If you want to have a package sent over to Nicaragua, you need to know a few things. As a tourist, if you’re completely clueless, you might have a hard time tracking your package. It’s a rather tedious process, and one in which your things might easily get lost amidst all the bureaucracy.

The circumstances: I was waiting for a package to arrive from the United States and tracking it online, I learnt that it left the States December 5 and arrived at the Nicaraguan customs office December 10. But by December 17 my package still had not been dispatched to my friend’s address in the capital city of Managua, which I’d designate it to be posted to.

Increasingly frustrated and anxious because I was supposed to have left Nicaragua 3 days ago, I decided to look up the customs office and request for my package in person.

Tracking down Las Aduanas: So, seeing as how my package was sent by international mail I thought it would be at the airport customs office. However, it took me a while to find it. I’d thought the customs office would be located within the airport building but after some inquiring here and there, and after some confusion, I found an officer who told me the customs office was the nondescript, rather disorganized-looking space made up of blocks of buildings on the left of Managua’s August C. Sandino International Airport. I had come from that direction in a taxi and we’d driven right past it.

So having found it, I inquired there, asked for my package that was being sent by US Express Mail but I was told that they only had packages coming in from Real Express, Trans-Express, DHL and FedEx… nothing from US Express Mail, which they hadn’t even heard of.

I continued asking around, wanting to make my trip to the airport worth it, and in the end an officer let me into the internal area to ask around. So I wandered through this giant warehouse with tall steel shelves that contained hundreds and hundreds of packages, all of them compartmentalized into different categories of courier services, and I looked - but unfortunately, in vain - for US Express Mail.

Then somebody told me maybe I should go to the customs office at the central post office instead.

Ah, so that’s how it worked. I wasn’t sure if there was just ONE central customs office. I’d thought this one next to the airport was it, but actually it only deals with courier mail.

So I went to the central post office (Los Correos) near El Malecon and lo and behold, I was in the right place! Only problem was, they wouldn’t release my package, said it wasn’t ready, that it hadn’t yet been processed, and that it normally takes a month… at least.

I didn’t have a month. I told them I was going to leave the next day, and fortunately the girl was nice enough to speed it up for me. So I finally laid hands on my package, but only after quite a lot of trouble.

What usually happens: Packages will NOT normally be mailed to the address you designated. After the post office processes your package, it will normally send you a collection slip, telling you when you can pick up your package, and then you bring the slip to the customs office and retrieve it.

But I spoke to Greg, who manages The Backpackers Inn in Managua and he said he’d arranged to have a package sent to him almost a year ago, and so had one of his employees, but they’d never received their packages. They hadn’t even received collection slips. And so he hadn’t known he was supposed to have gone to the customs office to collect his package. He’d just thought they’d gotten lost in the mail. After I told him about my experience, he finally went himself and tried to trace it but found no sign of it.

Beware the tax: On a slightly different but not so separate note, if you are purchasing something online to be sent to you in Nicaragua — perhaps a camera or something substantially expensive, keep in mind that an import tax of about 50% applies.

Yes, 50 per cent. I’m not kidding.

So the advice is: if you are purchasing a camera online from overseas (because choices are few and far between in Nicaragua, and their prices are inflated), tell your vendor to either list in your invoice ‘NO COMMERCIAL VALUE’ or ‘$25 USED CAMERA’, or something like that. Because if your brand new camera costs $USD 600 you will pay an import tax of about $300, which is absolutely ridiculous. And if you don’t have that amount in cash you will have to take a taxi to the bank to pay that amount before taking another taxi back to the customs office and have them bounce you around like a ping pong ball a little bit more before you finally get your hands on your long-awaited package.

I hope I haven’t put you off any rendezvous with Nicaraguan mail communications. By all means, buy something and have it sent to Nicaragua. So long as you understand the system, it’ll be fine.