Touching Costa Rica

In Panama, you are only allowed to drive for three months on a foreign driver's license. We haven't gotten around to getting our Panamanian versions, so we need to enter Panama every three months to be allowed another three months of driving privileges. As we love traveling, it's kind of nice to have an excuse to cross a border now and again.

As our three-month limit approached, we didn't want to spend the money on an all-out excursion to Costa Rica, and we kind of wanted to go back to Boquete, anyway, so we thought we'd just hop across the border and come back.

There are different stories as to how this works:

1. You cross over, you have to stay over for 72 hours, then you come back.
2. You cross over, you have to stay over for at least a day, then you come back.
3. You cross over, you come back.

My guess is that the official rule is 72 hours, but it depends largely on which border guard you get.

We were going to give #3 a go -- the worst that they could tell us was that we had to wait.

By the time we left, we were already over our three-month limit, so Brent's dad came with us to do the driving. It's about five or six hours (or two speeding tickets, depending on how you're counting) to the border from where we live, and we arrived in the afternoon.

Larry tooled around on the Panamanian side of the border, and we stamped out of this country and into the next.

We wandered around. Had lunch. At one point, we walked through a store that had doors on each end, and when we exited we realized we were back in Panama. Oops.

There's not much to do in the border town, so after about an hour or so, we went back to the border (officially this time) to return to Panama, reconnect with Larry, and go to Boquete for the weekend.

And they let us through. Easy as pie.

P.S. Not true for our friends David and Stephanie, who gave it a go a couple of weeks after we did. Their guard said no way, and they had to spend the night in Costa Rica before returning.