On Monday, April 2, we bid farewell to San José and started to make our way towards Panama with our first stop being in San Isidro de El General, a small city that was a three-hour ride away. This was one of our less enjoyable rides as we had a scare with the bike early in our trip that made us buckle down and shave about 35 pounds off our luggage when we got to our hotel that evening. This is in addition to the 10-15 pounds we had already cut before leaving San José. We also got some cold and rainy weather in the last hour of our trip that had us hoping that our hotel would have hot water (it did… woo hoo!) and not one of those electric showers that are everywhere in Central America and had so aptly been named the “suicide shower” by Marisa.
The next stop on Tuesday was in Ciudad Neily, an unremarkable and overpriced border city that was another three hours’ ride and a place we should have skipped entirely in favour of crossing the border a day earlier. It was a better ride, despite the humid day, and our favourite biker appreciated the lighter bike. I appreciated his appreciation.
On Wednesday, after crossing six borders together, we crossed the border to Panama without our friends, Tim and Marisa. We missed them, but the crossing was quite fast at around 45 minutes. You can read up on the details on our Border Crossings page.
Hello, not-Tim’s bike
For the evening, we stopped in David, a fairly large city just an hour away from the border. David was not a particularly dynamic or well-maintained city, and Panama did not seem to be as clean or as beautiful as Costa Rica; however, the silver lining was that we paid less and got far better than what we did in Costa Rica.
David, our first stop in Panama
An afternoon in David
On Thursday, we left David and rode for a little over three hours to Chitré, another unremarkable Panamanian city, where we were to spend the next five days before we made our way to Panama City. We had booked our apartment through Airbnb while we were still in Costa Rica and had given ourselves more time than we needed to get there. Hence, the long stop in Chitré. Our hotel had a pool so, no complains from us 🙂
Vacationer
