All plain sailing, obviously!

We didn’t get our cars out of the bonded warehouse until after 2 pm on the first rally day. The drive to our night halt was around 500 kms, mostly on the Pan American Highway, so not too arduous and the navigation was a sinch. There were police everywhere and two of our cars (no names - not us) got speeding tickets.  Our car attracted a lot of attention and we often had cars driving along side us with the driver filming on his phone.   Reminiscent of Iran, and not too sensible. 

About 200 kms from the end, Adrian pulled into a bus stop as the car was overheating. It was pitch black as there was very little traffic, just the odd giant truck.  A diagnosis of a failed head gasket was made. All quite serious, but we had a spare.  I called Toby, our mechanic, who was about an hour behind us and then we waited.  

Toby and Adrian set too and completed the repair.  That last, short sentence belies the huge amount of work involved in that. It took about three hours.  Jamie, our photographer, was travelling with Toby and so the incident has been very well recorded.  Luckily, we were in a safe place in the bus stop, it wasn’t raining, and I had a good thriller on my kindle so sat quite happily on the kerb.  

Off we set for the hotel.  We stopped for fuel and Toby decided to just check if anything needed tightening.  Just as well as the fan belt was shredding.  5 minutes later a pristine one was in place. We finally arrived at 0235 and collapsed into bed.  

Our hotel was in a caldera and, when we finally got to see it in daylight, was pretty with beautiful flowers everywhere. 

It was 200 kms to the border with Costa Rica with some very steep climbs and  great scenery.  Alas, we passed our old rally friend, Frank, with his scarlet pick up broken down. He and Don had electrical problems on day 1 and this seemed to be a repeat.   The latest on them is that they will catch up with us tomorrow.

We had been warned that Costa Rica does not like RHD cars - but we had hoped to get through the border formalities and sneak it in. The border on both sides was as ramshackle and chaotic as you would imagine.  There was a short no-mans land of a single lane Bailey bridge over a river and, after completing the Panamanian formalities, we were ready to trundle across.  There was no system for this, obviously, and we were competing for a gap to cross with all the banana trucks from Costa Rica on their way to Panama.  We got over the bridge to a scrappy car park and parked.  The paperwork was done in an office which meant multiple queuing for various forms, a long wait while the official typed out all the details, two, yes two visits to a photocopy shop because theirs had broken down and then, the moment of truth.  

We knew that the girl had to come out and read the Chassis number so we had parked facing outwards, with the bonnet open and had given the car a cunning disguise. Roger gave us his big silver sun reflector to put inside the car to hide the interior.  He’s Australian and they carry such things, knowing about the sun and everything.  Sadly, it wasn’t cunning enough as she looked inside and started to walk back. We thought we’d got away with it when she turned back and looked again, obviously realising it didn’t look right. We were busted. No amount of persuading would change her mind.  The only thing to do was to take the car back over the bridge, again competing with the bananas, and take it back to Panama. 

Anyway, short story is it’s now on a truck going to Nicaragua. We took an ancient, rattling taxi with a very friendly driver to the hotel which was only about 40 kms away.  We were hoping to rent a car to use from our night halt for the 3/4 days we are in Costa Rica but there were none available. 

So, I rode today in our Aussie friends’ Discovery, bought in Mongolia after they broke down on P2P with us in 2010, driven across many borders to the UK, without papers, on Mongolian plates and now finding itself in Central America. Such luxury! A/C and everything!  We even stopped for a proper sit down lunch. 

Tonight, we are at Arenal Volcano, more on that tomorrow.  The good news is I’ve managed to hire a car here for the next couple of days. Hooray!