“Bridge out...”

The hot sun baked down upon me, standing just in front of the car high atop the old railway bridge, officially in no-man’s land between Panama and Costa Rica. Thankfully I had decided to wear pants that morning, so the heat factor was that much higher. It was still relatively early, far too early for stagnant heat like this. You would think that there would be some kind of breeze in the middle of a bridge, but alas, there was none. So I stood there and waited as the sweat pooled out of every pore in my body. We had gotten up early on the island, trying to make the 8 am boat back to mainland Panama. Arriving just in time, we paid our four dollars each and climbed aboard, making the short trip in. A taxi then took us back to our car, and by 9 in the morning we had arrived at the border crossing.

The exit from Panama went smooth, less than five minutes to hand in our papers and get our passports stamped. I had been a little bit worried that there might be some issues with my unpaid seatbelt ticket, but just as I suspected, technology had not entered this part of Panama yet, and I had escaped as a fugitive. We fetched the car and drove up to the bridge entrance, carefully positioning the wheels on either side of the old railway tracks and slowly crept across the bridge behind a few Costa Rica bound pedestrians. Three quarters of the way across we were forced to stop as a work crew was repairing the very bridge we were driving on, with about a four foot gap missing in the support beams underfoot. How long would this take? We had planned on getting up to Liberia, the far opposite end of Costa Rica so that we could get into Nicaragua in the morning, but the lack of bridge could foil our plans. I got out and asked the workers how long it would be before we would be able to drive across. Half an hour, maybe even fifteen minutes the one worker said. I optimistically gathered the paperwork and left the car behind, hoping that when we had obtained our entry stamp that the work would be done. While waiting in line behind all kinds of hippies and degenerates making the trek into Panama, I could see that a couple of other cars had now pulled up behind ours. So I left Denielle behind to wait in line and get the passports stamped in case the bridge opened up. So now I’m left standing, in front of the car, slowly soiling my clothes with sweat from head to toe as the fifteen to thirty minutes passes.

The lead worker called out commands to the others while they shifted and moved the cover planks around so that he could trim each one with the chainsaw he had in his hand. Giant pry bars were used to move the big support beams into position under the old tracks, and soon everything was in place. I moved the car over the newly repaired bridge and into a little cubby in front of the immigration office just before the fumigation archway. Bewildered hippies shot angry glances as I corralled them against the fence, allowing the other vehicles behind to pass while we proceeded to enter the nightmare of bureaucracy at the border. The problem with these border crossings is that a lot of people don’t know what they’re doing, and this is especially the case at the smaller crossings where they may not encounter things like two Albertans far from where they live with a suspended car import permit so that they don’t have to buy a new one. So the immigration lady got on the phone and made some calls and then told me which forms I would need to photocopy and where to get new car insurance. I walked through the border unabated by any sort of police or security, and walked over to the pharmacy where I was to purchase the insurance and get photocopies. Of course the immigration office that needs copies of everything wouldn’t have a photocopier, that wouldn’t make any sense at all. So the pharmacy told me that their photocopier was broken. Returning to the immigration empty handed and with a small fear resting like a pit in my stomach that we wouldn’t be allowed to enter until we found some magical photocopy machine, I presented my case to the lady. She said there was another copier downstairs of the pharmacy. Of course there is. So back I went, across the border and into the pharmacy. I couldn’t buy the insurance until I had the required photocopies of the sheet the immigration lady had just handed me, so they pointed me towards a building down by the river, below the border bridge. Great.

I walked down below the bridge towards a house with a red roof, where there was a lady cutting a little kid’s hair. Do you photocopy here? Yes she said. So I went in, got my copies for twenty cents, and returned to the immigration office to pick up the other documents I needed for the insurance from our file folder, and crossed through the border once again. I filled out all the information on the pharmacist’s computer for her, all the passport numbers and names and country information, VIN numbers and make and model of the car, just so I could pay her $15 for the effort. I walked back to the immigration office, tired but satisfied, only to be given another copy of our car import permit, the new one, which I needed to go photocopy for them. Of course they needed a photocopy. We got to keep the original, but I had to go get their copy for them. So I walked back under the bridge to get my copy, both sides, when the scanning printer they were using broke down. Meanwhile another guy came in asking for a passport photo, so the Dad that was helping me out this time handed a small digital camera to his son, maybe all of six, who went and took the picture while he fixed my printer problem. I got my copy and wasn’t even charged as I guess the guy felt bad for making me wait. I returned to immigration, handed in the copy and we got into the car and entered the fumigation. Just on the other side the man running the fumigation said something to me about having to go back to immigration. So I waited a while and thought, screw this, so got back in the car and took off into Costa Rica. A couple of glances in the rear view mirror revealed no massed chase, so we were free and clear. What started out as a great early beginning now had us at nearly eleven in the morning Costa Rica time, so three hours were spent at the border crossing.

After a very long drive across the spiny backbone of central Costa Rica, we came into the outskirts of San Jose, the capital city. I told Denielle that it would be nice if we could take some roads around the city to avoid it, so she guided me through some of the suburbs to the north. I was a little apprehensive at first, as this did not appear to be a main road, but we continued along with no traffic lights or stop signs, and were steadily making our way through it all. Then our road ended and the signs stopped, and we soon became engulfed in the unknown. We broke out our GPS to get at least which direction we were facing, and slowly made our way out to the west. Before we knew it, we had passed the airport and were back on the main highway, bound for the Nicaragua border. We arrived in Liberia, just 80 kilometres south of Nicaragua just as the sun was beginning to set. We arrived the following morning and passed through the Costa Rica side of the border with very little trouble, but once into the Nicaragua side, bureaucracy reared its ugly head. Two hours of waiting and no less than 8 different people we had to visit to get various tickets, stamps, pay taxes, insurance, have police sign off on other stampings and have our car inspected. Then we were through, and made the short drive into San Juan del Sur to have lunch and pick up some souvenir t-shirts. After lunch we were back in the car and off to search for Popoyo, our last contact with the Pacific before a gruelling drive back up to Mexico.

Tyler.