CA-4 Visa Extension in Nicaragua

I thought that it would be useful for me to write a post about extending the CA-4 visa, necessary if staying in Central America for over 3 months.

As a recap, once you enter one of the CA-4 Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador or  Nicaragua, you will receive a stamp on your passport, and a visa that is valid for a total of 3 months. While we have been moving around these 4 countries, we noticed that only Guatemala and Honduras actually stamp your passport (Honduras immigration officials claimed that their country was no longer part of the CA-4 group), so it is quite confusing to really know what the actual situation is. It is therefore useful to note down entry/exit dates, especially if there is no stamp in your passport.

Stamp for our arrival in Guatemala, and our first point of entry into the CA-4 group of Central American countries. The initial 3 months ran from this date.

Stamp upon leaving Guatemala.

Stamps in and out of Honduras.

Before the expiration of the 3 months, you can apply for an extension (if i am not mistaken this can only be done once), or you need to cross out of the group of countries to either Mexico, Belize or Costa Rica and reenter. In our case, we had only 3 days left on our CA-4 visa once we had crossed over to Nicaragua, and as a Malaysian passport holder, i needed a visa before arrival to enter Costa Rica – the closest border to do a visa run (this was also unclear as i also hold a residency card for Spain, so we were unsure if i actually did need the visa). We eventually decided that the best option for us was to get the visa extension done in Leon, as we did not like the prospect of entering into Managua.

The process was simple. We filled in the necessary forms at the immigration office and paid a total of 1050 Cordobas (over USD $40) for 2 months extension (the maximum extension is for 3 months). Our passports were then sent to Managua for processing and we were told we had to wait a total of 8 days then return to pick them up. In our case, we arrived at the immigration office in Leon at the appointed date, only to find that our passports were still in Managua. In the end, we decided to make our way to the main immigration office in Managua and pick up our passports ourselves since we were traveling southwards anyway.

Our 2-month visa extension obtained in Managua, Nicaragua.

The immigration officials in Nicaragua were fairly efficient and although our visas were not in Leon at the time they should have been, they did not lose any of our paperwork, and could tell us exactly where our passports were at any given time. We met an American girl in Matagalpa who had gone directly to Managua to get her visa extension and she told us that she managed to get it done within an hour! So our advice would be to do just what she did, and save yourself the hassle, time and worry.

Border Crossing: Nicaragua

We ended up leaving Tegucigalpa later than planned. We were pretty exhausted from the long bus journey the previous day and had not eaten anything for dinner so we crossed the road and had a local Honduran breakfast at a hole-in-the-wall just a few doors down from our hotel. It was there that we had some overly-sour sour cream in our baleadas, which upset our tummies. Not a good start to another long day of traveling.

Our bus from Tegucigalpa to Choluteca.

We hopped onto the bus to Choluteca, one of Honduras’ southern towns just before the border crossing, right outside our hotel. The bus was slow and stopped to pick up and drop off people everywhere. It took us 3 hours, and at the Coluteca bus terminal, we found the colectivo vans to Guasaule, a tiny border town. We were not prepared for the commotion that greeted us as soon as the van stopped at the last point in Honduras before the border checkpoint though. A huge crowd of local pedicab/trishaw guys just descended on us, literally grabbing our backpacks  from the roof and loading them onto a pedicab before we had even exited the van. A fight broke out among them and we were in the middle of it all, which made us eventually feel coerced to pay 100 Lempiras (roughly 4 Euros) to one of the guys, just to get us out of this mess (which was a bit unnerving). We were first taken to the Honduran checkpoint to get our passports stamped before proceeding to cross a bridge over to the Nicaraguan immigration point.

Our full pedicab. Those two guys on the right took us over to Nicaragua.

The Honduras immigration checkpoint at the Guasaule crossing. Just a couple of tables.

Goodbye Honduras.

The river between Honduras and Nicaragua.

While we were crossing the bridge (quite a few border crossings have been over a river),  we were stopped by a couple of military personnel who thoroughly checked through our backpacks, and thankfully found nothing to stop us, so we continued to the other side. While Rick went into the Nicaraguan checkpoint to settle the entry fees and get our entry stamps (we paid 12 USD each), i waited outside with our bags. The pedicab guys, started asking for a tip ie. more money, which we were certainly not going to pay,having realised by that time that we had been conned (we could have walked across, it wasn’t as far as they had told us). At this point they were getting quite annoying, and the more they harped on about their “tip”, the more resolved we were not to give them a cent more than what we had agreed upon.

The end of the bridge and the entrance into Nicaragua.

The Nicaraguan immigration personnel told Rick that we had only 3 more days left to either extend our CA-4 visas in Nicaragua (CA-4 countries are Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – and you get a total of 90 days for all 4 countries) or quickly make our way to Costa Rica to exit and reenter. We were told that we could get an extension in Leon,the first place we had decided to stay in Nicaragua, so we decided to head to the immigration office there and see how much it would cost us when we were settled.

The pedicab guy then took us to the bus stop after the immigration point, where we got on a chicken bus to wait for the 2-hour ride to Leon. Before getting on the bus, Rick realised that his sunglasses were missing, so he ran after the disgruntled pedicab guys (they were unhappy that we had not tipped them), and when he confronted them, one of them said that they had, rather conveniently, “just found” the sunglasses. It was not a nice thing to have to deal with at all. At this point we were both pretty tired from the journey and the heat and still had upset stomachs.

Waiting for our bus to Leon to leave after getting Ricks sunglasses back.

On the bus to Leon, we met a South African couple who we eventually ended up sharing a cab with into Leon from the bus stop (20 Cordoba’s each). It was already dark and we were stopped literally at the side of the main road to Managua. The taxi driver dropped us at a reasonably-priced hostel (Hostel La Clinica), where we spent our first night in Leon, Nicaragua.