OK, so the President of the United States isn’t entirely responsible for my missing breakfast, but if he hadn’t been arriving in San Jose, Costa Rica, for meetings with Central American leaders I would almost certainly have been able to take advantage of the breakfast included in the price of my room…it would have looked something like this, but this is for illustrative purposes only since I didn’t actually get to eat it.
After spending so much time in Nicaragua without internet access we didn’t know President Obama was visiting Costa Rica the same day we’d be arriving. This is the sort of thing that happens when you’re travelling. It could have been worse, we met someone on our bus to Panama who’d had his flight cancelled so Air Force One could land…makes missing breakfast seem small fry.
As it was, the entire centre of San Jose was to be placed in virtual lockdown from 6am in the morning until 4pm in the afternoon. Getting to the bus station in time for the 7.30am bus to David in Panama would require leaving the hotel no later than 5.30am. Breakfast started at 6am, lockdown-time.
I didn’t really mind about the missed breakfast, but losing an extra hour of sleep following a long day of travel the previous day was pretty galling. We’d arrived in San Jose at 9pm after setting off in a boat down the Rio San Juan in Nicaragua at 9.30am. After a delay of three hours in the transport hub of San Carlos, we got another boat to the Costa Rica border at Los Chiles.
Immigration formalities complete we had to walk 2km to the bus station in Los Chiles. Why, oh why, couldn’t the bus station be near the port? Failing that, surely some enterprising taxi driver might consider it worth his or her time to hang around the port when a boat from Nicaragua arrives? Apparently not. So in the baking sun we walked.
Dripping with sweat, we made it just in time to catch the last bus to San Jose. Its not far from anywhere to anywhere else in Costa Rica, but buses pick people up along the road and drop people off outside their front door, making Costa Rican buses one of the least efficient forms of transport on the planet. It took five and a half hours of squashed bus travel before we reached San Jose.
It wasn’t all bad. As we crawled up the zig-zag road through the mountains we witnessed a truly stunning sunset over the ocean to the west. Although this was ruined by a passenger two rows in front being violently sick over himself. Actually, it was pretty bad.
After only a few hours sleep we got cab at 5.30am to the bus station in San Jose, narrowly missing the city centre lockdown. We got our tickets and prepared to wait an hour and a half for the bus to leave. It would be a nine hour journey if everything went well at the border crossing between Costa Rica and Panama, and after the previous day’s travel we weren’t looking forward to another long bus journey.
In the end everything was fine, although the border crossing at Paso Canoas between Costa Rica and Panama was one of the most chaotic I’ve ever come across. We arrived in David, Panama in the late afternoon, tired but relieved that we’d managed to cross from Nicaragua to Costa Rica to Panama in a day and a half using only two boats, two buses and three taxis.
We’d decided we wanted to see a bit more of Panama before we headed back to Colombia and then to Bolivia via Peru, so skipped through Costa Rica as quickly as possible. Next up, Boquete, Panama…
Notes from Camelid Country 