Welcome to Effing Costa Rica, Land of Hospitality!

Note: Some folks here in Florida asked me to repost this story. Here you go guys.


Have you ever spent any significant time in a jail in San Jose, Costa Rica? Well, now you can check that off your bucket list, because I’ve done it and will tell you all about it. You know, to save you the trip.

When my wife’s brother asked me to tag along on a fishing trip to Costa Rica with some friends, I jumped at the opportunity. What a nice long weekend it would be, fishing for the elusive Marlin along the best waters in the world for saltwater billfish.

We arrive in Costa Rica on Wednesday evening and we get in line to go through Customs. No problemo. I've been through customs in dozens of countries all around the world. I've always prided myself on my innocent face and sympatico karma that makes me glide through international borders like a greased pig on a frozen pond.

Oh, but my cockiness caught up with me with a vengeance. I, brilliant contrarian that I am, get into a slightly longer line at customs that I believe will actually run faster based on the fact that the silver-haired customs agent checking passaportes (as they call them in Espanol) is dressed very smartly in a nice blazer and is probably more intelligent and speedy than his compadres. I am a world traveller you see, I wink to my friends. I know how to work these lines, eh?

This was mistake number 1, in retrospect.

But let’s back up a mite. Perhaps mistake number 1 was when I returned home from a business trip last year to attend a party for San Antonio Spurs center Steve Kerr, who was retiring from basketball. That party was very fun as I recall, as we all ended up in the pool in our clothes playing, what else? Water basketball with several Spurs players. You may recall that I bragged endlessly about hitting an outside shot against the three-point superstar, making me a three-point superstar..... in water basketball. If this were a TV movie, which it may be you never know, there would now be a close-up of my passport in my back pocket, with pool water flowing over it.

But really, if we want to truthfully trace back to mistake number 1 (there are really so many mistakes, we might have to go all the way back to shortly after my birth when I hit my head on a jeep bumper), it may be when I took Lulu and her friend Dacia (I know, it’s a stripper name but she’s not a stripper) to sushi lunch and announced that I was going to the paradise of Iraq for a few days with Diageo to help administer humanitarian relief to hospitals in the wake of the war, back when it was deemed safe, about 48 hours after we had taken Baghdad.

While I do not regret that trip, as we did provide 90,000 pounds of medical supplies to ailing Iraqi hospitals (and some beer for the troops), the trip had the unfortunate consequence of providing many suspicious-looking visas being stamped into my passaporte. You know, friendly tropical vacation hotspots like Costa Rica don’t welcome cool-faced gringos in wind jackets who frequent Beirut, The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and particularly the recently liberated Republic of Iraq.

So getting back to my mistakes: I end up in the pool with the Spurs where my passaporte gets wet and soggy. That’s mistake number one. Going to Iraq with Diageo was mistake number two (if you don’t count the head-wound on the jeep bumper).

Then not going to the post office to get a new passaporte because mine looks as if it’s been through the spin cycle in the washer before being put in the microwave before being run over by a tractor before being chewed on by a Cherokee squaw….. that was mistake number three.

So there I was, all smart and sassy, picking the silver-haired sharp dressed man who would clearly recognize an honest American tourist with lots of U.S. dollars in his pocket to spend on the fledgling local economy. And hookers. Just kidding, honey. (Or am I?). No really I'm kidding.

This was mistake number four, because it turns out this prick would make Allan Greenspan look like a drug addled party boy. He gives my passaporte the equivalent of an anal search. He peals back laminate, splits pages looking for microscopic pieces of….. what? Nano-guns? Puts it under some kind of special light, probably just regular flourescent trying to scare me. He frowns and shakes his head and clucks his tongue. Meanwhile my entire crew has made it through customs like a breeze and is on their way to get the rental car.

Then it happens. He was already suspicious of me, and was searching for the straw that would break my marlin fishing weekend's back. He sees the Arabic stamps in the back: Iraq, Jordan, Beirut, Amsterdam (they have hashish there I'm told) and various other disreputable countries like Australia, which everybody knows is full of drunks. “Mmm, no bueno,” he says. Now I’m no linguist, but I now know that I’m in trouble. And when you are in trouble with a Customs official -- particularly in Central America where Democracy is kind of a new experiment that they aren't completely settled on yet -- and even if you are totally innocent, I'm here to tell you that bullets of sweat break out on your forehead, which make you appear all the more guilty.

“Mmm," he says again. By this time a curious crowd has gathered and another senior manager has arrived. This immigration official speaks friendly English, as they do in the Spanich markets in west San Antonio when they wish to sell trinkets, and says that they will have to take the passaporte to another place to inspect it, and will I please sit down and wait, no problemo. Now this sounds friendly, so I sit and wait.

One hour passes. Tick tock. Two hours pass. I remember reading a tourism poster in the terminal that said, "Time goes slow in Costa Rica!" Wow, they weren't kidding. Meanwhile, my brother-in-law and friends have no idea what’s happened to me and nobody will let them back through, nor will they let me send them a message that I’m going to be detained, maybe for fear that I’ll hide a file in the note or something?

Now, a few of you have indelicately insinuated that for this to happen I must have been rowdy drunk, wearing a sombrero, loudly singing Irish folk songs and insulting everybody within earshot. That is simply not the case. I slept the entire plane ride down there and was mild as a field of clovers.

Finally another immigration official arrives, with no English to make it more of a challenge -- nay, opportunity for me, and declares sharply that I am to leave the country the next day, and that I am to wait in a spare white room all night with an armed guard until such time that I will be summoned.

Huh? No Miranda rights? No court-appointed attorney? But most seriously, no iPod or book? What is this, freaking Gitmo? I have so many questions I don’t even know where to start, or how to start, as my Spanish is a little rusty. Maybe he told me that the grateful government of Costa Rica is going to pay for my stay at the Los Suenos Resort until transportation back to the States can be arranged?

My interpretation turns out to be a bit optimistic. A guard escorts me to a plain white room with a single plastic chair, which I sit in before he does. “Ah, Senior, mi amigo, donde esta mi passaporte y equipage?” I say, trying to make friends at first as I see him as the only obstacle between me and a pay phone. The guard shrugs and says what he will repeat several times throughout the night: “No se, senor.” I don’t know.

Can I use a phone? No se. Can I get my passport back? No se. Can I speak to a supervisor who speaks English? No se. Can I contact the U.S. consulate? No se. Can I get a drink of water? No se. Can I take this chair and shove it up your ass? No se.

By this time, my friends had bribed a janitor to sneak his cell phone to me (guard didn't seem to care) and I was able to tell them that I have been detained and to go on without me, because I wisely suspected at this point that the golden shores of Costa Rica were beyond my capabilities.

Yet another immigration official (the bureaucracy in this freaking country is amazingly large for a so-called 'republic' that is most famous for abolishing its military) comes and he is all smiles and handshakes. He's the good cop. He keeps repeating, “no worries, theeese is jeeest a reality. Eeees okay, no problem, jees a reality. Weee send you home manana, no problem, a reality, no worries, we happy no?”

Well, no, not really actually. I can't really say with candor that I'm "happy", per se. Fishing for billfish on the open seas makes me happy. Seeing my children again would make me happy. Drinking warm water from a dirty tap would make me happy at this point. But sitting in a white room in a plastic chair with an armed guard all night doesn't usually make me particularly freaking happy.

"Oh, si," all smiles and nodding so that I'm tempted kick his nuts up through his mouth. "Eeees jus a reality, my friend. No problem, a reality."

I think he means to say “formality”, but in a way his word is more descriptive of the situation, because this white room and this plastic chair and this armed guard are my true reality. We are at about midnight now, and I experience what consultants refer to as a "paradigm shift" after contemplating my situation from a higher sphere. My thinking, attitude, and demeanor shift from indignant pissed-off haughty holy journalist U.S. Citizen with inaliable rights, to foreigner captive jackass without a gun or passport who'd better start playing nice. So I don't kick him, because at this point it occurs to me that I may be walking the fine line between just leaving the country quietly or going to a more permanent dank prison ruled by a sodomite named Guapo. I choose a conciliatory tone and offer him and the guard fancy American Orbits gum from my pocket, the new tangy orange flavor they won't get in Costa Rica until 2008.

Finally, at 6am, maybe just because of the gum, I am allowed a phone call on a pay phone that looks as if Castro had forged it from old rusty cannon balls just after taking over Cuba, and painted it a nice Soviet shade of drab green. I call Lulu (collect) and instruct her to contact Continental Airlines and get me the first flight out, preferably first class, and tell the airline to send a beefy agent to fetch me from the holding room and we'll make a break for the gate. She does this, and Continental tells her that the government of Costa Rica has already informed them that they want me out of their country ASAP (they've already arranged my ticket), so there will be no problem in me getting to the gate. She upgrades me to first class, bless her tall blonde soul.

At seven thirty, two armed guards escort me to the plane, all the way to my seat in 2A. As they turn to go, I give them my best Jim Cary immitation, “Thanks for the memories, can’t wait to return! Oh, and don't forget to write.” or something to that effect. The other passengers are either impressed or horrified. I actually said something saltier than that, but I'll spare you the details as it wasn't my finest hour, to folks who were just doing their job.

The government of Costa Rica, such as it is, has requested that I never return to their fair country. Finally, we agree on something! Happy days. You know, I feel this is a good healthy start towards a reconciliation. It's like saying we both like Breakfast at Tiffany's. It's a small but solid cornerstone on which to forge our future together, me and Costa Rica.

They had torn up my passaporte to such a degree that I actually had a little trouble getting back into the blessed beautiful United States. Birth certificates and Social Security cards had to be faxed from courthouses, bags had to be searched (again), more indignities endured. But I got back to the blessed U.S. where they have habeus corpus, a right I hadn’t fully appreciated until now.

So why am I public enemy number 1 in Costa Rica? I'm not entirely certain, but I think those Inspector Clusoes know a small arms dealer when they see one. "You're a beer writer," one official had asked in disdain. "A beer writer? Mmm." He'd seen too many "Murder, She Wrote" and "Matlock" episodes to believe that a beer writer would travel to Jordon, where beer is practically illegal.

The official reason was because they felt beyond a reasonable doubt that my passaporte had been tampered with, and in fact I was not who I said I was. Why anybody would pretend to be me, Harry Schuhmacher, a beer journalist from San Antonio, is beyond me. But apparently everybody wants to be me when trying to get into Central American countries.

I've since learned that Costa Rica is a destination of choice for felons on the run, and tampered passports are the best way to get into the country.

The frayed passaporte, the Arabic, my boots with Arabian sand on them, an iPod with U2, a sarcastic wit and foul mouth….it proved a combination that was just too much: I showed all the traits of a desperado on the lam, not fit for the unarmed waifs of Costa Rica.

So the Marlin remain safe from my hooks. But the bed is not, I’m going to sleep for 12 hours straight.