Crossing the border

8 July 2009

Today, it's bye bye CR. Due to our diversion, we cross the border into Panama not via the panamerican highway but a small place called Rio Sereno. We first take a one hour bus from San Vito through beautiful mountain scenery. We see the La Amistad nature reserve (a UNESCO site) in the distance. The last 40 minutes on this busride lead over an unpaved road. As the bus comes to a halt, all the locals head down the street into what seems to be the village. We're the only ones enquiring about the location of the border officials. Turns out we have to backtrack a bit to get to the CR immigration: the bus passed it undeterred. We get the stamps from a plainclothes officer in the building (to this day, we don't know if Costa Rican uniforms for immigration officers exist at all). Next, we walk our trolley bags down the unpaved road to the Panamanian immigration. The official requests copies of our passports, and is a bit annoyed that we don't have them ready. He doesn't have a copy machine in his office, but a shop further down the road has one (probably on Panamanian territory already). Natasha sprints, gets two copies for a few cents, we get our stamps (free of charge) and walk down the same road the locals did 15 minutes ago into Panama. No fence, no gate.

At the Panamanian side of town, we're greeted by a Chinese supermarket. We already started to wonder if the Chinese had not yet set up shop in Central America – they're relatively absent in Nicaragua and CR, but we see many Chinese supermarkets in Panama.
We take the minibus to David: a three hour ride along curvy mountain roads and blasting salsa music. At times, the driver races like a criminal on the run, only to bring the vehicle to a halt a bit later and slip in a three minute cigarette break.