The following day leaving San Juan del Sur I crossed the border into Costa Rica at Peñas Blancas, or Putas Blacas as I like to call it. Although border official corruption is not a problem, this was the most painful crossing yet in terms of procedure and standing in lines. The procedure to check out of Nicaragua was puzzling. Get a little slip of paper with a stamp on it, pay a parking fee and get another little slip of paper. Go into an obscure office and get one slip of paper signed. Then go wander around outside and try to find a cop to sign it as well. Good luck finding the cop. Then you must of course make about 12,245 copies of everything. Get checked out of immigration, then make more copies, go to another window and get the bike stamped out of the country.
Next you proceed to the Costa Rica side for processing. There are bus loads of people (literally off the buses) standing in lines for immigration stamps. So I stand in line for about a hour and half and finally get my tourist stamp. Then I go to an office in the same building to make copies of everything and purchase the mandatory insurance for the bike. Now I take all of that crap and go across the street to Aduana. I get to the front of the line and customs guy proceeds to make a 20 minute phone call to his girlfriend while he casually flips through a magazine. He never looks up at me. So after he takes his time on the phone and gets bored with the magazine, he looks up at me and says, “what do you want?” Nice. I just hand him my stack of paperwork. He has me fill out several forms, asks to see all of my original documents etc. Then he wants to see the VIN on the bike. Fine. On my bike under the seat is a factory sticker with the VIN number because the VIN number stamped on the frame is almost impossible to see without removing the fairings and fuel tanks.
He looks at the sticker and says, “no good, I need to see the number stamped on the frame.” I explain that its under the fairings and tanks and hand him my tool roll and tell him to have at it. Then just looks disgusted, grunts, hands me my paperwork and tells me to take it over to the warehouse. OK, great where is the warehouse? “Over there” he says as he makes a sweeping gesture with his hand. What a guy. This guy is a complete jackass. So I get on the bike and find the warehouse and proceed to stand in line with a bunch of truck drivers who all look equally unhappy about standing in line all day. When I get the to front of the line after about 30 minutes, the customs guy behind the window tells me that he does not have time to do my paperwork right now and I should come back later. Great.
View CR Panama in a larger map
I high tailed it to Avellanas to Casa Kristi and got a very nice room for the night.
The next day I made tracks down the Nicoya peninsula to Mal Pais. My friend Wendy lives and works there so I spent a few days visiting her. The nearby town of Santa Teresa is kind of a sad sight. Its very touristy, expensive, and full of dirt bags, both local and foreign. There are lots of idiots selling drugs, and with that comes out of control theft and robbery. Nice place.
However Wendy’s place is out of town on a nice little beach that borders the Cabo Blanco Reserve, the first national park in Costa Rica.
There is a pretty decent left out there as well.
It was good to see my friend Wendy. However after a couple of days I was less than thrilled with Costa Rica and was ready to move south. So, I hopped the ferry over to Puntarenas.
I blew through Jaco. Wow, what happened to Jaco? Jaco used to be a really cool beach town. Now it is just a complete mess. I stopped for all of a minute to look around, then headed further south. Maybe Dominical would still be nice? Nope, wrong. Dominical is another mess of agro surfers and 20 year old idiots, both foreign and local, selling drugs by day and robbing homes and people by night. Nice. What happened to Costa Rica?
So I headed further south. I got a tip on a cool place to stay from fellow motorcyclist. About 2 miles north of Uvita, you will see a small sign on the left that says “Rancho Diandrew 4 km.” So at the sign, I make a left up the dirt road and head into the hills.
There are a few houses off the dirt road. Nice foreigner homes and there are no idiots to be seen. OK, now this is a little more like it.
Well, as it turns out, Rancho Diandrew is a great place to stay. You can rent a big tent with an air mattress for 10 bucks a night and there is a nice kitchen tent right next to it.
Or if you want a nice place, there are ”tent cabins” as well that are a little more plush. They are very much like the yurts in San Ignacio, Baja California. I stayed in a nice cabin for a night, then moved into the 10 dollar tents for the rest of the week.
Nice views of the ocean out the front porch too. There are plenty of animals around and you will seen numerous exotic birds and monkeys, maybe an anteater or two, and if you’re lucky you will get to see some big snakes as well.
This place was excellent. I stopped in for a night, and stayed a week. I would lounge around all day, hike in the jungle then go for a swim in on of the numerous swimming holes within a 30 minute walk of the house. This is a very refreshing way to spend a hot afternoon. I think all I did while I was here was lounge around in the morning and swim in the afternoon. It was really too hot to do much of anything else.
So there are in fact still some neat little off the beaten path places near the coast in Costa Rica, but you have to hunt for them. If you are coming through Costa Rica I highly recommend a stay at Rancho Diandrew.
After all my lounging around, South America was calling me, so I wanted to get moving further south, toward the very small Rio Sereno border crossing into Panama.
I climbed up into the mountains to a little town near the border called Sabalito, stopped at the gas station and asked how to get to Panama. The gas station attendant gives me very detailed directions and I find myself here. A Central American border crossing down a dirt road? I think this is gonna be good.
So I pull up to the Costa Rica office a little further down the road. There is only one official there for both Migracion and Aduana, and I am the only person using the crossing. Bingo. He checks me out of Costa Rica in about 30 seconds. Then I go about 100 meters up the road to the actual border with the Panama offices on the other side of the fence. Check this out. This is a border crossing? Excellent. I couldn’t believe my luck.
Migracion on the left, Aduana on the right. However when I walk into the first office, the guy informs me that it is lunch time and he will take care of me in about a hour or so. No problem, I just kicked back in the shade and started to relax. However, about 2 minutes later, he comes out and asks me for my paperwork. I give it to him and he comes back a couple minutes later, hands it back to me and says “welcome to Panama.” He did this on his lunch break. How cool is that? So I go over to customs to inform them that I will be back after lunch to take care of the bike import. One guy tells me not to worry, just give him the paperwork and he will take care of it now. Very cool. So I hand him all of my stuff, walk across the street and buy some cokes for everyone in the office. When I come back in five minutes, everything is finished and the folks were actually really surprised and happy that I brought them some ice cold cokes to drink. I couldn’t believe it. I was done with this border crossing during a lunch break, and in the time it took me to go buy some refreshments. Needless to say I was extremely happy about this border crossing.
I headed to Santa Catalina on the coast for some world class point surf.
Instead of world class point surf, I was sick with the flu the whole time. That pretty much sucked. So, I only took a few pictures while in Santa Catalina.
The evening thunderstorms.
The point surf.
The beach.
After a week in Santa Catalina, I headed to Panama City in search of transport to Colombia. Of course a visit to the famous Miraflores locks on the Panama Canal was in order. Some people have been less than impressed with a visit to the locks, but I found it to be a great thing to do.
I met these guys. Steve and Bruce riding KTM 950’s from Lima to L.A. They even bought me lunch at the locks.
Some pics of ships passing through. They are headed to the Pacific. In the Miraflores locks they will drop 9 meters.
Tanker and container ship.
Tugs that pull the ships through the locks.
Tug boat.
Its a good place to kill a few hours out of your day. Besides that, you stay in the air con in the restauant and drink beer while you watch the ships come though. Given that fact, I don’t see how anyone can not have a good time at the Miraflores locks.
Well, now back to finding transport to Colombia. To get from Panama to Colombia you must cross the infamous Darien Gap. The Panamerican highway ends in Panama at the town of Yaviza. There are no roads through the Darien into Colombia. The gap is a well known haunt for FARC, narco traffickers, and generally bad people. Not to mention that the jungle here is brutally unforgiving. A few people have taken motorcycles through the Darien, but they didnt ride them. They carried them over the course of weeks. I think I will pass on that one. There are three ways into Colombia. You can carry your bike thorugh the Darien. You can take boat through the San Blas islands over several days and go the Port city of Cartegena in Colombia. Or, you can fly yourself and bike from Panama City to Bogota. From research, I deduced that there were basically two boats that I would trust with my bike. The Steel Rat, and the Seeadler. I had emailed these boats almost two months before my anticipated trip to Colombia and they were full. I poked around Panama City looking for other viable boats to take but found nothing that I was keen on taking. So, I decided to pack up, ride to the airport and have the bike shipped to Bogota.
Met a guy named Chris who was coming north from Colombia. His bike just got to Panama and he was starting the ride home to the States.
Of course, as fate would have it, when I returned to my hotel in Panama City after shipping the bike off to Colombia and buying a ticket for myself on Copa Airlines, I checked my email and Ludwig from the Steel Rat had sent me an email which informed me that a spot had opened up for me on the boat. Doh!!!! It would have been a great experience, but it was just not to be I guess.
Not the way I wanted to get to Colombia………..
Just bad timing. I was pretty bummed out about it.
Saludos, Vicente