Part of any journey is dealing with the unexpected, and keeping your head straight and mind honed enough to extricate from the situation at hand. Case in point being my plan to cross the Panama/Costa Rica boarder to get to San Jose (incidentally, travel coinciding with Easter Sunday in vastly predominant Roman Catholic regions is not easy). The buses were completely sold out and luck wasn’t looking my way. Rather than tarrying longer in Boquete, I opted to “wing it” and just see what happens if I just took a bus to the boarder. All events seemed to conspired to some untoward outcome. From Boquete to David took 1+ hr, from David to the Costa Rican boarder too 1:45. Soon as I crossed, the chaos of the boarder scene was immediately evident as throngs of people were rushing back and forth from both sides of the boarder. Everything was closed. I have no ticket to San Jose. What to do? It’s was already 4pm and the next scheduled bus won’t leave until 4am and arrive 7 hrs later.
Not to mention my Spanish is not very functional. But, certainly I wasn’t planning to stay at a location that looked so forsaken and wait until 4am, and even that was not guaranteed. One must be flexible with all situations in life, bending with improvisation as required by circumstance. Just about everywhere I asked with my limited Spanish turned up futile. I had not eaten since 10 in the morning, now starved, tired from carrying the load, and stinking from sweat … desperation was in order.
Just then, wandering in the sweltering heat and humidity, I saw a weathered man with burnt complexion wandering around with 3 dogs like some modern day Diogenes… calling to them in English. He looked every part a sketchy vagabond character, but it’s a measure risk that needed to be taken. I paid complements to his pets and struck up a conversation; complementing that, judging by the loyalty of the dogs, he must be of solid character. When in doubt, fluff a man’s ego. It’s a means to an end and he was pleased to receive it – enough to walk around with me in the no-man zone inquiring of bus lines and schedules and translating. In the end, after canvassing information between both sides of the boarder multiple times, something positive turned up. This was no small feat as we concocted a story that I had a flight I needed to catch the next day. In the end, I paid $15 for the $12.50 ticket – buying it off of some on who was willing to wait for the next bus in exchange for a small profit.
I finally arrived at 1am in San Jose. Exhausted after sweating for 14 hours.