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On the Road: La Frontera and Beyond - Page 2

© Colleen Kaleda

I am completely lost.

There's nothing to do but ask someone where the border is. As serendipity would bless me, I find a shop owner who speaks perfect English (he had lived in Missouri for four years) who walks me up a crumbly rock road leading to the Panamanian "migration" office. It's a tiny one-room place where two people sit behind a glass window and stamp passports. I almost certain I'm the only person they've seen today.

There is a cluster of other buildings, none labeled as anything official. Using trial and error, I find the Costa Rican border station, where they stamp my passport. There is not another soul crossing the border. In fact, the "border" is just a dirt road slicing up seemingly endless fields of banana trees. Where is everyone? I wonder.

In my imperfect Spanish, I talk transportation with the Costa Rican border guards (who, by the way, are not doing much guarding from inside their hut 50 yards from the road). After 10 minutes of back-and-forth, I gather that a bus went by about 15 minutes before I arrived and another is not due here for hours. Miles and miles of banana fields stand between me and San Vito, my destination in Costa Rica.

Again, the English-speaking shopkeeper comes to my rescue. Before I know it, he has hooked me up with a friend who just happens to drive by in a pickup truck. The friend makes deliveries across the border daily, and this is his last return trip home to San Vito for the day. We chat in Spanish all the way to San Vito. The only indication that I am not in Panama anymore is the road - unpaved and potted like most in Costa Rica. My driver drops me off near the central square and refuses any money for the ride. He's headed home to his wife and children for a holiday weekend, and wishes me well.

I spend the next few days in San Vito, the largest town for miles. After a few days, I board a predawn bus bound for the Costa Rican capital of San Jose. By tomorrow night, I have to reach Liberia, in the north near Nicaragua, to catch my flight home. I cannot miss it; it's the last flight the airline has scheduled for the year and I am a standby passenger. The bus ride from San Vito to San Jose is supposed to take about eight hours, but I know this really means 10 or more. After that, I have another four hours to Liberia.

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