(31) Puntarenas Costa Rica to Panama City Panama - The Unofficial Halfway Point
Neil and I are in Panama City now. I’ll catch things up from Puntarenas to Panama City. This is our second day here. We arrived on December 4th and we will not leave until December 13. I’ll catch things up until now and my next update will be for the remainder of the time in Panama and wherever we are in Colombia at that time.
We were definitely getting a little antsy to be on the move. So all we did in Puntarenas was spend the night and then hit the road the next day and head toward the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. It may have been possible to get all the way over in a day but we chose to cut the trip to the other side of the country in half. So we headed out from Puntarenas for Turrialba. As with many days in this part of the world the day started out nice but we ran into afternoon rain storms. Not bad this time but Turrialba is up in the mountains and we did hit some drizzle getting there.
The ride was pretty spectacular once we got through the capital, San Jose. After getting through there we moved onto small windy mountain roads through lots of little towns or villages. You would think that by now we would have learned how to configure the GPS for the types of routes we want. But, on this day we had another episode of “follow the magenta line” taking us on a wild good chase. We were way up in the mountains and pretty near our destination of Turrialba when the GPS told us to turn off the main road we were on and head down a “residential street”. Since the street was paved we decided to turn and follow the route that the GPS was showing. About a quarter of a mile down that street it turned to gravel. It seemed to be well maintained gravel and was not any big deal to ride so we kept going. The next thing we know the road goes through an open gate into a pasture and turns into more of a trail than a road.
Since the GPS shows us we are really near connecting back up to the main road we decide to keep following. I’m sure we were on someone’s farm but we didn’t see any animals. After a half mile or so we get to the other end of the trail only to find a locked gate and no way around. No one seemed to care we were there so we just shrugged, turned around and headed back to the main road and swore to not pay attention to the GPS anymore if it sent us off on apparent turns to nowhere. It did try to do that several more times on the way into Turrialba and we dutifully ignored it and just stayed on the main road and got into our hotel there just before it started to really dump down rain for pretty much the remainder of the night.
I make up the routes we follow on the laptop and then download them onto the GPS units. I generally do this in the evening for the next day’s ride each night. After our foray off into the cow pasture I started to dive into the software settings in the mapping program and finally found a setting for “Road Avoidances” and a checkbox or “Residential Roads”. Now that I have a check in that box hopefully we will stay on roads and not be sent off to streets unless we are in a town or city. Time will tell.
The day we left Turrialba heading for Puerto Viejo turned out to be a very eventful day and not in a good way. As those of you who saw my Facebook post know Neil had a crash this day. There is another range of mountains between Turrialba and the Caribbean coast and the mishap occurred on the twisty narrow roads in those mountains.
First off, Neil is fine. Secondly the bike is mechanically fine. Other than some busted up plastic on the bike and a pretty scared Dad for a bit all is well. The main road between San Jose and Limon, the main Costa Rica shipping port on the coast, was closed for some reason. So all the big trucks carrying goods back and forth between the capital and the port were using this mountain road (highway 10 if you want to look it up). That meant that traffic was really heavy and SLOW. In the end the slow part was a blessing in disguise.
Neil was leading and we were just cresting a hill and starting downhill around a blind corner. As Neil came around the corner he saw traffic stopped in the road. I came around the corner just in time to see him hit the brakes hard. There was oncoming traffic so he had nowhere to go to avoid things. I could see his rear tire lock up (skid) and him fishtail and lose control. We don’t know if he hit a patch of something slippery (oil, wet leaves, etc) on the road to make the tire lock up, but once he began to lose control and with oncoming traffic he had no choice but to lay the bike down. I saw hem go down on the left side of the bike, separate from it and watched the bike slide into the back of the car stopped in the road. I was able to come to a stop with no issues and was already asking Neil via the helmet intercoms if he was OK.
By this time he was standing up and saying that he was fine and had no injuries at all. Unfortunately the road was so steep at that point I could not stop where I was and get off my bike to help. It kept trying to roll off the kick stand. So I had to go around the accident and go a bit down the hill to a place flat enough to get off and run back up the hill to help Neil pick his bike up and check it for damage. We were able to determine that there was no mechanical issue with the bike. However the right side faring was busted up with pieces laying all over the place on the road. About this time the driver of the car comes around and starts showing us the scratches that he now has on his bumper from Neil sliding into him. He was calm and actually pretty nice, but adamant that he would need $150 for the damage or we would have to wait for the police to show up and do the paperwork on the accident. Neither Neil nor I were particularly interested in waiting around for God knows how long for the Police to show up, file an insurance report, etc. So we agreed to the price.
The only problem was that between us we only had $70 between us. So I had to jump back on my bike and head back to Turrialba (the nearest town with an ATM to get enough cash to pay the guy off. It took a good 20 minutes just to get back to town and another 20 minutes to finally find an ATM. Then there was the line of 20 people in front of the ATM that I had to wait for to get the money. As I was getting near the front of the line a local police/parking official yelled at me for where I parked. I had to get out of line, losing my place, and go find a motorcycle allowed parking spot. From there I had to get back in line at the end and wait my turn to get cash. All in all I was maybe 30 minutes trying to get cash.
By this time Neil is texting me via WhatsApp asking where I was because the guy who’s car he hit was getting nervous. Oh and by the way, while I was gone a tractor trailer rig rear ended a car in the oncoming lane who had slowed to get by our accident. Now the road is blocked in both directions. As I was to find out, it is illegal in Costa Rica to move your vehicle if you have an accident. So the guy Neil slid into would not move his car out of the middle of the road. When I left traffic coming from behind us would just slowly go around the accident. Now that there was a blockage in the other lane no traffic was moving at all. He told me that it will be backed up quite a ways when I start back to him with the cash.
He was right! I hit the line of trucks and cars around a mile and a half from where I needed to be to get the money to the guy and us get out of there. So I just moved over into the oncoming traffic lane and started passing people. Every once in a while there would be a car coming who had managed to get through somehow and I’d have to stop and hug the side of a semi to let them go by and then continue on.
In the end I was able to get back to the accident site and get the guy paid off. We collected all the pieces of plastic we could find on the road and tucked them into Neil’s tank bag and got off in the grass and passed the other wreck and were able to continue on. At least we had no traffic to contend with since it was all backed up behind us. LOL We did breath a big sigh of relief when we were several miles down the road and saw a police truck headed up toward the accident. Be decided to keep moving and try to get to Puerto Viejo as fast as we could. The rest of the trip there was uneventful and we arrived just in time to dump our gear in the hotel room, walk down the street to a bar and catch the last few minutes of the Costa Rica vs. Germany World Cup soccer game.
It was an outdoor bar and packed. Lots of yelling, banging of drums and beer! Unfortunately Costa Rica lost and were eliminated from the tournament. It was fun to manage to get to see a bit of the game where the local country was playing.
Thankfully we had scheduled two nights in Puerto Viejo. The plan was for a day at the beach during the day we stayed in town. However, with the accident the day turned into what Neil dubbed “arts and crafts” day. The next morning we walked down to the hardware store and stocked up on duct tape, clear packing tape and super glue. I carry a selection of zip ties with us in the tool kit also. We then spent the rest of the afternoon super gluing all the pieces we found on the road back together and then duct taping all that together to give it some stiffness. Of course the Frankenstein’s monster of a creation we made won’t stay on the bike. So I borrowed a drill from the scooter rental place across the street from our hotel and drilled some holes while Neil used a knife to make other holes and we proceeded to zip tie the reassembled parts onto the frame of the bike.
The clear tape was for the headlight lens. The light was fine but the lens was busted up in the crash. So we super glued what we could back together and used the clear tape to cover up where we couldn’t put the plastic back in place. At this point things seem to be doing pretty well with our McGyver inspired repairs. I think they will have to hold up until the end of the trip. We could get a replacement faring shipped somewhere and if we will be in a place long enough we might, but it doesn’t seem worth it at this point. I checked into a replacement lens for the headlight and they do not sell a replacement lens. They only have the full replacement headlight assembly for a mere $1,100. This is on a bike that after taxes and everything only cost me $8,000. I started looking and there are literally hundreds of rants from other people who need to replace all or part of the headlight about the cost on line. So we have decided that it will just have to survive also until the bike is back in the states.
By the end of the day in Puerto Viejo we had the bike as together as it’s going to be and were ready for the border crossing into Panama the next day. There are two border crossings between Costa Rica and Panama. There is the main on on the Pan American highway back on the other side of the country and then the one on the Caribbean side where we were at Sixaola. I had read many boarder crossing reports from various people both with and without vehicles who said that the Sixaola crossing was really easy since it was so much less used than the other crossing. Well as the saying goes, don’t believe everything you read.
We crossed on a Saturday which meant that there was a huge line at the Cost Rica immigration window. But worse than that was the line of about 10 people in front of us to pay the Costa Rica exit tax. It’s $9 per person and for what ever reason took about 10 minutes for each person in front of us to be processed and get their tax paid. On the plus side when we finally cleared that step the line at the immigration window (yes 1 person at 1 window) had almost totally cleared up. So we got through immigration and had our temporary import permits canceled pretty quickly and rode across the bridge to Panama, where things came to a grinding halt.
Nothing is marked, but a Panamanian guard gave us vague instructions as to where the immigration building was. Thankfully we got near it and a couple of kids (I’d say 9 or 10 years old) lead us to a place to park and showed us where the immigration office was. They would follow us like they were glued us us for the rest of the afternoon as we went through the border process. Immigration turned out to be pretty painless.
Next stop after immigration was to buy insurance for the bikes as required by Panama. We got held up here behind another person who didn’t have what they needed to get the insurance issued. Lots of waiting but finally we got though. The last stop was to get the new temporary import permit for the bikes to be able to bring them into the country. Up to that window we go. The lady there gives us a form to fill out and gives us a list of documents and copies of documents she needs. We don’t have copies of the right documents, but were finally able to get her to make the copies, for a fee. Once she had all the required documents from us, including our passports, she closed the window and walked away. Other people came in behind us and asked where they get their permits and all we could do was point at the closed window. Nothing happened for well over an hour, before a guy came out of the office and said that their internet connection had gone down and they couldn’t do anything until it came back up.
After about another half an hour a different person than who took our documents opened the window and called Neil over to hand him his passport and TIP, but then closed the window again. I could see him through the window at various times just chatting or sometimes diddling with his phone, but not processing any paper as far as I could tell. Finally I looked in once and I could see him at least appearing to be looking at documents and processing things. Eventually he opened the window again and called my name. When I got there he handed me my stuff and motioned in a way that I understood to mean he’d been working by tethering his computer to his cell phone in order to get an internet connection. In the end the entire border crossing took about three and a half hours end to end.
Of course, just as we are ready to leave it starts to rain. So we pay off the kids that had showed us where to go, get our rain gear on and head down to road to the city of David where I had made hotel reservations for the night. Unfortunately, given how long the border took we knew we could not get there before dark. David is back on the Pacific side of Panama, so to get there it’s up and over the mountains again. The road was really pretty and in decent shape. Had it not been for the off and on rain it would have been quite fun to ride. In the end we didn’t do too badly and got to our hotel in David about a half an hour after dark.
Then all we had to do was get up the next morning and make a 300 mile ride into Panama City. That ride was on the Pan American Hwy. In this part it’s a two lane each way divided highway and we were making really good time. That is until we were stopped by one of the local police for speeding. Apparently the limit is 80kph (roughly 50mph) and we got clocked doing 106kph (65mph ish). As soon as the cop found out Neil spoke Spanish he left me by the bikes and took Neil back by his motorcycle. I could tell from just looking that Neil was just getting a lecture but it did take a while. When Neil came back he said the cop was most interested in where Neil had learned to speak such good Spanish :-). We were warned not to exceed the speed limit but were allowed to go on our way with just the warning. I lost track of how many other cops on motorcycles doing speed checks we saw on the rest of the ride in. So it’s a good thing we were being good boys and only doing the limit the rest of the way.
Since it was a Sunday even the ride into Panama City was pretty uneventful. Traffic was not bad and we were able to get into our hotel nice and easy. So from a travel perspective we are done on the bikes for a while. Yesterday we took them to the shop to have a bunch of maintenance done on them. It’s quite the list but this is our chance to get major work done so I’m taking advantage of it. This is the list of work we’re having done.
Replace the stock rear suspension spring with an upgraded one. Especially for Neil since he with be riding 2 up with Paxson in Colombia.
Replace both the front and rear sprockets and chain.
Install new brake pads front and rear, purge and replace the brake fluit
Flush and replace the coolant
Replace the spark plug
Replace the air filter
Do an oil change and replace the filter
Carefully inspect Neil’s bike for anything I might have missed after the accident
Replace front and rear tires
They will have the bikes a couple of days doing all that work.
Paxson arrives tomorrow. She and Neil will be heading off to spend a few nights up at Bocas del Toro and I will stay here in Panama City. We have to pick the bikes up and take them to the airport on Monday the 12th to have them clear customs and be prepped for air freighting to Bogota, Colombia.
Neil, Paxson and I leave on the 13th for a 5 day boat excursion through the San Blas Islands and on to Cartagena, Colombia. We will spend a day there exploring the city once we arrive and then catch a bus into Bogota to collect the bikes. We should pick them up on the 20th and be able to continue southward.
The next update to the travel log will be from someplace in South America. Stay tuned.
