June 25, 2016
After a long ascent into Panama we get to experience what the true Panam-erican Highway is really about.
Cycling Stats
Start Point: Paso Canoas, Puntarenas, Costa Rica
Destination: David, Chiriqui, Panama
51.1 km trip, 3:12 time, 44.4 km/h maximum speed, 16 km/h average speed
Route Description:
The day starts at the border crossing. The Costa Rica immigration is on the left before the crossing where it looks busy. Then after you go into the busy part, the Panama immigration is on the left. We paid $7 per person to leave Costa Rica. The highway has a shoulder at the beginning of the day in Panama and then you climb about 200 meters. The road starts to get busy and there is no shoulder. It is two lanes in both directions and quite busy. It’s mostly downhill to the town of David from here. There are lots of restaurants and grocery stores including a very large one in David.
Accommodations:
We found a hostel with private rooms with air-conditioning for $30 USD. You could get dorm beds for $11 per person.
What happened…
Andrew writes: There are two things that really stick in my mind about today. The first is the sucky hill from the border, for about 20km. It just keeps going and going. Fortunately though we had a shoulder the whole way. Then surprisingly, the shoulder disappears and all of a sudden we were jammed into the highway with many, many, many cars and trucks. So we’re whizzing along on the downhill into David, and every 50m or so there would be a huge crack in the pavement and I just kept hoping that I could keep it together enough to not die. So yeah, that really stuck in my head today.
Reaching David, we found this awesome little hostel with a pool, and a bar, and the price seemed really reasonable. I could see this being a great home-base, and I sent a text message off to our friends from the last week to make sure that they knew about this little gem. After getting settled in, Amanda and I went for a walk to explore David. There was a great supermarket, and we got to have McDonalds for lunch; ahhh, a “home-cooked” meal.
Amanda writes: Andrew said it best; not dying today was really nice. The traffic was heavy, the road was lousy and maybe because David is a bigger town the traffic was a bit more aggressive. We made it alive and found a grocery store after McDonald’s. It was one of our most enjoyable shops in quite some time. We’ve been traveling through countries for months where you can’t actually go into a store and browse the shelves. Everything is behind bars and you need to know what you want, need to know how to ask for it and then someone goes and gets it for you. Safety is paramount for store owners in a lot of Latin American countries and since we entered into Guatemala the stores are most often behind bars. So being able to walk around and not only look at options, but to have options was really nice.