Continuing the run South…
We had ended up stuck in the capital of Costa Rica (San Jose) for the night since we didn’t manage to cover anywhere near the amount of ground we had planned for the day. The route we chose was along the PanAmerican highway and it winds its way along the mountainous spine of the isthmus. This makes for beautiful views and the roads are in excellent condition too. Unfortunately, there is just so much traffic on this route that it is very crowded. Compounding this are two more issues: First that the windy mountain road is only two lanes so passing is really tricky but not too bad for small maneuverable and fast machines like motorbikes. The second problem is that this route seems to take most of the truck traffic in the country (and there is a lot of it). The trucks barely fit in the lanes and are also very slow at climbing hills. The overall result is that this is a lethal combination of conditions (Literally for at least one truck driver that we saw!). Anyway, we survived the dangers but only covered half the distance. By the end of the day I felt that Costa Rica should probably be renamed to “Traffic Jam”.
We got a hotel (quite a nice one) and re-grouped and re-planned the route for the next day. The new route was still in the mountains for about 100Km and then went South to the coast and along the coast to get to Panama.
This turned out to be a good plan but also had its challenges. Initially the road climbed steeply up into the mountains again and the grey skys of San Jose turned into cloud then mist then rain and the temperatures fell from low 20 degC to less than 5degC, the winds rose to be really strong and gusty on the peaks, and the altitude rose to over 3300m. So we were wearing soaking wet riding gear in just above freezing temperatures with strong gusty winds and near zero visibility (real temperate cloud forest – it reminded me a lot of the West coast of Tasmania) – and of course the local version of daring drivers on the road.
After a couple of stops for full bladders and to allow Marie to rewarm her hands on the engine/exhaust, we headed down for the coast. We rapidly dropped to sea level (in about an hour) where conditions were very tropical. Wind was gone, humidity in the 90s, temp in the low 30degC…. But we still had periods of rain.
I really defy anyone to design clothing that can handle this range of conditions!
Anyway, with our bodies reeling from the dynamic conditions we made it to the Panama boarder and stopped for the night in a smallish town ready to cross the boarder the next morning.
