Into Costa Rica – 5/23/2013
May 24th, 2013 by rallyadmin
Santiago is about 230 kms from the frontier with Costa Rica. It’s a two lane road but in most places the pavement is good. The weather has improved, it’s stopped raining and the early morning sun is out. We make good time and we get to the frontier before noon.
Like the frontiers in South America, the frontier is just bedlam. We have no idea where to go or what to do. We see an area where trucks are stopped so we pull up in line and park. We find a passport control window for salidas (exit) from Panama and get in line. Ha! Not so fast silly boy. As soon as the girl in the window sees our car documents, she tells us that we first have to have the car process through exit aduana before we can go through passport control.
When we picked up the car yesterday, both of our passports were stamped indicating that we had temporarily imported a car to Panama. Now we had to have that stamp stamped before we could proceed. Easier said than done.
We find an aduana inspector who looks at the car documents and tells us to wait while walking off with the documents. John goes running after him. The inspector gives John another form to fill out and then hands him off to another man who brings John to another window where he stands to have the new form stamped with another stamp with blanks that have to be filled in by the first inspector.
Back to the first inspector. Wait in line. The inspector fills in the blanks. Back to the window that stamped the new form. Another stamp on the new form. Blanks filled in. out to the car to check the VIN number and plate number. Back to the window and, more importantly to us, both of our passports get the car exit stamp. Now back to passport control.
We hand in our passports opened to the page with thye import and export stamps (we aim to be helpful) and the girl starts thumbing her way through the passport looking for the incoming immigration stamp that was also thoughtfully on the same page as the car import/export stamps.
She slowly thumbs her way through each visa in the passport. Then she gets into a conversation with the girl in the window next to her. I don’t know much Spanish but I’m pretty sure that they were talking about the guy outside the passport area that they were both ogling. If nothing else you learn patience on a trip like this.
She, finally, stamps the passport and hands it back with a smile. Have a good trip. Back in the car and into no-mans-land and to the Costa Rican border. Where there isn’t a sign for passport control or aduana to be seen. We ask a truck driver and he points us up the road and there hidden in a row of shops in the aduana/passport control.
I pull into a a parking space and a young man with an official looking t-shirt tells me to go back and drive the car through the fumigation spray (gotta stop those yellow fever carrying mosquitoes). Turn around, go through the spray booth.
Back to the same parking spot where I’d left John. Park. Take to car documents and passports and follow a local guy who has decided to help us through the steps of the Costa Rican entry.
We joke about this being a three step process but these South American and Central American countries apparently don’t know about the three steps. This will turn out to be about 8 steps. But we get our insurance as part of the temporary import. And we get to get some copies made of our passport id page and the car title at a copy office that is next to a goat pen. (Buena leche, good milk, according to our guide.)
But at the end of the process, the car is inspected, imported and insured. And our passports are duly stamped. We’re officially in Costa Rica. I give our self-appointed guide (we must really look lost when we get out of the car) a $10 tip which is probably more than he expected if the smile on his face is any indication. (He never even mentioned money through the whole guide process.)
We’re back in the car. The guide waves goodbye, still with a big gring, as he bikes away. We’re in Costa Rica. Time to head north.
We drive along the coastal plain past the Golfo Dulce and the Osa Peninsula to Palma Norte where we take a right and head intot he mountains. The GPS wants us to stay on the coast but the InterAmericana (Costa Rica’s name for the Panamericana) heads into the mountains. The coast road has a lot of traffic and eventually you have to climb into the mountains farther north to get to San Jose, our stop for the night.
The road follows a river for a ways and then turns into the mountains. And then starts climbing. And climbing. And climbing. We had thought we were done with high montain climbs when we left Colombia. Wrong.
We climb the narrow twisty road until we’re nearly at 11,000′. And every few kms we come upon another line of traffic created by an 18 wheeler struggling up the road. Back to crazy blind passes based solely on the truck driver indicating that the road is clear to pass.
And to spice up the day, we’re in the clouds with visibility sometimes down to 50 feet. That inspires thoughts of just how far the drop is on the downhill edge of the road. These mountain roads aren’t of the same madness caliber as some of the roads in Bolivia but they get your attention none the less.
We cross the top of the mountain range and start the descent into the San Jose area. The good news is that the weather improves and, although the traffic picks up, everything moves along fairly quickly.
As we get into the outskirts of San Jose, we see a hotel along the expressway that we’re on. Get get off and back track. The hotel is actually in a shopping plaza with a number of restaurants. A good place to stop.
In the room John checks his email and the insurance policy that will cover us through the rest of Central America is attached to the email. This policy will cover us in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Nicaragua sells insurance at the border ala Costa Rica (we think/hope.) John had bought this before he left California but the policies have been held up somewhere.
We have them now and I copy the insurance documents to a thumb drive and go back to the front desk to get them printed. They point me to the business center where I can print them myself.
Everything seems to be falling in place. We’ve still got over 3,500 miles to go but we’re getting there.
Obi-wan