Last week I took the car back to the mechanic for some final adjustments before the Panama trip. The power seat had given up the ghost on the tilt function, which left me somehow sitting deep in a bucket with my knees brushing the steering wheel and needing to use my toes to operate the pedals. The exhaust developed a leak as well and the roof decided to not operate which, along with the non-functioning air conditioner should prove for an uncomfortable journey. After three days they had the exhaust leak fixed and changed the oil- nada mas.
So sitting in my bucket I tiptoed the car south and west over the Costa Rican central mountains to the border with Panama. I drove slowly and It wasn't as bad as I had imagined. We left Sunday morning, hit virtually no traffic and the car was responding well to the hills.
We hit the border around 1 PM and had a relatively smooth crossing as I had made all the copies of the paperwork for getting the car across ahead of time. Then the noise started.
We stayed the night in David and the next day managed to find the only German auto mechanic around, but he was in the capital and would be back the following day. I was thinking lifters, as that had been one of the original problems with the car way back when, and decided to head up the hill to Boquete. The car was still strong (though with a 5 liter V-8 you could lose a cylinder or two and still not notice much) so I ignored the noise for the moment.
Boquete is quite beautiful, and has a sharply contrasting climate from the lowlands. Panama is hot. You've probably seen it in the movies, and it's probably exactly like you've seen it. Up the hill though is astonishing. The whole area around the Baru Volcano is considered the breadbasket of Panama, and in fact much of the province of Chiriquí is under cultivation from sugar cane to corn.
We wound up staying at a place well out of our budget plans called La Montaña y el Valle- The Coffee Estate Inn. At $130 a night it's one of the most expensive joints in Boquete, but if you've got it, spend it.
We cater to travelers seeking privacy, quality, comfort, personalized attention and excellent food. We promise what we can deliver and deliver what we promise. There are no unpleasant surprises.
So says the blurb from the website, and I'll just second that. I highly recommend a stay. Just don't forget like I did to bring home some coffee.
So the next day el mechanico Don Roberto was back from Panama City so down the hill we went. One or more of the lifters on the starboard side seemed to be the problem, and it would take a day to get the parts, so we call Don René (with whom I had become acquainted with on my last trip) and hire him and his taxi for the next day. For the remainder of this day we explore David and stay at the Hotel Nacional, an overpriced dump at $70+ a night, but it has a casino which kept the little lady amused at the nickel slots- and where she won more than enough to pay the hotel bill. (Our first night in David was at the $24 a night Alcazar, which also seemed overpriced at the time.)
David is a relatively small city but its downtown section reminds me a bit of downtown Los Angeles. Not the new shiny part, but the part where all the cheap stores occupy the bottom floors of the older buildings while the upper floors remain uninhabited. David lacks only the taller buildings, if not the Spanish language. If David were truly a center for commerce it might be worth setting up a business there, but as you need to travel the six hours to the capital more often than not to buy ordinary items, it's not worth the noise and heat. Plus, all the money is in Panama City.
We went to the 'playa' looking to see what was up and pretty much found nothing. There are no 'beach towns' as we know them, just resort areas with a pavilion or two thrown in for the locals to party at on the weekends. Where we went, the closest beach to David, La Barqueta, there was an old condominium complex, a new hi-rise condo complex being built, a halfway decent resort and one of the aforementioned pavilions. If you had some time and money you could buy land and develop some stuff, but big profits would have to wait.
Off to Concepción to the west, through the pueblos on the south side of the Inter-Americana. Charming little places that would be nice to settle into a slow moving lifestyle. Concepción itself, which is about halfway between David and the Costa Rican border, is getting ready for one of their festivals and is a bustling little town. Very few of the storefronts were vacant, the central park was packed, and there was a good mix of old style businesses and more modern looking ones. The climate was slightly cooler than in the area around David, but not by much. The locals notice the difference. I liked it a lot.
From Concepción we headed north up the hill again to the other side of the volcano from Boquete. Volcán is small, and there are a couple of other pueblos around like Cerro Punta and Nueva California. Volcán seems to have an overabundance of restaurants for its size. Unlike Boquete, Volcán doesn't have a developed 'centro' area, just a strip of local businesses spread out along the main drag and not really conducive to a walking tour.
On the way back down to Concepción we found an abandoned Steak House with a for rent sign that included a phone number in Southern California. Panama, like Costa Rica, is littered with businesses set up by gringos and other foreigners that just didn't work out. They just seem to be more noticeable in Panama. It's a warning that I willfully choose to ignore. The abandoned stand-alone building was a good 2 thousand square feet and just outside the main part of town. It was either never used or only used briefly. The rent wasn't unreasonable, but it would need much work to put it in shape.
We called Roberto the mechanic as it was getting on towards 3 o'clock. He said he was consulting with another technician. Shit.
Back at the repair shop I find that the lifters were just dandy, but this was only found out after they had been replaced. Which means I had to pay for them. The racket was actually coming from one or more of the connecting rods. If you don't know what this means, just figure that it sucks, and that the short block I bought in the United States has failed in a significant way, and there is no reasonably way to return it to be repaired. The car remains in Panama, and we now begin the adventure back north.
"The last bus leaves the border for San José at five-thirty so we have to hurry." Only say that in Spanish. We rush to the frontier and cross over at around five. The only wait was on the Costa Rican side as the immigration official was on break or something. After fifteen minutes we're heading to the ticket booth. But it's closed and the last bus out was at three o'clock. I guess it's high time for a photo or two, so here is Paso Canoas on the Costa Rican side of the border. 
Sweet. It was time for food so we settle into a Chinese "steak house" for some kind of grub, which sort of resembled beef, if not steak. At seven or so there is supposed to be a bus that runs from Panama City up through Guatemala, and if we hang out we may find an empty seat or two depending on who they lose going through the border. At six-thirty the bus comes.
Border crossing is never a sure thing even with all your documental ducks in a row. The northward passage through the Americas to the promised lands is especially risky if you happen to be one of the designated 'peoples.' Columbians usually have the most problems as you may well guess, and my dark-skinned Brazilian girlfriend gets all upset when she's mistaken for one. But as she has such a heavy Rio-accented Spanish that about 10 seconds of her yammering is usually all it takes to put smiles on faces all around. It's pretty funny to watch.
The first bus is packed to the gills. Lot's of Asian faces for some reason, all speaking Spanish. I watch the process for the bus people, which is not at all like it is for us just walking across the border. After they go through immigration and get their passports stamped they are subject to a grilling by the customs people and a search of every bag down to women's purses. Three customs officials take 30 minutes to search the bus after everyone gets off. Airport procedures are the opposite. The Costa Rican immigration folks are the ones staring you down while you could pretty much smuggle a live cow through customs- if you could get it into a suitcase.
Now I begin to get nervous. I left Costa Rica with a car, which was documented, and I have a big-ass stamp right in my passport that says so. I'm returning without a car. I'm already in the country and I could just get a taxi to wherever, but I need the bus to San José tonight because the girlfriend has an appointment at the American Embassy in the morning (as of this writing she was missing a financial document relating to her ex: visa denied).
The driver of the second bus sets up shop in front of immigration. Four people won't make it across and there are two seats open for a total of six available places. There are ten people wanting seats including us. We're numbers six and seven. The driver is a really empathetic guy and you can see the pain on his face as he tells people there are no more spaces. A husband and wife missionary team make it, two indigenous religious types with a couple of kids don't (they were really cool folks with cool costumes. I would have liked to talk to them more). The driver turns to us and asks if we could share one seat and we agree, though the prospect of six hours like that, much of it on winding mountain roads, is not my idea of fun. He takes our money and we have a ride. Now through customs.
The bus people leave their passports and forms at immigration and the customs officials then call them one by one to the search tables. We weren't originally on the bus so we fill out our forms separately and hand them to the customs guys directly. This makes one stick-out, and one never wants to do that. We get special treatment. They occasionally make small changes to customs forms and I missed one of the items. As I don't have residency here I have to leave the country every three months or so for 3 days and reenter. This was not one of those times but I have a plethora of exit and entry stamps in my passport.
Why was I here? Where was I? What was I doing? Where am I going? Everything except questions about the car. Technically they could have said I've overstayed my welcome in Costa Rica and booted me back to Panama. As my girlfriend is a legal Costa Rican resident I pretty much pointed at her and let her go into her routine. The icebreaker was the cheap Chanel perfume rip-off she insisted on buying from a couple of guys who molested us in the restaurant. I pointed out the crooked label to one of the customs guys who proceeded to peel it off and everybody got a kick out of it. Bienvenidos a Costa Rica.
We go hang out with the bus driver who was from Cartago. One of the fellas who bought a ticket just before we did was the last guy standing at the customs table. Two cops walked up to him and escorted him away. That meant we each had our own seat.
We pulled out at around nine-thirty PM from the border station. I used to commute from New Jersey into Manhattan quite a bit in the old days and spent many an hour on the bus, but it's been quite a while. The last time I had the pleasure was in Morocco, which was an experience in itself. The roads in Costa Rica aren't in the best shape, and some of the passages through the mountains are quite hairy.
As we began hurtling through the dark I took inventory of my actions should some calamity befall us. I saw they had seat belts, my first notice on any bus, and I reached for the straps between our two seats. One had a clip, one did not. I looked over at my girlfriend, who had her eyes closed already, and buckled in with the good strap. Then the woman behind me started with her knees in my back.
For about an hour I sat upright, staring out the windows as we passed tractor-trailers and slow moving cars, violently switching lanes, which caused the bus to rock enough so that I was bruising my elbow on the hard plastic armrest. I had to lean back into the seat to stop rocking, where I then found a pair of knees. I tested the reclining feature, and as I leaned forward to adjust myself under the seat belt, the woman behind me pushed my seat forward. It was on.
Some years ago I learned what a passive-aggressive personality type was, and that I had one. I took steps to try and be more direct and assertive, and only God knows if it's better or worse. But instead of confronting her directly and asking her to knock it off, I decided to go the old-fashioned route and planted my feet on the floor and pushed back. It actually felt quite good to exercise my legs like that, and as my back was in a state from strange beds and too much time in the car, the added pressure against her knees made my back pain start to go away. As the position also kept me from swinging back and forth with the jerky movement of the bus and thus banging my elbow, this was a win-win situation all the way around.
About a half hour into it I started rubbing my back side to side taking advantage of the free massage and she backed off. The bus pulled into San José around two thirty in the AM and we grabbed a taxi almost at the moment we stepped off the bus. I never turned around to look at her face.
