We got a relatively early start after a nice breakfast at the Hotel Aranjuez in San Jose. Both of us were anxious to get back on the road and out of downtown San Jose.
Costa Rica is an incredibly beautiful country but the city of San Jose isn’t all that nice and if you’re riding a bike there you feel like a steer in a stock yard – your time to be slaughtered will come. The taxi drivers are extremely aggressive combined with the busses who definitely own the road and then there are the trucks who occasionally have working brakes. Dan was bumped a couple times riding around the city and John doesn’t like riding in cities in the first place.
We headed south out of town on CA2 the “main” road. This road snakes its way up along the ridge of mountains down the spine of the country. As we climbed up into the mountains there were clouds stuck on them and we both chatted back and forth that it was going to be cold and wet. We climbed and climbed – reaching over 10,000 feet and the moisture was getting “thick” and we were starting to freeze… We kept talking about how long this would last, is it rain, is it just foggy moisture, etc… When we got up to almost 11,000 feet and it was definitely raining we broke down and pulled over to put our rain gear on… on Feb 20 at about 11am we ended our no rain streak 
of about 39 days of travel without rain came to an end… we rode on in our rain gear trying to warm up and in about 15 minutes as we descended down thru 8,000 feet the rain stopped and out came the sun. By the time we hit San Isidro we were riding in sunshine and mostly dry on the outside, but soaked on the inside due to our stubbornness of waiting too long to put our rain gear on. I think the point at which we decided was when John complained of water running down his leg into his boots getting his socks wet. Looking back thru the comments in the blog it appears the closest guesses are on Feb 14th – by John’s wife Lynn!!! and by mtrcycllvr – so we will figure out a prize for you guys….
Gassing up in San Isidro we got to chatting with a guy about heading south – he suggested we go out to the coast to Dominical and ride along the ocean instead of down the inland route. It was a very good call – the coastline was spectacular and we had a great road almost all the way to Palmar Norte and enjoyed some nice riding without playing pinball with the trucks.
Working our way into the afternoon we debated whether to hit the border crossing today or not – it would be about 3pm when we got there and it looked like about 45 minutes to an hour ride to a town after the border. We decided to try it – as we pulled into the border a few of the “fixers” came swimming out of the urchin tanks to attack us. They wave you into a parking spot, but we have learned to just weave thru them and choose our own line/parking spot. Which establishes right away who is in charge.
Dan worked the border exit from Costa Rica while John watched the bikes. The exit from Costa Rica was not difficult – just took some time waiting in lines – get your immigration stamps and the exit for the bikes – took about an hour to get out. Entry into Panama was a little more mysterious – stand in line for your immigration stamp in the passport, then be told that you need a $1 sticker stamp from some dude walking around, then back into the immigration line – “oh, no Senor, you need the tourist card ok, go find the mysterious tourist card from some other office – only there is nobody there – wait for a while, wait some more, finally he comes back – $5 each for these papers and back to the immigration line… another 15 minutes waiting for the immigration guy and I’m thinking “ok, let’s see what he can find wrong now” – get up there and he looks it over and stamps our passports and says “Belcome to Panama!” – now, the bikes need to get their papers… over to the vehiculos “department” – more lines, more $5, etc… I start to head to the bikes when one of the fixers tells me that we need to go thru customs …. yea, i know that but where is it? – several of them point to yet another unmarked room – I go in there and there is a chubby little guy with a fancy hat, official shirt, picture id hung around his neck and a sign on the wall, in english and spanish, that says “All services in this public office are free”. He looks over the passports, the tourist cards, the vehicle papers, writes some notes on the vehicle stuff, and then says “$5 for each bike”. I point to the sign and say “gratis?” – he says in very good english “you want to have bikes “inspected” or you want to whiz right through?” – I pulled $10 out of my pocket and the customs machine resumed full speed operation spitting out 2 more gringos and motorcycles onward into Panama.
We got out of the border around 5:15 or so – a little over 2 hours total which wasn’t too bad. We headed down to Puerto Armuelles because it was the closest city and it was down on the ocean. About 35 kilometers (little over 20 miles) and the road was great. We got stopped about 5 miles out of town by some cops to look at our papers but otherwise just zoomed out there. Then we began circling and circling the town trying to find a hotel – it was surprisingly big and but we couldn’t find anything. While riding around a local guy on a played out Suzuki DR125 or DR175 pulled up next to Dan – revving his engine and popping the wheel off the ground a bit – he was excited to see us and checking the bikes out – Dan pulled a big wheelie for him and he lit up like he had fresh batteries installed in him. We stopped to talk to him for a second and Dan asked him where a hotel was – he signaled to follow him and he tore off like he was set on fire – weaving in and out of traffic, down one way streets the wrong way, thru stop signs, thru red lights, eventually taking us back out on the main road the way we had come and pulled into an unmarked and mostly unlit building that looked to be not that nice. His name was Franklin and he knew the owner who came out and gave us a nice welcome – $30 later we had a decent room with running water, A/C, 2 channels of staticy spanish TV, and a couple very nice beds. In the room a sign pointed to the pool and we thought sweet! Lets go for a dip in the morning…. 
The bikes went straight into the lobby for safety and we went walking up the road about 50 meters to an outdoor rotissarie chicken place… the food was incredible and John said it was the best rotissarie chicken he’d ever had – only problem was they didn’t have cold beer – they didn’t have ANY beer…. but it was $9 for both our dinners and drinks.
A few games of cribbage and we hit the sack early so we could hit the pool in the morning!! John barely hanging onto his lead now with only 15 points ahead.
Cheers….
Here is a shot of the pool in the morning – John still wanted to swim but I thought the green slime might leave a permanent mark … we decided to hit the road without a swim….
We hit the road early and the weather was nice. Cool and sunny to start but it got very hot later. We hit like 5 Policia check points and had to produce our documents in 4 of them. Stop the bikes take off the helmets and let the dude look at your passport, Bike docs and the like. Most were super nice, But it just takes time and you feel like your not getting anywhere. On top of that you are stopping in the hot sun and your mesh gear is not feeling very “meshy” when you’re sitting there stewing in your seat.
Finally we both got frustrated and in the end we said “screw it, lets just grind out the rest and get to P.City. Of course then we roll into a huge city with no plan, no place too stay and no idea of where to go. After riding around awhile looking for a cheap place or an internet cafe, we stumbled on a hostel. They had a room but no place to put the bikes except on the curb out front…. It was also a very dodgey area and we decided to pass. Plus the gal who was running it was kinda a grouch. So we got a couple of warm beers from them and stole some wifi. With the internet we locked into a place about a mile or two away. It turned out to be a little more than we wanted to pay but we were both shattered after a long day in the hot sun. We went for a dip in the rooftop pool, had a couple of drinks and crashed out.
We were told/read on the interrnet Copa Carga were “the” guys. We checked with them first and the dude was like 19. He made some calls, we think to his bosses (who were probably at the Carnaval … hammered) and then flatly said no. We had trouble comunicating with him about why. But we basically got that they have canceled cargo flights. We tried to ask when we could expect the filghts to start again, but all we got was stuff like “indeterminate”. 
We headed back to the hotel to do a little more research on the internet. Dan had been having a dialog with Mike at 
We decided to get some fresh (but damp, humid, and stagnated) air so we went for a ride on the bikes. On our spin we were stopped by a Military Dude who was not happy to be working or just plain not happy. He was the equivalent of a Panama version of Barney Fife. He held us in the hot sun for what seemed like 45 minutes looking at our documents. He asked us the same questions over and over. He even called it in on the radio to check our passports. We both just smiled, acted stupid (which comes naturally for both of us), and smiled -answered his questions again and again. At one point he just put our passports in his pocket and started checking other folks in their cars…. While we waited and waited. He finally decided that we were no threat and we might actually outlast him… and he released us. We rode on down this road that followed the coastline. The road went about 20 miles and ended in this little crappy town. On the way down there we ran several guantlets of maybe 8 or 10 kids who were loaded with water buckets, water balloons, or hoses. They would dose the passing cars with water. At first they weren’t throwing water at us – but Dan egged them on because he was hot and inadvertently caused them to bomb John who was following… When we reached the crappy little town, we just turned around and headed back the way we came – only to run all the gauntlets again – only this time, they hit us both with everything they had... All this time we were wondering what the checkpoint was protecting?? and what Barney was busting our balls about….
After maybe 20 miles of riding past the Barney Fife checkpoint, we headed up to the canal and found this spot at one of the locks. We parked, got some Lemonade for a street vendor and watch this huge ship go through the locks. We were about 20 feet away from the locks and no checkpoint, no security, no military protecting the biggest asset in Panama…. Go figure!
We met Michelle for breakfast and laid out our plan of attack. Dan had some email threads with Mike at Motolumbia.com – Mike called his contacts at Copa Cargo in Cali Columbia who confirmed somethings for us – and gave some other information that was contrary to what we had heard locally. The info we had heard locally however was also contrarary to what we had heard locally…
We took off for the bank and lunch. The first bank we hit (Citi) would not do a cash advance on Visa or Debit cards – ok, next bank. We hit the HSBC – yes, we do cash advances but only for $1000 per card. Ok – drag out a couple cards to get $2000 and then hit the cash machine for another $500 and we figured we had enough cash to get things done.
The Girag guys brought a big flat aluminum sheet out – we rolled the bikes on there and got things positioned for them. Then they began to tie they down with scraps of webbing and straps. And it looked like they had never tied a motorcycle down before – we watched for maybe 1/2 hour and then they sort of asked us what we thought – 
