Playa Hermosa, CR - Santiago, Panama (July 8 - July 15)

Route:
https://goo.gl/maps/f6S8I

Since the last post on July 8^th it’s been a pretty smooth ride through the south eastern section of Costa Rica into Panama. The night of July 8^th was spent camping in the ocean front yard of a bar/restaurant. On the menu for dinner was tuna and avocado sandwiches all bought from the local supermarket. Two Americans from Seattle had pity seeing us eat that food, so they gave us some of their leftover gallo pinto (rice and beans) dinner that we gladly took. The night of the 8^th was very calming hearing the waves crash onto the sand 30 feet from our tents. 

After a slightly restless night due to the excessive humidity of the Costa Rican wet season keeping us up, we had a quick breakfast (concentrated milk + corn flakes) we were on the road south by 8 AM. We quickly stopped at a gas station to fill up our stove fuel canisters with gas. We had read blogs before the trip mentioning that gasoline (super) could work with our white gas stove. But the downside was that gasoline gets the stove filters a lot dirtier than white gas due to the lack of pureness. Thus, we would have to clean the inside of the stove more often. At the gas station, the mechanic and his "intern" would not believe that our stove could take gasoline, so I had to pull out the user manual (Spanish version of course) and read him the section about the gasoline. Finally convinced, he filled up my red bottle and we connected the bottle to the stove. I could see the look on the mechanic’s face that he was expecting the entire stove to shoot up in flames and blow up in our faces, but it ended up working out perfectly fine. Before getting back on our bikes, Matt and I both agreed that this trip would be about constant problem solving and expecting the unexpected.  

 Our next stop after leaving the gas station was Parrita. We grabbed an early lunch and talked with a few Costa Rican mountain bikers that were coming back from a morning ride. They offered us water melon and chocolates which we very much savored in the 90F+ heat at 10 AM. 

Following lunch we set our next destination to be Quepos, the entry town into the Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio. This national park is well known for its whale watching and scuba diving. While riding through town to buy a SIM card for our phone, we saw quite a few tourists and thus the food prices were also a little higher because of the popularity of the town and area. Since we would be having a stretch before our next town, we decided to load up on groceries for dinner and breakfast the next morning. 

On the menu for dinner was macaroni and cheese and papaya. Also after talking with several travelers, we decided to stop buying bottled water and instead drink the tap water. The people we had talked with had mixed opinions on the water, but since we were drinking 5+ liters of water each per day, we decided drinking the tap water would save us a bit on our daily expenses (up until now the tap water hasn’t caused us any issues!). As we left the grocery store rain started coming down. We waited for a bit until it calmed down a bit and hit the road. We both agreed that we were eventually going to have to ride in the rain, so why not start now? All our gear is waterproof and the fact that it was in the 90Fs made riding in the rain reasonable. The afternoon was still a little tough due to the downpours every 45 minutes for a solid 15 minutes at a time. We eventually made it to Playa Dominical around 5:30 PM. We found a backpacker hostel owned by a French couple and spent the night there. It was interesting to interact with backpackers (travelers traveling by bus/taxi and staying in hostels/dorms) for the first time on this trip. Matt and I have both backpacked in the past, and we both realized how different our current form of travel (by bike) is so different from the backpacker style. 

 The following day, our plan was to head north into the mountains towards a city called San Isidro. Following San Isidro, we would spend a day volunteering on a farm in the mountains. Leyton had provided us a contact of an American guy’s farm he had done volunteering on that seemed pretty interesting. Since we now had a phone, we decided to call Wade (the farmer) and confirm things. Unfortunately, he told us that the minimum stay had to be 7 days due to the “training” and initial investment they would put into the volunteers. Since we wanted to get a good head start on our trip, mileage was, we didn’t already want to take a 7 day cycling break a couple days into our trip. Another downside was the associated costs we would have had to pay. Thus, we both decided that we would avoid the detour into the mountains and take a more direct route down the coast towards Panama. 

The weather that day (still in the mid/high 90Fs) was slightly overcast with a little breeze which felt good after the previous days’ excessive heat. We had our first stop at a rest stop overlooking the Pacific. Two guys (Juan Carlo and Andrei) in their early 20s were having a couple beers (cerveza) and offered us some. They tasted amazing but we knew we would kind of regret them with the 15 km of riding until our next stop for lunch. 

The rest of the day consisted of rolling hills but nothing compared to the first day of our tour in terms of steepness. We arrived in Palmar Sur in late afternoon and bought some groceries before looking for where we would sleep that night. Our first stop was knocking at the doors of the Bombero station. They responded saying that we were welcome to stay but that another cyclist was going to be sleeping there as well. The fire chief told us to come back to the station in 1.5 hours when the shift would change. We decided to have a few beers in the city park to pass the time. Matt and I talked about how the trip was going and our expectations vs. what was actually happening. We agreed that the trip should not be about the mileage and the destination, but that putting some good miles/kilometers in did feel good at the end of the day. It kind of made it seem like a job well done after going through some tough moments on the saddle during the day. Once we returned back to the fire station, we met the other cyclist staying there that ended up being a French girl named Cecila who was 26 years old. She was touring by herself and had started in Guatemala City. She had been traveling/volunteering for 10 months already, but had only cycled for a portion of that trip. Cecila was using a bike that she had “made” herself using spare parts at the non-profit she was volunteering with in Guatemala. The nonprofit took old non-functioning bikes from the United States and the volunteers would reassemble them with various parts from different bikes. When the bikes were finished they would be given to local kids in the community. Cecilia was actually mailing her bike back to France in a few days since she felt it was not solid enough to have her continue her travels through South America, but still wanted to have it in France as a souvenir/memory. Anyways, the three of us spent the evening chatting on our views on Central America, the friendliness of the locals, and bike touring in general. We also got to see several volunteer fire fighters doing training exercises using ladders and oxygen tanks. We ended up sleeping in the fire fighter dorm room that had several sets of bunk beds that were available.

 The next morning we were on the road by 8 AM and Cecilia accompanied us for 15 KM, since she was planning on spending a few days in Palmar Sur. We were able to talk some more about traveling and get her views on why she quit a good job to travel. She had been working for 3 years and felt like she had too much pressure from society to act a certain way and live a certain lifestyle and figured that traveling would be the best way to answer a lot of these questions.  

 After departing with Cecilia we had a solid morning of riding, with one pit stop at a leeche fruit stand to get some food. Leeche is a type of fruit that kind of looks like a cactus but peels like an orange. There is a pit in the middle kind of like a plum, but it tastes like a kiwi. In other words it’s a mix of 4 fruits in 1. Both Matt and I have leather saddles that are ideal for bike touring since they eventually form to the shape of your butt. The thing with the leather saddles is they take 400-500 miles to break in. I made the mistake of buying my saddle 3 days before leaving on this tour so I have been struggling a bit at times due to the stiffness of the leather. Matt got his saddle back in the fall of 2013 (as a birthday present to himself), and says he hasn’t been having issues on this tour so far since it’s broken in already. 

Following a quick lunch of the usual “casado con carne (steak)” we were off for a couple miles before stopping at a river for a swim. 

The running river water felt amazing and almost like a massage on our backs and legs. Although we could have spent the entire day in the river we had some more miles to go before our destination for the night. 

In my opinion, since it’s still very early in the trip, the hours on the bike have not been difficult mentally.  Since everything is still pretty new, there are so many thoughts going on in my head to keep me busy from the repetitive motion of riding a bike. This new lifestyle on the bike is such a 180 degree turn from where I was 1 month ago that there is so much to take in and process every day. It is very exciting, although our lifestyle on the bicycle has come down to cycling, finding food, and finding a place to sleep (and hopefully shower). It’s has become a very simplified lifestyle yet it is so different from back home due to the lack of distractions.

Anyways, we rolled into Ciudad Neily in mid afternoon and stopped by the bomberos to ask if there was availability. Unfortunately, their building was under construction so they couldn’t host us. They referred us to the Red Cross, who gladly accepted to host us. Whenever we sleep somewhere for free, we try to give the hosts something, which in this case ended up being the rest of my leeche fruits! We went to grab some dinner in the city’s “centro” and when we returned the entire Red Cross station was locked up. No way to get into the building where our stuff was. There ended up being several emergencies that resulted in all the paramedics being on call, having to leave the station. After about 35 minutes one of the paramedics came back to unlock the doors and let us in.

The following morning we were woken up by the local roosters at 5:00 AM. Their crowing prevented us from falling back asleep, so we decided to make it an early morning start. We reached the border crossing into Panama before 9:00 AM. It was a pretty smooth transition which consisted of getting our Costa Rica passport exit stamp, paying the $8 Panama tax, and then getting a Panama passport entry stamp. Before getting into Panama, I had a quick chat with some French travelers that were crossing into Panama with surfboards. They said that during the winter, they were ski instructors at Les Arcs, a major ski resort in the French Alps. They were on a big surf trip through Central and South America now that the ski season was over. By the time we reached the first major town to get lunch we were amazed by the food prices in Panama: $2.50 for a full plate of rice, chicken, beans, and plantains. This was about ½ the price of Costa Rica prices. The Pan American road into David got very difficult to ride on as we got closer to David (one of Panama’s biggest cities). The shoulder was minimal and traffic was pretty bad. We stayed at a backpacker’s hostel that night.

The next morning (Sunday) we had a big hostel-made breakfast and hit the road mid morning towards San Lorenzo. 

We were told that this stretch of road until Santiago would be very rural with few cities. As we approached San Lorenzo in mid afternoon, we decided to try to find a restaurant that was streaming the World Cup final on the main TV. As we were looking for a place, we passed by a residential area were ~15 Panamanians were watching the game in their patio with a big screen TV setup outside. They waved to us to cruise over and then welcomed us into their party. We observed right away that these were pretty affluent Panamanians from the way they dressed, having a nice TV, and seeing some decent cars parked in front of the house. 

After beers, some great BBQ, and an exciting final between Germany and Argentina, we hit the road again to try to find a place to sleep before the rain started coming down. A few km down the road it started raining and we happened to be near a small dairy farm. We approached the farmers and told them we were looking for a place to sleep for the night. The one place available in the farm was the corn/maize storage room for the cows. 

We gladly took it and quickly setup our stove to cook some macaroni and cheese, with the smell of cows a few feet away. 

We then spent the rest of the evening listening to some Mark Knopfler as I attempted to play around with my camera settings. 

The following morning we were on the road by 7:15 AM, but it started with my bike getting a flat tire as soon as we were back on the Pan American (we had taken a dirt road to the farm). It ended up being a staple that resulted in the flat on my rear tire. 

After having set everything back on the next 30 miles went by pretty quick, until I got my next flat tire, this time the front. Getting that 2^nd flat tire was very frustrating since we were on a roll miles-wise that morning, and it kind of killed our momentum, since it takes ~20 minutes to take all the gear off the bikes, replace the tube, and put all the gear back on the bike.  After I was back on the bike, we rode another ½ mile (all uphill), before I realized that I had forgotten my front bike light on the ground next to where I had changed the flat. We had already been riding for 4.5 hours and hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, so it was even more frustrating having to backtrack and get the light that ended up being on the shoulder of the road. By the time we finally reached our first “town” and grabbed lunch, both of us were exhausted. 

Unfortunately, this was “no man’s land” in this area so we would have another 4 hours of mountain roads before the next town. Following lunch we road for an hour before it started pouring rain. We didn’t really have a choice at that point to stop since there was nothing, beside a bus shelter half way into the afternoon. In Ojos de Agua, we were told by some locals that our target city for the night had a police station that could possibly host us, so we were looking forward to getting out of the rain for the night. Once we finally arrived to Llano de Los Ruices soaking wet, around 4:30 pm (9+ hrs since we hit the road in the morning) we approached the police officers, who told us we couldn’t sleep in the station but we could setup our tent outside their building and they’d keep an eye on it. Since we wanted to let our wet clothes dry and have our gear in total security, we decided to ask the local church if they had room for us to stay. One of the ladies at the church, whose house was nearby offered us a room in her house to sleep for the night and we were very much grateful for it. Over dinner, I discussed the day with Matt about how it had been very challenging (mentally/physically) and Matt agreed. Based off our GPS, in terms of elevation climbing (vertical) we had done 4,200 feet (1,280 meters) that day. It had definitely the toughest day of the trip so far.  We realized that the long term fatigue from riding extensive miles was started to affect us mentally and physically. We agreed that we would need to take rest days more often in order to not “burn out” from riding so much.  

The next day we road to Santiago, Panama (the first major city) at a decent pace, to avoid the incoming mid afternoon rain. I made another rookie spanish mistake while ordering my food/drink for lunch. I confused "huveos" (eggs) with "jugo" (juice). When the waitress asked me what I wanted to drink, I responded quickly with "un bebida de huevos de fruta" (a drink of eggs with juice). She looked at me for a couple seconds confused, before correcting me with "un bebida de jugo de fruta" ( a drink of fruit juice). Yea that's what I meant. This reminds of of a few days ago while asking for a place to sleep, I said "Estoy casado y necessito un espacio para dormir en la noche" (I am married and need a place to sleep tonight). The man corrected me with "Estoy cansado y necessito un espacio para dormir en la noche" (I am tired and need a place to sleep tonight). 

Anyways, in addition to those spanish errors we decided that a rest day the next day (after being on the road for 10 days) was much needed before making the next stretch to Panama City, which would take 3-4 days. 

-LB