car. The taxi tilts onto two wheels, sending the driver's little plastic dashboard saint jiggling like a mad Hula girl, and then recovers, squeezing back into the center of the highway just in time to avoid a farmer driving a donkey cart. We whiz past miles of unmoving trucks like this until we reach a shoddy outpost of concrete and chain-link where guards in black fatigues with M16s signal for us to stop. Welcome to the border.

The border at Peñas Blancas, or La Frontera as the locals call it, is the only official entry point between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. It's considered the gateway between North and South America along the Inter-American Highway that spans from Panama to Mexico, and goes all the way to the tip of Argentina as the Pan American Highway.

A jaunt over the border is at best a sweaty and shuffling two-hour inconvenience, at worst a full-day Dantean undertaking. You take your place in a queue of hundreds of sweltering backpackers, bug-bitten and hungover, Nicaraguans returning home for the holidays from their jobs swinging machetes in the fields and expats doing the "border shuffle" -- the term for leaving the country and immediately turning around and reentering just to get another 90 day travel visa. They fan themselves with the morning edition of La Nación and inch forward to get their immigration papers stamped at a glassed-in counter.

"Mango mango mango! Se vende mango!" A fruit vendor with a basket on her head shouts over the din.

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