This was my second time in Costa Rica and I am still impressed by how nice it is. The country is beautiful, the roads are nice, and people really take pride in their houses, yards, and stores. It’s a nice place and it’s no surprise that so many tourists go there. However, that doesn’t make it as attractive to us….we need a little bit more on the difficult, adventurous side. It’s no fun if things are as easy as in the States.

We motored straight through the country. On my first trip to Costa Rica I saw the policia run radar so we were more careful about our speed here. On a busy highway we found ourselves caught behind a slow police truck and kept our speed down. Earlier we had been passing lines and lines of trucks. We soon passed a police speed trap running radar and counted ourselves lucky that we were inadverdantly saved.

We arrived in Puerto Viejo de Tala (something or other). It’s a popular hippie slash surfer hang out. Roar will tell you that I really don’t like hippies but somehow we keep running into them. But the place had a decent vibe and I have to admit that the place was fun. We had another great night meeting and hanging out with locals. The only thing we both regretted was having some local concoction of some clear liquor. The next day hurt a little bit.

The next day we bounced out of town for the border with Panama. I wasn’t really looking forward to it because Roar had told me stories about how this was supposed to be a unusual border crossing. The crossing was  some rickety, wooden bridge with planks covering up the holes to the river twenty feet below. Some people have written  posts on the Adventure Rider website about how difficult the crossing was, and, of course, that made Roar want to see it for himself….