Departing from Granada to Costa Rica, I caught the morning Tica bus that took me to Liberia, CR. The bus was comfortable and took a couple of hours to get to the border crossing. Like the bus trip from Honduras to Nicaragua, the passengers give the bus conductor their passports and the bus company gets all the Nicaragua-side paper work sorted out and returns the passengers their passports when they hop back on the bus. No need to worry about this procedure as it all goes pretty smoothly. During the 20 minutes or so that it takes for the formalities to be completed, you can stock up on duty-free at the two duty-free shops. However, things are not so efficiently organised on the CR side of the border.
You get back on the bus and travel for a couple of minutes to the CR-side border control and this has gotta be the most poorly-organised and inefficient crossing in CA. First you line up to get your paper work sorted and this takes about 20 minutes or so. I was not asked to show proof of an onwards bus/plane ticket from CR. Then you have to wait, in my case for more than an hour, for the border guards to perform a baggage search, albeit a very haphazard one. Sooner or later (most likely later), all the passengers' bags are placed in a row and the guards single out a couple of people to open their luggage. Waiting in this shitty little outpost in the sweltering heat is no joy. The actual bagge inspection only took a couple of minutes but we waited around for an hour for them to do it. From there, it's back on the bus and a couple of more hours to Liberia.
I stayed with a friend in Liberia for a couple of days and chilled. One day, I caught the local bus to Playas del Coco and did a 2 site dive with Deep Blue Diving. We dove at Punta Argentina and Tortuga, both at about 18 metres. The visibility was pretty average (early September) and the coral is nothing to rave about. However, we did see several small white-tipped reef sharks and some large schools of smalll fish. On the way out to the dive sites, we got real close to a pod of whales. They were jumping out of the water all over the place and an infant came out of the water right in front of the dive boat... this was really thrilling! Deep Blue were well organised and the gear was in good order. The two dives were about $90 from memory.
A cheap lunch option lies directly across the street from Deep Blue, set meals at low prices.
Pt8 - La Fortuna, CR to follow
