Writings By Date| Panama: A Test of Endurance | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
We stood in line for several minutes, with various people shooting up to the front of the line because...well, because nobody stopped them for trying it. Eventually, someone stopped us before we reached the window and redirected to us a neighboring window, where we were motioned that we needed to buy a stamp for $1. We don't know what the stamp was for, but we got it anyway. We were then ushered back to our first line. Upon reaching the window, our passports were examined and we were given another card, with handwritten (and verbal) instructions to take it to the tourism counter to get tourism cards.
So we rounded the corner to another window, where a frail old woman looked at our passports, then took out two tourism forms and started meticulously filling them out for us. Ten minutes and $10 later, we were sent back to the immigration window to wait again. This time, the guy just spotted our tourism forms, and told us we were good, and now we just had to go to customs.
So do we go back to our bus, we wondered? We asked someone else from our bus, who said that the bus was going to be coming through separately, then we would take our luggage and go to customs. So we stood there waiting, and I began to worry about this whole transfer of busses thing, and the stuff we (stupidly) left behind might not make it over. After a brief conference, it was decided that I would go back and try to decipher, with my limited grasp of the language, what was going on.
I walked across the border from Panama to Costa Rica without a single eyebrow being raised — probably not all that surprising. I went over to where the two buses were, and saw that our bus doors were now open. so I tromped on and looked in the dark, but found no trace of our stuff. I even tried looking for a light switch on the dashboard, but found nothing. (i think I found a switch to turn on the TV, which tempted me for a moment, because I still wanted to know how that awful movie ended...but my fleece was just a little more important.)
I got out and asked an official-looking border patrol guy who was overseeing the loading of some packages onto the back of a pickup truck which was on the bus to Panama. He pointed me to the other bus. But when I eeked out, with great effort, that I had something on board, he indicated I could not go on — even if I were to get right back off again — until after it had crossed the border.
