On Monday of the last week of 2020, our friend Bill, in Costa Rica, reached out to ask a favor. Would it be possible to drive him to the bank the next day so he could pay his Marchamo? Tuesday is the weekday that he can’t drive because of his license plate number. (Costa Rica still is restricting travel on weekdays due to COVID. The weekday we can’t drive is Friday.) The Marchamo needs to be paid by the end of the year, and he was concerned that if he waited until later in the week, that it would get too busy with everyone trying to pay last minute.
We happily agreed, since we were on Christmas break from Spanish school. But it got us to thinking. Did we need to pay the Marchamo too?
Marchamo is the term used in Costa Rica for what is roughly equivalent to a vehicle license registration in the US. When we lived in in Iowa, we received a bill in the mail with the annual fee for each of our vehicles. The timing of the bill was based on the birthday month of the first listed owner on the vehicle. When we received it, I would pop a check in the mail. Several weeks later a letter would arrive with a small colored sticker printed with the month and year, and a registration document. I would affix the sticker to the license plate of the appropriate car and place the registration document in the glove compartment just in case we were ever stopped by the police. After many, many years, I had this process down pat. (And, yes, it was me paying bills, affixing stickers, and ensuring the registration documents were in the designated envelope in our cars’ glove compartment.)
But in Costa Rica, Marchamo was new to us since we’d just bought the truck new in June and had been without a vehicle for the year before. We knew that the dealership had paid for necessary taxes, registration and inspection fees, and we had what we were sure were the requisite three stickers on our vehicle’s windshield, on the passenger side. John went out to check on the car stickers. One of the stickers had a date of Oct 2022, so we figured we were safe on that one. But there was another sticker with the year 2020. It was labeled COSEVI. Nothing said Marchamo. Still, if we had a 2020 sticker, and the calendar was changing to 2021 this week, we probably needed to check it out.
On Monday, the same day Bill made his request, John did some research on the Internet. Based on that, it did appear that we should also be paying the Marchamo for 2021. It looked like the Marchamo was related to the COSEVI sticker. John also found that you should be able to text to 1467 (in Costa Rica), with the word “Marchamo” followed by your license plate, to see how much you owed. Wow, that seemed pretty slick – I don’t remember an option like that for us back in Iowa!
Our license plate starts with “CL” which indicates it is for a truck. If you have read previous posts, you may remember that in Costa Rica, license plates are associated with the vehicle, and not with the owner. So, if you sell the vehicle, the license plate goes with it.
I typed in “Marchamo CLXXXXX0” (X’s replaced by our plate’s numbers in the actual text, of course). I immediately received a response in Spanish. The first line read “Placa CLXXXXX0” as I had entered it, followed by a line in Spanish that looked like it couldn’t find the license plate, and another couple of lines that looked like an advertisement. Not wanting to take chances, I copied and pasted the text into Google Translate on my phone. Sure enough, the translation came back “Plate could not be queried. Acquire the Insurance of Damage to Third Parties, Your Life and More Protection. Ask us.” OK, not a good start for determining the Marchamo amount. And, even if we were interested, who, exactly, were we supposed to ask about insurance?
We thought that maybe entering the “CL” as part of the plate number was causing the problem, so I sent another text, this time only including the numbers after the “CL”. I received another immediate response. This time, the response looked like there wasn’t a pending Marchamo due, with the same advertisement. Again, Google Translate confirmed what I thought it said. “This vehicle does not have pending marches. Acquire the Insurance of Damage to Third Parties, Your Life and More Protection. Ask us.” Google Translate obviously didn’t understand how to translate Marchamo. (When you look the word up in the Spanish translator Spanishdict.com, it comes back as a word used in Spain for a label or tag.)
At first it seemed that we were off the hook, but … it just didn’t seem right. So, I gave it a third try. I entered it differently, with the “CL” and the number as before, but this time with a space between them. Jackpot! This time the response came back with “Monto 798,887.00.” “Monto” is amount, so the amount due was 798,887 colones. The exchange rate is roughly 610 colones to 1 dollar. Still, 798,887 is a large amount. It calculated to about $1300 US dollars! If you read online blogs, you get the impression that the average Marchamo is going to be about $200 dollars. That’s because the Marchamo is based on value of your vehicle, and a lot of people drive old and not very nice cars. Since our vehicle was only six months old, this is the Marchamo we got.
We contacted Bill and asked about how to pay. Would we need to have cash? Bill assured us that last year he had paid with a credit card. That was a relief! We don’t keep that much cash on-hand, for obvious reasons. Also, most ATM’s have limits on the amount of money they will dispense. He also told us that we needed to have our car title when we went to pay.
Our original plan for Tuesday was to get up and take a quick walk before we drove the 20 minutes from our house (Point A) to pick up Bill at his condo (Point B), go to the bank (Point C) and pay the Marchamos, drop off Bill again (Point B), and return home (Point A). This is what that that would look like:
This is what actually happened the day we paid our Marchamos (with some points visited multiple times).
When we got up Tuesday, we decided that it would probably be best to get an early start, if that was OK with Bill. It was, so we left our house at 8:30 a.m. (Point A) and arrived to pick up Bill at 8:50 a.m. (Point B). We drove to pay the Marchamo at the bank in Huacas that Bill frequents, Banco Popular (Point C).
It’s worth a note that many bills are paid at the banks in Costa Rica. When we lived in Escazú, we paid our Internet and water bills at the bank. In our current rental house, we just pay the landlord for our utilities, but we now pay our Spanish teacher at the bank. We go to a current branch of the bank where he has an account, and deposit directly into it.
The bank in Huacas was down a short alley, with about six very tight designated parking spaces. Of course, when we drove up, all of the spaces were full. John somehow managed to back up the truck and park along the side of the alley, in front of a motorcycle. It wasn’t an easy feat, but somehow, he managed it with Bill’s help and encouragement.
Bill and John went to the bank while I stayed in the car, occupying myself with my phone and watching cars pull into the alley looking for a parking space and backing out again when they found there weren’t any. A car pulled in behind our truck, and I was concerned that we were going to be parked in.
While they were in the bank, I received a text from Ofelia, the Tica that cleans our house once a week. She usually comes on Thursday afternoons. Ofelia was inquiring if she could come that afternoon, instead of on her usual Thursday this week. I thought that would be OK but wanted to check with John first so waited to reply until he came back out.
I knew it was going to take a while. There is a process to follow when you go to the bank, that has become more complicated with COVID protocols. Now they are only allowing one person into the bank per family. I have been the one going into the bank to pay for the Spanish lessons, so I am used to them. But this time, since the car is in John’s name only (in Costa Rica they only allow one person to own the car), we decided that he had better be the one to go into pay.
First Bill and John washed their hands in the hand-washing station outside of the bank. The security guard then “wanded” them, like they do sometimes when you go through TSA at the airports. Of course, masks are required, but since masks cover faces, they were required to drop their masks for a security camera. They also had to wait until there was room inside the bank before they were let in. Bill was let in immediately, while John had to wait a few minutes.
Once inside they took a ticket for their turn. The tickets look like what you would get a deli. When I go to the bank there are two ticket machines, one for bill paying and regular bank transactions (where you stand up at the teller), and one for seemingly other more complex transactions, where you sit down to conduct business. This time there was another ticket machine with numbers that started with “M”, for Marchamo.
There was one guy doing Marchamo payments at the bank, and he was conducting other business, as well. When it was Bill’s turn, and he went up to pay, he was told that he couldn’t pay with a credit card seemingly because the machine was down. Bill left the bank and came out to the truck to tell me. I expected John to follow immediately. Even though John knew that he couldn’t pay, he felt obligated to wait his turn, since he had a number. (When I’ve gone to the bank and they call the next number and no one comes up, the tellers just kind of shrug and go to the next number.)
I did ask John if he thought it would be OK for Ofelia to come that afternoon, and after asking her what time she thought she would be coming – 1:30, replied that it was fine. Ofelia doesn’t speak English, so all texting is in Spanish.
The impression Bill got was that the credit card problem was related to this bank, so perhaps we could go to another place to pay the Marchamo. Bill thought that possibly a local electronics store, Gollo, accepted Marchamo payments. There was a Gollo just down the road (Point D). Fortunately, the car that had parked behind our truck at the bank had left. John somehow managed to get turned around in the narrow parking area, again with help and encouragement from Bill. Gollo turned out to be a bust – they didn’t do Marchamo payments.
A mutual friend had told Bill that Coopeguanacaste also accepted Marchamo payments. It’s Huacas location is set back from the road with a very large parking lot, especially by Costa Rica standards. All of it is enclosed by a fence. Coopeguanacaste is an enigma. It seems to control electricity and internet. Additionally, you can buy electronics and appliances, both large and small, there.
Coopeguanacaste (Point E) was only a few minutes from Gollo. After John pulled in, he and Bill jumped out and went to the front door, as I waited in the car. Coopeguanacaste had chairs lined up six feet apart in front of the door in anticipation of people needing to wait to enter. Fortunately, John and Bill didn’t have to wait outside. But, again, hand washing for them was required before entry.
It wasn’t too long before Bill and John emerged. No go – Coopeguanacaste would only take cash for the Marchamo. At this point, we came to the conclusion that we needed cash, but neither Bill nor John had enough cash on hand to pay their respective Marchamos.
ATMs in Costa Rica dispense both US dollars and Costa Rican colones. However, many ATMs limit the amount of money they will dispense. There is one ATM in Tamarindo that we know of and all of us had used, that will dispense higher amounts. However, we still didn’t think that our financial institution was going to let us withdraw the amount we needed. Bill didn’t need quite as much cash as we did, so he offered to spot us the difference and we would repay him. Sounded like a plan.
Tamarindo was about a 20-minute drive from our current location. We also knew that Tamarindo was an absolute zoo this week, as it is a popular beach town and the week between Christmas and New Year’s is a very popular time to go to the beach for Costa Rican’s. We didn’t have a choice.
We were going to be traveling back by Bill’s condo on the way to Tamarindo. We’d been out and about a while now, and I knew it was going to be time for a pit stop soon. I asked Bill if it would be OK if we stopped at his place on the way back from Tamarindo. He suggested that we stop on the way there. At the condo we talked briefly with Bill’s wife, Randi. She has a job where she can work remotely from Costa Rica, with a great deal of flexibility in her schedule. The week between Christmas and New Year’s is always kind of a down week, anyway, but she did have some meetings scheduled for the day, which is why she didn’t join our quest in the beginning. When we stopped, I asked if she would like to come along, but she had a conference call starting in five minutes, so the three of us returned to the truck and started our trip to Tamarindo.
I was glad that Bill had suggested that we stop on the way, rather than on the return trip from Tamarindo. On our way to Tamarindo we had to drive through Villa Real. There is a T-intersection there, they call it a “cruces” that was looking insane.
Approaching Villa Real 
Approaching Right turn at Villa Real Cruces
On the way to Tamarindo you take a right, easy enough, but on the way back, you must take a left. There is no traffic light there, nor in any of the beach towns, frankly. We could see that the cars were lined up for at least a quarter mile to make the left. We would be doing the same when we came back this way. My bladder was silently thanking Bill.
Tamarindo was everything we feared – cars and people everywhere! The ATM in Tamarindo (Point F) is in a small plaza with, you guessed it, limited parking, and none of it available. As John drove by it, Bill spotted a space along the side of the road that we could park in, if we were going the other way. John turned down a street, managed to get turned around the help and encouragement of Bill, and returned to a spot alongside the road. It wasn’t ideal, but it would do. John and Bill hopped out of the truck and went to the ATM. I stayed with the truck. I wasn’t expecting to have to wait very long, so I was kind of surprised as the minutes passed. Eventually John returned and said that he had his cash, but Bill was having problems with his transaction. Well of course he was! His withdrawal request had sent the ATM into a spin, and he couldn’t retrieve his card. Eventually the situation worked itself out, not sure what all happened, but we had enough cash to cover both the Marchamos.
On the return trip through Villa Real, although the cruces had cleared out a bit, but we still had to wait in a long line to make our left turn. At that point I just sighed and said out loud, “I have frustrating dreams like this, where I am trying to do something, and just can’t get it done.” No one responded. We eventually were able to make the left turn, which seemed like a small victory.
Back at Coopeguanacaste (Point E), John parked, and Bill and John went in, while I waited in the car. At 11:10 a.m. I received a text message from Randi. We have a text message group set up for the four of us.
Randi: “How’s it going?”
Me: “We are at Coopeguanacaste. I am in the car and the guys are inside. That’s all I know.”
Randi: “Well at least you’re partway there…”
At this point John must have noticed Randi’s text and felt it necessary to respond.
John: “Bill ran into problems with the name on the registration I think.”
Randi: “Ugh!”
At this point Bill emerged from Coopeguanacaste, clearly frustrated. (John was still inside.) The guy handling Marchamo didn’t like the fact that the title to Bill’s car had a different name than his. Bill said that last year they had problems paying the Marchamo because when they bought their car used, their lawyer hadn’t properly transferred the name from the previous owner to their LLC. (Their car is held by their LLC corporation. This is something that many expats do in Costa Rica for their houses (we did this for ours) and their cars.) However, the issue had been resolved and the title was correct. In the parking lot Bill called his car insurance person, Michelle, to tell her what was going on, and asked if everything was in order for him to be able to pay his Marchamo.
At this point I texted this: “Bill is calling Michelle now for help.”
Randi: “It’s always something! Hopefully she can help.”
When he was finished with his call, Bill provided a summary. Michelle had offered to talk with the guy at Coopeguanacaste and said that everything was in order on the title. Since Bill was no longer with the guy, she then suggested that he go to BCR (another national bank) to make his payment.
While Bill was on the phone, and before John returned from inside Coopeguanacaste, a man and his primary school-aged daughter emerged from Coopeguanacaste. Their car was parked close to ours, and he couldn’t help but hear Bill on the phone, and his summary. With a very obvious Canadian accent, he asked Bill if he needed a good lawyer, because he had a good one that he used.
Bill responded no, but a conversation ensued, where we learned that yes, he was from Canada. He and his family had recently moved to the Playa Flamingo from the Jaco area in Costa Rica. They moved to Playa Flamingo because of an issue with his daughter’s school, and there were more school choices in this area. They had a 15-month lease. They liked it here, but their place had flooded out, which had happened with the previous tenant, so they had grounds to break the lease. The guy had assumed that Bill and I were a couple, which Bill clarified. Eventually we had exchanged all the information we needed, and more, and he and his daughter drove away.
At this point John finally emerged from Coopeguanacaste, quietly stating that yes, he had successfully paid the Marchamo, and had the new sticker. Normally at this point I would have been jubilant, but trying to be sensitive to Bill’s situation, I simply acknowledged it.
The BCR bank branch is located a short distance down the road past our rental house development. It was getting to be lunch time by now, and we decided that it might be best to continue with a full stomach. We wanted to include Randi, so hopped back in the car and went the opposite direction to pick her up at the condo (Point B). Randi was through with her calls for the day and was willing to go to lunch. The only issue she had was that she had hurt her foot the evening before and was moving gingerly. It was a bit of an effort for her to get into our truck, but she made it.
We decided to go to Potrero for lunch. There are several restaurants there, and one, El Castillo, that Randi and Bill liked quite a bit, and we were anxious to try. Potrero is a short distance past the BCR bank. From Randi and Bill’s condo, would take about 20 minutes to get there. I was mindful of our 1:30 commitment to Ofelia, but it seemed like we should have enough time to get there, eat lunch, and return.
We drove to Potrero only to find that the El Castillo restaurant was closed. I am not sure why we expected it to be anything but, at this point. There are several restaurants in the same area and decided to try an Italian restaurant that Randi had heard was good that was just a bit further – La Forketta (Point G). The day was turning into a “fork it” kind of day, so it seemed like just the right restaurant for the day.
There was a decent gravel parking lot next to the restaurant. This is a luxury for restaurants in Portrero. Most require you to find a space along the side of the road. Restaurants here are open air, which is great for dining in the age of COVID. There wasn’t anyone else in the place when we arrived, so we picked a table and sat down. A masked waitress came by and told us they had to move the table. There were two guys with a tape measure measuring the distance between tables, and apparently our table was too close to the tables next to it. They moved it about a foot, and we sat down again.
Due to COVID, a lot of the restaurants have done away with physical menus. Instead, there is a QR code stuck to the table that allows you to use your smart phone to see the menu. We eventually got the menus to show up on the phones and ordered. Bill ordered the sausage with fries (a lot of meals come with fries here, even places you wouldn’t expect, like Taco Bell). Randi ordered lasagna, John ordered a pizza, and I ordered a calzone. When the food came, only Bill’s seemed to be right sized for one person. Randi’s lasagna looked like it was a quarter of a cake pan, John’s pizza, that he thought would be a personal pizza size, was 16 inches. My calzone was the last to arrive, and its arrival produced a gasp from from everyone – it was so large it looked unnatural, and was wierdly shaped, like a sea creature. When we had eaten all we could, the three of us asked for boxes. What was left of my calzone they had to put into a full-sized pizza box!
While we were at the restaurant, and before the food came, we discussed our next drive. Ofelia was due at 1:30. Ofelia doesn’t drive, so we pay extra for time and transportation costs for her to take the bus to our gated community, MarVista. It takes about five minutes to drive from our house in MarVista to the main road where she waits for us. She usually texts us when she is arriving, and we drive down and pick her up and take her through security and back to our house.
The BCR bank, where Bill needed to go to pay his Marchamo, was between the restaurant and MarVista. Bill suggested that we could just drop he and Randi off at the bank while John and I went to pick up Ofelia and get her back to the house. I am not sure why I felt compelled to respond to Bill so quickly, before Randi even had a chance to say anything. After all, Bill had been nothing but nice all morning, even though he was clearly frustrated by his situation. In my defense, my ginormous calzone hadn’t yet arrived.
“Bill,” I said incredulously. “There’s going to be a line to get into the bank. They are only going to let you in, so Randi will have to wait outside. There’s no place to sit down. Who knows how long it is going to take? Randi has a hurt foot! She has to go with us!”
I am not sure exactly what was said after, but there wasn’t a debate.
The only other weird thing that happened at the restaurant was when a man who was seated across the restaurant stood up to meet a delivery truck. The delivery guy came with an exceptionally large Styrofoam chest, maybe 4 feet. John joked that it looked like Jimmy Hoffa had arrived. It turned out that it was filled with nothing quite so interesting, only a substantial quantity of large packages of lettuce greens. The packages were unloaded from the Hoffa chest and placed on a table in the restaurant. At first, we thought that delivery must be for the restaurant. That is, until he pulled up his car alongside the table and started loading the lettuce packages into the trunk of his car. He even enlisted one of the waitresses to help. She threw the packages to him from the restaurant.
After we ate, we left the restaurant and drove back to BCR (Point H). BCR is located in a small plaza with several other businesses and a restaurant. It has a tricky, uphill, parking area, that is difficult to navigate. There are two rows – you go up one row and down the next, with angle parking spaces on each side. The problem is that the parking spaces are not nearly long enough for most vehicles, so you are usually dodging the backs of parked vehicles as you make your way through the parking lot. It is always stressful with our truck. We did manage to drop off Bill without incident, make a left out of the lot, and return to MarVista.
On the way I received a text from Ofelia stating that she was arriving. For once that day, something worked out. We pulled into MarVista just as Ofelia was walking up the side of the road. When she got into the truck, she was surprised to see Randi. Ofelia also cleans Randi and Bill’s condo – in fact, they are the ones who introduced us to her. There was no point in trying to explain why Randi was in the truck, especially trying in Spanish, so we just drove back to our house (Point A).
Usually before Ofelia comes, we tidy up a bit, so she can clean rather than organize. When we got to the house, I quickly put a few things away, while John put another chair on the patio. We try to stay out of the way when Ofelia cleans. She is trustworthy, so we don’t hover while she cleans. The patio seemed like a logical place to settle until Bill was finished. Just as we had finished our tidying scramble, Randi announced that Bill had successfully finished. He was walking down the road a bit and was going to wait at a local comaco (hardware type store) on the other side of the road that had a gravel parking area where we could more easily pick him up and get turned around. After riding around with us today, Bill had clearly made some astute observations.
John, Randi and I loaded up in the truck and made our way to the comaco (Point I). There was a jeep exiting as we pulled in, and Bill just didn’t seem to notice that we were there, which we found amusing. We got his attention, he got into the truck, and we headed back to Randi and Bill’s condo. Bill had no trouble paying the Marchamo at the bank. They told him that things had changed since last year, and that only cash was accepted as payment.
We continued back to Randi and Bill’s condo (Point B).
When we got back to there, Bill commented that he was ready for a nap. But then he asked if we wanted to stop in. We’d already been there three times today, and inside twice. We knew Bill was just trying to be nice. We politely declined and headed back to our house to wait for Ofelia to finish cleaning.
After a few hours, Ofelia finished, and we made our last driving excursion for the day. We drove her out of MarVista to the bus stop in Brasilito (Point J), a few miles down the road. Afterwards we returned home (Point A).
So, we had our sticker. Bill had warned us that we could not change the sticker before 2021. We couldn’t drive January 1, because it was a Friday, and we can’t drive on Fridays. On January 2nd, we changed the sticker.
We tell ourselves that this year, we will definitely start all of this sooner, at the beginning of December, and have cash ready. I hope we remember by the time December rolls around – but after all of this, it’s hard to believe we wouldn’t!
Remember, it's an adventure. 