Costa Rica, Más Rápido

I approached the border checkpoint at Penas Blancas with some trepidation; after the horror show at Guasale, I was hoping to both avoid the tramitador-induced headaches, and get out in some semblance of a reasonable time in order to make it to the town of Monte Verde, Costa Rica by nightfall. The early signs were already encouraging; outside of the usual line of trucks waiting for inspection, Penas Blancas contained a surprisingly small number of cars and people, and the facility looked almost brand new. A few tramitadores loudly offered their services on the way in, but to their credit, stayed away after a firm “Vaya, no necesito.” The lines inside were not long, and moved quickly, and after a few short questions from the passport control agent and a few dollars in exit taxes, I was stamped out of Nicaragua. Canceling my temporary import permit and getting the bike out with me, was, as usual, a little more complicated, requiring visits to different Aduana desks on both the entry and exit side of the crossing, a verification that the VIN and plate numbers matched those on my title and registration by a police officer who was none to happy to be asked to do his job, and a final trip inside with all the signed bits of paper. I’ve come to find that one of the main hang-ups in getting an American bike through customs, no matter the country, is that many border agents don’t understand the difference between the vehicle title and our state registration; the source of much of my time waiting in Guasale turned out to be due to the officials’ confusion over my license plate number being absent from the title, and my having to bring them the registration and explain the difference. Since then, I’ve taken to handing over both documents immediately and pointing out where to find the plate number, and things have gone much smoother as a consequence.

Entering Costa Rica turned out to be a similar game of waiting a long time for relatively quick processes, but still turned out to be the quickest and smoothest crossing I’d made since Mexico. With my luggage X-rayed and tagged, and my fifth set of TIP documents, I rode away with the now-familiar rush of riding new foreign roads building in my chest. I had hoped to make it to Monte Verde in the same day, but two things put that plan on the back burner; first, it was getting dark. The further I got into Central America, the earlier the sun seemed to set, and at 4:30 in the afternoon I was already facing little more than an hour of good light. Second, and more dangerous, was the reported condition of the roads. Monte Verde is a small mountain town in the middle of one of the best-known biological reserves in Costa Rica, and as a consequence, the only road access is through a trio of steep, winding, and entirely unpaved roads. Every traveler’s account I’d read specifically mentioned the difficulty in driving up the roads, including my parents’ own multi-hour ride in a 4x4 to get there in 2015. I’d initially dismissed the reports as hyperbole, figuring that a bike as capable as the Twin would make it through, but the report from a local policeman I asked about the route to Monte Verde put the final nail in my plans; it had apparently been raining in the mountains for two straight days, and the roads were more akin to muddy slides than actual routes. With a fully loaded motorcycle, they would be next to impossible, and the idea of slogging through mud and rocks in the dead of night turned my stomach. Stopping for a quick dinner, I engaged in one of my rapidly developing skills: last-minute AirBnB requests. Finding a room in Tilaran, less than an hour north, I quickly jumped back on the Twin and set off, mildly disappointed at having my plans thwarted, but relieved to not be struggling up a muddy hill, or more than likely out of a surrounding ditch, with 600-ish pounds of motorcycle and luggage.

My refuge for the night was a rather nice villa just a few minutes away from Lake Arenal, and as I rode up the increasingly windy road from the Panamericana to Tilaran, I had a feeling the next day would have great things in store. In between switchbacks, I could see just enough light over the hills to know I was in some surely beautiful terrain, and the red lights of windmills dotting the hills reminded me of Costa Rica’s status as one of the most progressive and rapidly developing countries in Latin America. My hosts received me as they would a family member, only leaving me to sleep after my third assurance that I needed neither coffee nor food. I was finding that my spartan way of life on the bike and generally humble attitude towards the places I stayed along the way formed a stark contrast with the happily aggressive hospitality most of Central America displayed to foreign travelers, but I wasn’t complaining; it was certainly better than dealing with the reverse.

Next morning, after a breakfast of home-cooked Gallo Pinto, I set off north to Lake Arenal. With the deadline for having my bike inspected in Panama City looming and wanting to leave myself time in hand for any bureaucratic mishaps (even I learn from experience sometimes), I had only planned on three full days in Costa Rica, the shortest time spent in any country so far. I’d spent a week and a half with our combined families in the Pacific coast town of Quepos for Christmas 2015, exploring a couple of national parks and Costa Rica’s beautiful beaches in the process, so if I had to cut short my time, at least it was in a country I’d already been to. And that didn’t prevent me from taking the most scenic routes I could find through the country. To that end, I’d plotted a route north and east from Tilaran, circling Lake Arenal and the volcano with which it shares its name, traversing the capitol of San Jose, and ascending into the mountains in the country’s center to the Parque de los Quetzales. If I couldn’t see Monte Verde, I could at least enjoy Costa Rica’s abundance of natural beauty and still try to see some Quetzals in the process.

There are two kinds of road in Costa Rica: long, straight major highways not unlike American, and the rural highway routes that consisted almost entirely of tight curves of the sort avid motorcyclists will go far out of their way to find, and it was this latter type that took me away from Tilaran and towards Lake Arenal. The lake certainly did not disappoint, its green-and-azure waters forming a whole network of coves surrounded by reddish-brown sand and lush jungle, with brief glimpses of the volcano between the clouds in the background. Fortunately, there were enough viewpoints and pull-offs to keep certain gawking motorcyclists from running off the road. There seemed to be a hotel, lodge, hostel, or tour company tucked into nearly every nook and cranny of the lake, and I was sure that had I ridden through in the high season for tourism, I’d have spent my whole morning stuck in traffic; as it was, many of the places I passed were sparsely populated or seemed to be closed altogether, keeping my route free of obstacles and allowing me to focus entirely on the smooth asphalt hairpins and gorgeous scenery surrounding them; the ability of a good motorcycle to fill in the gap between points A and B should never be underrated. 

As the curves momentarily straightened into the dam that keeps Lake Arenal in check and I got my first real view of the region without a canopy of trees overhead, I actually felt my jaw drop in my helmet; the contrasting deep blue and light green of the lake formed an amazing view to my right, but ahead and to my left, free of the morning cloud, Volcan Arenal rose out of the jungle. I had occasionally had to remind myself, after the litany of volcanoes and mountain scenery I’d ridden past in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, to not let these kind of landscapes start to seem “normal,” but Arenal’s green slopes, slashed through by black and reddish-brown lava and ash flows, needed no reminder whatsoever. “This is a real place, and I am really here,” I said out loud in between clicks of my camera, not nearly for the first time. 

I turned off the main road and down to the entrance to the national park surrounding the volcano, but the $20 fee turned me back around; even my assurances that I only wanted to go up the park road and back and take a few photos along the way did nothing to dissuade the ranger, and a slightly better view than I’d had from the main road with a few km of fun on dirt roads wasn’t worth two tanks of fuel. As I turned back onto the main road and continued through the myriad curves, an extremely familiar pair of headlights and white fairings suddenly appeared around a curve, and I found myself faced with a near mirror-image of my own motorcycle, only the third Africa Twin I’d seen all trip, the first since Guatemala, and the first with my same color scheme. The rider returned my enthusiastic wave, and I pulled a quick U-turn, hoping to catch up with him for a photo and what I was sure would be a fun roadside conversation, but I gave up after coming to a fork in the road, not wanting to risk heading down an unfamiliar road with at best a 50% chance of finding my quarry. At least it meant I got to see Arenal again on the way.

Emerging from the lake region and leaving one set of mountains behind, I returned to one of the main highways and booked it towards San Jose and the many mountain towns in between. My route would take me straight over the mountains between the Juan Castro Blanco national park and the Children's Eternal Rainforest, and as I ascended, the clouds and fog closed in. The roiling clouds on every side threatened rain, but aside from a few spits, I stayed miraculously dry. The traffic turned out to be more of a frustration than the weather; the problem with mountain roads in Latin America is that many of them are still main routes, and as a consequence, the trucks and buses make for slow going. I spent miles stuck behind large trucks or tour buses crawling up the steep roads and curves, taking advantage of the few straight parts to skip the line whenever possible, but the pace I was setting inevitably ran me up on another train of cars following a slow-moving bus or truck. Some were good at moving over to let people by, and some seemed to struggle even to make headway on flat ground, forcing me to constantly feather the clutch and occasionally even stop dead in order to keep from falling over. By the time I’d made it over the top of the range and started the descent into San Jose, my wrists were aching from working the levers, and I was cursing Latin America’s general aversion to passing lanes.

San Jose at rush hour was far more entertaining than a major city packed with cars had any right to be. First impressions upon entering are of a modern, advanced city with free-flowing roadways, and that was the case for at least part of the time, as I rode against prevailing traffic. The highway past the San Jose airport also happened to pass underneath the main approach vector for landing aircraft, and I briefly considered joining the small group of people parked on the side of the road watching them, laughing with a bit of reckless pleasure as a jetliner barreled over the road at treetop level, so close I could feel the gentle shove of its engine wash. Traffic was flowing smoothly, right up until I hit the center of town and everyone around, in front of, and behind me stopped dead, joining the long line of cars trying to get out of the city. I had almost resigned myself to being stuck in traffic through nightfall when a small two-stroke Suzuki buzzed by me, followed in quick succession by four or five other motorcyclists. Living in a non-California state, I often forget that lane splitting is legal almost everywhere else in the world, and so I joined the two-wheeled convoy picking its way through the stopped traffic. The small bikes around me had no trouble getting through, some coming close to highway speeds with reckless abandon, but things weren’t quite as easy for me. With fully loaded bags on, the Twin cut a wide swath, and I had to be extremely careful not to snag them on an errant mirror or the edge of a truck; such a mistake would at best have torn the bag off and scattered either my camping gear or my laptop, tripod, second lens, spare parts, and toolkit all over the road, and at worst would scatter me with it. I soon got the hang of threading the slalom-like course through mirrors and truck wheels, and the further I went, the more it got to be one of the most recklessly fun things I'd done all trip, especially when I managed to keep up with the locals. After an hour or so of dodging cars, I reached the edges of San Jose, traffic began to thin out, and I once again was back on steep, winding roads up mountainsides, though this time through the outer barrios of the city. Though they were obviously poor, San Jose’s outlying neighborhoods were strikingly colorful, the kind of places you might see in a guidebook advising you to look from a distance, but here I was riding through them with no trouble. Stopping at a supermarket to stock up on food for the night, I came out to find two middle-aged men peering at my bike. “El moto es tuyo?” one inquired, to which I nodded. “Vienes de verdad de los Estados Unidos?” asked the other, to which I replied in the affirmative, unable to hide a smile. We engaged in a short conversation about the bike and my trip, one of them saying the Twin was the largest motorcycle he’d ever seen. “Pura vida, amigo,” one of them said as I swung a leg over the seat and pushed off, wishing like hell that I had more time to spend in Costa Rica.

Rejoining the Panamericana, I left San Jose almost as quickly as I had arrived, ascending further into the mountains up Cerro de los Muertos. For a main highway, it was getting curvier and curvier, which was only a problem because it was getting dark, and rapidly cooling off. I knew I wasn’t far from the Parque de los Quetzales, where I was planning on camping for the night, but I’d hoped I would have to do so in the dark, and the cold was something I hadn’t figured in. I was tossing all these factors around in my head when I was forced to stop at a construction roadblock. Several miles of the highway were under construction, and the police were only letting cars through in one direction at a time. As I hopped off the bike for a stretch, my phone buzzed; Mom and Dad had seen me stop on the GPS track and wanted to make sure I wasn’t dead. I explained the delay, and that I was still planning on camping for the night, which didn’t seem like the best idea to them; I had to admit it was sounding less and less appealing, but hotels in the area were expensive, and most I found would require a significant detour. I compromised on telling them that if I found any kind of hotel or hostel on my current route, I’d stop there for the night.

Once the police had allowed the long line of vehicles I was sitting in through, I gingerly made my way back onto the Panamericana through patches of gravel and grooved pavement, and with only a few km to go, figured I was going to end up in my tent, until I saw a hand-painted sign by the side of the road, next to a wrought-iron gate: “IYOK AMI HOSTEL.” Scarcely believing my luck, I pulled off in front of the gate, seeing nothing but a dark driveway and a couple of dogs eyeing me suspiciously. I pulled up Google, and sure enough, where my previous search for hotels had turned up nothing, a pink icon now showed I was right on top of a highly regarded hostel. I called the number, and explained to the man who picked up that I was outside the gate and wasn’t sure how to get in. He told me to come on through and not to worry about the dogs, and a few seconds later, I was pulling up at a nicely lit wooden house not unlike an alpine lodge. I was met at the door by the proprietor Belrich, his wife, and their 11-month old daughter, and after explaining that I was traveling by motorcycle and needed a bed for the night, ushered into a wonderfully cozy living room and lounge, greeted by another young couple around my age and welcomed as though I was a long-lost family member.  After dropping my things, I was besieged by offers of food, wine, and coffee from my hosts and the other two guests, all of which I gladly accepted. Ivan and Maria-Jose were on a short hiking trip, and they and our hosts were all too happy to be regaled with stories from my travels thus far. We spent the night talking of travel, politics, and anything else that came to mind into the late hours of the night; it turned out that Maria-Jose was the granddaughter of the beloved Costa Rican ex-president who had disbanded their military in the 1970s, and that Ivan had spent a couple of years in the U.S. working for two different beer companies. Their pride in the hospitality and good reputation of their country was quite clear, I was happy to be in the company of two such enthusiastic ambassadors for Costa Rica, and I told them as much. “You are Pura Vida, my friend,” replied Ivan, “and you are welcome here.” 

Morning light revealed the beautiful cloud forest all around us; Iyok Ami was located less than a kilometer from the Parque de los Quetzales, and when I told Belrich of my plans to visit the park, he suggested instead that I simply walk out back and hike the extensive set of trails around the hostel itself; the park, he explained, had almost no publicly accessible trails and was little more than a ranger station. Seeing no problem with that, I did as he suggested, accompanied by Ivan and Maria-Jose, and we soon found ourselves enveloped by the Costa Rican cloud forest. Everything seemed damp and lush; the trees dripped water from the clearing fog, mist hung in the air, and even the ground bowed under our feet like a sponge. The trail was steep, but a fun challenge, and occasional spits of rain kept us cool for the most part. After a lengthy descent, we found ourselves next to a fast-running creek, and after splashing through it for a few meters, a gorgeous small waterfall cutting through a narrow rock passage. Seeing no way of going further, we took as many photos as we felt like, then turned back for the hostel. I couldn’t get enough of the forest, loving the sight of the tall trees wreathed by mist, nearly every inch of their branches and trunks covered by moss and other plants. I didn’t get to see the Quetzals I’d so hoped for, but we’d spent nearly the whole hike surrounded by birds of various sorts, including a number of hummingbirds. One of them had even flown into a window while we'd eaten breakfast, but after a helping hand from Belrich and a few dazed minutes, it had flown off none the worse for wear.

I left the hostel in the early afternoon, planning on making it to the coastal town of Golfito before crossing into Panama the next morning. Fog and rain had rolled in, and I was starting to worry that Cerro de los Muertos was going to live up to its name; at times, visibility wasn’t much more than 10-20 meters, and I was having to constantly wipe water off my visor. Luckily the fog cleared as I descended the other side of the mountain, and the rain let up for a while, giving way to heat and humidity as I returned to the lowlands. The gorgeous, winding roads surrounded by jungle didn’t hurt, either, and somewhere along the way, my trip meter ticked over 5,000 miles, a milestone I scarcely believed.. As I reached the coast and turned east, however, the rain came back with a vengeance. With the skies darkening and large drops starting to hit my visor, I pulled off at a gas station, put on my waterproof liners, and was just about to resume my trek when a group of runners in Costa Rican team garb jogged by, the leader carrying a flaming torch, and followed by a long line of cars, buses, and people all waving Costa Rican flags and honking horns. I asked one of the station attendants what was going on, and he replied that the celebrations were for Costa Rica’s Independence Day over the coming weekend. 

Filtering into the slow-moving line of traffic, I was forced to crawl with the crowd until being waved through by one of the escorting police officers. By this time, night had fallen entirely, and there was nothing for it; come rain or dark, I had to make it to Golfito. The coastal highway was thankfully mostly smooth, but as the rain went from a sprinkle to a torrent, I found it almost impossible to see ahead of me. Costa Rica is, to its eternal credit, one of the few Latin American countries that actually uses reflective marker dots on their roads, and I’ve never been more grateful for the invention of the things than I was that night; in many particularly curvy parts, they were the only thing keeping me on pavement. When I got to Golfito, I realized another problem; having used Google Maps to get me there, I found that it had no idea where the Hostal del Mar actually was. When the arrival notification pinged in my helmet, I was surrounded by trees on both sides, with no driveways or anything that looked remotely like a hostel in sight. Turning off at the next place I saw, I realized that there was a small road running parallel to the highway along the beach; that had to be my target. I flagged down a passing taxi, and he replied to my inquiry of “Hostal del Mar?” with a waved hand down the beach road. It proved to be one of the worst I’d had the bike on all trip; besides being soaking wet, the surface was sandy and covered with so many water-filled dips and potholes that it was genuinely impossible to ride a smooth line, or to go more than a 3-5 mph, a problem exacerbated by the Twin’s weight and tendency to sink into the sand at slow speeds. By the time I actually found the hostel, over a kilometer away from where Google said it was, I’d had enough. I was soaking wet, sore, my nerves were fried, and all I wanted to do was cook a meal and go to bed. The hostel manager met me at the door, raising her eyebrows at my bedraggled state as I stripped off my gear and helmet, but welcomed me warmly as she showed me to the rooms. I was one of only two guests, the other a German girl on a volunteering trip. The Hostal del Mar was located in a huge, gorgeous house backing right up to a small bay, and unlike some of the hostels I’d stayed at previously, the dormitory room was nicely lit, clean, and very comfortable. While my pasta cooked, I disassembled my gear, hung my jacket, pants, and waterproofs in the windiest part of the house I could find, and propped my boots up by a fan, hoping they’d be at least halfway dry by the time I had to leave in the morning.

Sunrise over the bay was gorgeous, revealing Golfito to be the kind of quintessential seaside fishing town I’d spent very little time in thus far. The German girl and I struck up a conversation over breakfast; she was going to spend four weeks volunteering on a coffee plantation, and I was particularly interested in the old Minolta film camera she was carrying to document the experience. My things weren’t quite dry by the time I packed up and left, but I figured that with the sun out, the ride would do the rest of the job. I was planning to cross into Panama at Paso Canoes, less than an hour away from Golfito, and I figured that with my departure before 9 A.M. and the relative ease I’d had getting through the Costa Rican border on entry, I’d be able to make the six and a half hour ride to Panama City with time to spare.

What I hadn’t figured into the equation was the Independence Day celebrations. Upon arriving to Paso Canoes, I found that nearly all of the paved roads in town, including every road accessing the border crossing, was closed for parades. Traffic was coming through from Panama, diverted down side streets, but there didn’t appear to be any way to actually get out without riding directly into oncoming traffic. While I worked out the puzzle of how to physically get the bike out, I purchased a couple of delicious empanadas from a roadside stand and decided I’d at least enjoy a last bit of Costa Rican culture as I watched the parades go by. The high school bands and drumlines were particularly entertaining, seemingly trying to one-up each other in both style and volume as they danced down the street in unison, never once breaking time, and the dancers in traditional clothing were equally entertaining. I managed to get my exit stamp and cancel my TIP while on foot with a minimum of hassle, wishing once again that the rest of Latin America could follow the example of Costa Rican immigration, and headed back to the bike to figure how to actually exit the country.

Returning to the bike, I found a man pointing out directions to a pair of bikers on loaded Honda Goldwings, and asked him whether there was any way I could get the bike past the parade route and into the border crossing. He insisted on hopping on the back as he directed me, but every street he pointed me down had a cop at the end turning us back. Finally, he simply pushed a path through the parade crowd, waved me forward, and I ended up wheeling the Twin straight across, getting an obvious stink eye from one of the oncoming band directors. I thanked the man for his help and parked the bike under shelter in the border passage, figuring nobody else was going to be driving through and that it was safely in view of the police stalking around. I went in with my passport and documents, but the border agent wouldn’t even look at my passport before I started the arrangements to get the bike through, the first of which was purchasing mandatory insurance. Walking out, I found my helper from before lurking outside, pointing me to the insurance agency next door, and falling into step behind me. “Shit,” I thought to myself. I’d been on the lookout for anyone that so much as looked like a tramitador trying to scam me, and here I’d gone and sought one out myself without even thinking about it. I already wasn’t looking forward to the rest of the process, and the presence of my newfound companion wasn’t helping.

Returning to passport control with my insurance and vehicle documents, I got my entry stamp and got my application into the Aduana queue. The subsequent back-and-forth paperwork dance between Aduana and the national police agency, DIJ, was a routine that was becoming familiar to me, though no less annoying, but the Panamanians were at least relatively quick about it. Returning to my bike with all the documents in order, I found my tramitador hanger-on standing in front of the bike insisting on collecting his propina. I reacted none too kindly to his request, waving off his insistence that he’d shown me the way through with my own assertion that every street he’d tried to take me down was closed, and that he’d done exactly nothing to help me through the immigration process. I ended the conversation by starting the bike, giving him a few dollars, and taking off; somehow, even with the emigration/immigration process being relatively easy and having had all my things in order, it seemed I couldn’t get out of one country and into another without getting hassled in the process.

I’d only spent three full days in Costa Rica, but few places on my trip rivaled it for the amount of enjoyment I’d packed into such a short time. Despite all the rain and having had to cover far more ground each day than I’d grown accustomed to, I’d found it to be every bit as beautiful and hospitable as the last time I’d visited, and I’d even managed to make a couple of genuine friends along the way. With one exception, everyone I’d met had been exceptionally nice, and I think I’d found something aesthetically pleasing and full of life literally everywhere, whether it was thee lush cloud forest, the colorful neighborhoods of San Jose, the coast at sunrise, or the lively parades at the border. Pura Vida indeed.