A young writer from the United States recently found herself besieged in Peñas Blancas, the border crossing point between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, as her lack of a travel document nearly prompted an anxiety attack. Emilia Azar, a senior at Elon University in North Carolina traveled to our country with a few noble intentions, one of them being learning to surf; alas, her joyful sojourn hit a snag as she returned from Nicaragua.

Writing for Though Catalog, the young, blonde, talented, and attractive Miss Azar explains:

Crossing the border from Nicaragua back into my host country of Costa Rica was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. I had forgotten the essential tool for getting back – my plane ticket proving that I would return to the U.S. that December. That print out ticket – evidence of the fact that I was not planning on hanging out in Nicaragua for the rest of my life – was somewhere in my cozy, sized-for-a-5-year-old room back in San José, Costa Rica.

Ir is important to note that Miss Azar lives with general anxiety disorder. She is the founder and president of Active Minds at Elon University. As reported in The Pendulum, Elon University’s student news organization, Active Minds seeks to:

raise awareness of mental health issues and to erase its surrounding stigmas[.]

Active Minds was created in 2002 at the University of Pennsylvania by then-junior Alison Malmon whose brother had suffered from severe schizophrenia and committed suicide. Since her irst efforts twelve years ago in Philadelphia, Malmon’s idea has spread to college campuses across the country fostering open discussions of mental health issues.

In July, while reading Cosmopolitan in a nail salon, Azar stumbled across an article about young women starting nonprofits, with one of them being Active Minds.

According to the news story above, Miss Azar’s affective disorder was -at one time- very pronounced:

Depression claimed her prisoner and made her bed the cell.

She missed countless classes she cared about immensely. She just couldn’t get herself out of bed.

Her friends surrounded her in the hopes that she would pick herself back up.

 

Backt to the border crossing tale: As the Nicaraguan immigration officers questioned Miss Azar’s lack of the required travel document, which exacerbated her emotional condition:

All of a sudden, anxiety gripped my heart and enclosed a tight fist around it. My breathing was short, practically nonexistent […]

And all I wanted to do was buy some gallo pinto (a Costa Rican specialty) and drown my sorrows in the goodness of rice, beans, and various sauces […]

I explained my story in broken sobs and broken Spanish. It turns out I had to buy a whole new ticket (yay more money to borrow from friends…) and everything would be just fine.

The Costa Rica Star hopes that Miss Azar is safely back and enjoying as much gallopinto as she can handle. Her experience is an example of how things have changed for perpetual tourists in recent times.

Tourists who hold passports from the United States, Canada, member nations of the European Union and other countries that do not require to apply for a visa can make Costa Rica their permanent vacation home. The way it usually works is as follows:

Upon arrival to an immigration checkpoint, be it Peñas Blancas, Paso Canoas, Puntarenas, Moín, the Juan Santamaría International Airport (SJO), or the Daniel Oduber International Airport (LIR), tourists will get an entry stamp on their passports as long as they have the economic means to stay in Costa Rica and a travel ticket that indicates that they will exit the country within 90 days or less. The latter requirement usually consists of the return portion of a round-trip ticket whilst the former is calculated at $100 per day but seldom corroborated by immigration officials. In fact, many tourists have stories of landing at SJO, flicking their passports open, getting stamped, and continuing on their merry way as a courteous immigration officer wishes them a pleasant stay.

For several decades, perpetual tourists have been renewing their 90 day stamps and staying in Costa Rica in a state of permanent vacation by means of a visa run. The tautology that has developed in this regard is that the perpetual tourist must spend a minimum of three days outside of Costa Rica before returning to obtain an entry stamp and prolong their vacation for another vacation, but there is no legislative or procedural evidence to back this claim. In fact, the “3-day” rule may be a conflation of a customs requirements. There’s also the problem of getting dirty looks from immigration officers on both sides of the border should a tourist choose to breeze through the exit procedures and comeback minutes later with passport in hand.

Visa runs to Nicaragua and Panama (both safer countries than Costa Rica, according to Gallup) are a fact of life for thousands of perpetual tourists who make Costa Rica their second home by virtue of the ambiguity of standing law on immigration. In recent months, however, the border crossing points of Nicaragua and Panama have made the process a little more difficult by enforcing certain requirements such as payment of exit taxes, proof of departure travel plans or return tickets, sufficient cash on hand, and others. The enforcement is largely uneven, but there are stories about plane tickets and bank statements being verified in Panama, bribes incited in Nicaragua, confusion about departure taxes, two-week visas being stamped in Costa Rica, etc.

With all this growing uncertainty about perpetual tourism in Costa Rica, it is not difficult to understand how Miss Azar could have succumbed to an anxiety attack at the border.