Days
116-118 – Cahuita, Limón, Costa Rica to Santa Catalina, Veraguas, Panama –
18,223 km
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The Route: A) Cahuita, B) Guabito,
C) Santa Catalina, D) Panama City |
We left Cahuita first thing in the morning
and we rode the remaining few kilometers east to the Panama border. It was a
sleepy border crossing at Sixaola-Guabito but just over the bridge into Panama
we were greeted by several German bikers on BMWs who had just finished their
paperwork and were eager to get underway. All went well enough with the customs
and immigration officials except that here, as in Guatemala, El Salvador, and
Nicaragua, the municipality of the border town extracted a small tax.
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| Río Sixaola at Costa Rica-Panama border |
‘For some reason it just makes me furious,’
I said to Jess after we had paid the tax of two U.S. dollars each. ‘These
border towns are always the worst and, rather than clean themselves up so that
you might want to stick around and buy something, they just slip their hands
into your pocket as you pass through.’
But the biggest inconvenience of the Costa
Rica-Panama crossing was buying the mandatory vehicle insurance before the
Panamanian customs would issue a temporary vehicle permit. Belize, Nicaragua,
Costa Rica, and Panama require auto insurance, which is a reasonable enough
requirement, but they do not recognize any foreign or international insurers.
In these countries our Central and South American motorcycle insurance was
invalid and we had to buy local policies at the border. In each instance, we
would walk or ride over to some rickety office in a kiosk where three ‘agents’
– somehow it took that many – would copy our driver’s license and vehicle
information onto a form, stamp it, and then collect our money.
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| Jess waits for vehicle permits at customs office |
Each time, Jess’s comment was the same:
‘I’d like to know what the terms of the policy are in case we get into an
accident.’
And my response was also always the same:
‘What does it matter? Do you really think this bullshit policy is going to be
worth anything if we do get into a scrape?’
At one border – I think it was Nicaragua –
I tried to satisfy Jess’s curiosity and I asked one of the several ‘agents’ who
was handling our policy, ‘So what coverage do we have if we get into an
accident?’
‘You call this number,’ the agent said.
He pointed at the phone number that was
written on a printed sheet that was taped to the wall.
‘Ok. That’s fine,’ I said. ‘But how much
are we covered for if we get into an accident?’
‘Just you call this number and they will
handle it,’ he said.
He took one of the pages of the policy
document from my hand and he scribbled on it the phone number that was on the
printed sheet on the wall and that was already printed in the header of that
and all of the policy documents that he had issued us.
This time in Panama my cynicism was fueled
again when we entered another office-in-a-shack a dozen or so meters from the
customs office. This time there was only one ‘agent’ and, although there were
no other customers looking to buy auto insurance, this helped me to understand
why issuing an auto insurance policy in one of these border towns was normally
a team effort. He sat at the computer where the online form was open. In the
heat and humidity of the late morning it was absolutely excruciating to watch
as he assumed the herculean task of transferring the information from our
vehicle registrations into the text boxes and dropdown menus on the computer
screen.
‘Why did he write United States over and
over again in the address line?’ Jess whispered as I shifted my attention
between rolling my eyes at her and watching over him to catch mistakes.
‘Wouldn’t writing it once be enough?’
‘What’s worse than that is how long it
takes him just to write it the first time!’ I whispered back.
Then he got confused on which was our VIN
and which was our engine number and which was our driver’s license numbers.
‘He does this every day, doesn’t he?’ Jess
whispered when I turned back to her after sorting out these mistakes.
‘Not only that,’ I said. ‘On the table
beside the computer there’s a stack of copies of policies that he did for
tourists with our same California registration.’
In all he erred on each of our names, both
of our VINs, Jess’s engine number, Jess’s license number, and my vehicle type.
Not only that, but after each time he printed a policy for signature, he erased
the form on the computer. The errors were scattered and each time we caught an
error, he had to redo the policy from scratch. Finally, after more than an hour
of us sweating in the cramped kiosk office and two versions of Jess’s policy
and three versions of mine, we had our motorcycle insurance and we went on to
the customs office for our vehicle permit and then to the local police station
to pay our municipality tax of two dollars each.
After completing the border crossing it was mid-afternoon and
we were eager to make Almirante, which seemed to be the last place to find a
hotel before a long stretch through the central highlands. Instead of following
the tarmac road out of the border town of Guabita, I decided – under the
influence of my GPS – to lead us down the dirt road that would eventually link
up with the highway. It was hard packed and none too rocky but the real
excitement came at the several small, wooden bridges that we crossed along the
way. The excitement was not that they were not study enough because they looked
to be in decent enough repair. The excitement was that twice I decided not to
ride over the bridges properly.
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| I rode the bridge nicely in this photo |
The first time, I stopped before the second
bridge to let Jess catch up because she lags a bit off the tarmac. When I
started up, I accelerated too slowly before I reached the bridge. Speed, or
rather the lack thereof, is often a motorcyclist’s worst enemy and this was
never more heart-stoppingly brought home to me than when I rode so slowly over
that bridge. The lack of speed made each crevice and each step between the
uneven planks an enormous hazard that threatened my balance so that twice I was
almost certain that both bike and I were going to fall over and then into the
crevice where the small creek ran below.
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| Jess rides through Reserva Forestal de Fortuna |
Seeing me teeter here, Jess became very
nervous about crossing the bridges. For that and the several remaining bridges
she parked some ways before and signaled me to walk back and ride her bike
across for her. My second scare came on the second to last bridge when Jess had
parked her bike too close to the bridge. This left me very little space to
accelerate before lurching onto the particularly uneven planks of this bridge.
Again I teetered, although not as badly as before, until I pulled hard on the
throttle and remember to look far ahead and not just in front of my front tire.
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| View from Ruta 21 |
‘I saw you lose balance on the second
bridge and I got so scared,’ Jess said that evening when we had dinner at a
Chinese restaurant beside the hotel in Almirante.
‘You got scared?’ I said. ‘My heart stopped
and pounded out of my chest at the same time.’
The next morning we rode south from
Almirante away from the Atlantic coast and through the lushly forested
mountains of the Reserva Forestal de Fortuna. Then we took the Pan-American
Highway east and then went south again through lower, dryer hill country until
we reached Santa Catalina on the Pacific Coast. Santa Catalina is a small
surfing and scuba diving haven that seems to consist only of hotels, hostels,
restaurants, and dive shops so that you wonder where the few locals actually
live.
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| Small islands beside Parque Nacional de Coiba |
About an hour’s motorboat ride from Santa
Catalina is the national park island of Coiba where there was once a penal
colony. That afternoon we visited the Coiba Dive Center and the next morning we
joined a group for diving. I did three dives along the smaller islands near
Coiba and Jess had her first proper experience with snorkeling. Two Brits among
our dive group brought their GoPro cameras along and this made me disappointed
that I had opted not to bring mine, which we had bought after Jess twisted my
arm about it back at the BMW dealership in Guatemala City when we had the tires
changed.
The diving was good and it was my first
time to see a shark, which in this case was, I think, called a White Fin. We
also saw eels, a variety of colorful fish, a seahorse, dolphins, and several
rays that jumped high into the air apparently to shake the parasites off their
backs. It was a beautiful day and we had a good time of it but rolling over the
choppy waves, which were nothing compared to those further out at sea, we were
reaffirmed in our decision to ship the bikes out of Panama by air and fly
ourselves to meet them in Colombia, rather than all go together by boat as had
originally been the plan.
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| A day of scuba diving |
‘Every blog I’ve read about it says that at
least half the people get sick on the boat from Colón to Cartagena, even on the
Stahlratte,’ Jess said.
‘I believe it,’ I said. ‘I was sick as a
dog when my dad and I did a few years ago. It was miserable.’
‘Then it’s decided?’ Jess said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’re flying.’
The next day it was off to Panama City to arrange shipment of ourselves and our bikes to South America.
