Finca Project: Buying a Car

We are back in Costa Rica to start the new year. We have an awesome intern, Sofia, who flew down with me (Eliot) a week and a half ago. It is warm and sunny and great to be back down here.

The first item on our agenda was to buy a car. Brendan met us in San Jose and we started first thing in the morning looking for a car. We had tried to get the Mendez family to help us find a friend of the family that knew about cars. But that all seemed to fall through. So we jumped into a sympathetic looking taxi and asked the driver to take us to some used car dealers.

I hate dealing with cars, dealers, and mechanics because I really don't know much about cars not to mention I am not fluent in car talk (in English much less in Spanish). As we were driving I did my best not to let the driver aware of my ignorance while at the same time probing him for the right vocabulary words and bureaucratic regulations involved in buying a car. It took us about 3 hours driving around the suburbs of San Jose until we found the car we were looking for. I asked the driver to take us to Cartago (a suburb of San Jose). The taxi driver wasn't sure that there would be any cars there. I told him there has to be because its called Car-tago. I was right.

One thing that I have realized being from the United States is that the US has some of the cheapest cars in the world. Costa Rica has an extremely high import tax on cars. Originally our idea had been to drive a car down here from the US, but we were warned that it isn't worth it after all the taxes you will have to pay. So we decided to buy it here.

The car we ended up getting is a 1988 Toyota 4 Runner. Its pretty awesome. After negotiating we ended up getting it for about $4000 although we had to pay a lawyer a little bit more to get the papers filed. The Mendez family thought we would never be able to buy a car in only 2 days. But we did. We drove strait to Aguabuena after we bought the car. It took about 6 hours and we didn't get in till around midnight.