A few weeks ago was Semana Santa (Holy Week). We had the week off, so Paulina and I decided to make a visa run (see note below) to Panama.
My friend Samantha came down from Kansas to join us on the trip. I was very excited about this, because Sam and I had travelled together a lot when we studied in Spain back in 2007. Unfortunately, we had not seen each other since then. By joining me in Costa Rica and Panama, Samantha and I have now travelled to seven different countries together (Spain, Morocco, Andorra, Switzerland, Germany, Costa Rica and Panama). That is the most countries I´ve been to with anyone.
Paulina´s friend Raj joined us from New York, and the high school science student teacher, Amanda, came along for the trip too.
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Samantha flew into Juan Santamaría Airport, where my uncle works, on Friday evening, so I took the bus to meet her at the airport, where my aunt and uncle picked us up and brought us to their house. We spent the evening catching up and reading out back in the ranchito. The following morning we met up with Paulina and Amanda as they got off the morning bus to the airport. We went to the Budget rental place to rent our car. This wound up being one of the most difficult parts of the trip. They wanted the driver to be the person who paid for the rental. I had planned on paying for the rental, and having others pay me back, since I have lost my ATM card from the US, and can´t access that money. They wouldn´t let me pay for the rental, because I didn´t have a copy of my last stamp for entering Costa Rica (you can only drive legally in Costa Rica if you have been there for less than 90 days, and I had been there for about 100). So Amanda decided to try, but her license had expired and her ID said NON-DRIVER. This however was not an issue for Budget Car Rental, but we felt bad and told them about it. Then my uncle, being the very generous person that he is, let us do everything in his name, and we just added Paulina as an additional driver. This process took us about 2 hours, 30 minutes actually working this out, and 90 minutes waiting in line, which we were only 4th or 5th to begin with, so it was extra annoying.
Finally, we were able to drive to the airport and pick up Raj. Raj had wanted to be the sole driver, but he was flying in late, so we picked up the car before he arrived. Also, he did not have a valid drivers license either.
It was late, so my aunt and uncle lent us their GPS, a cell phone and a cooler full of soda for the road. We drove down to Cahuíta, Costa Rica to spend the night before figuring out how to leave the car in Costa Rica and transport ourselves to Panamá. On the way down we laughed as Carlotta (the GPS voice) would try to pronounce all of the Costa Rican road names as if they were English words. Our favourites included Interamericana 1, and Avenida 36a (the ordinal number for 36th in Spanish) and of course, any roads named after people were fun. As we neared Cahuíta we were driving down the coast and could see the Caribbean through the trees on the driver´s side. At one point we saw a load of crabs, and Paulina did her best to avoid hitting them, but I´m certain that she ran over a few. It was impossible not to, but she says she didn´t hit any. When we arrived at the hostel there were more crabs and we joked that they were the ghosts of the ones we had killed.
We stayed at a beautiful hostel, whose name I don´t remember, but in the morning they helped us get cash out of the only ATM in town, find a parking garage to leave our car in while we went to Panama and arranged a private shuttle to bring us to the Isla de Colón, where we would stay in Panama.
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US Americans can stay for 90 days on tourist visas in Costa Rica. In order to restart those 90 days, you must leave the country for 72-hours.
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