We have neighbors, a young couple on a motorcycle with a tent and a boombox further along a family of three with a tent and their pick up truck and no boom box.
Our days drift by with rounds of swimming and reading and cooking. Rusty is not keen on walking much but he enjoys napping under GANNET2, his home or under our picnic table. I scratch his chest from time to time and I see more gray hairs marking the passing of time.
We spent two hours calling around Costa Rica yesterday looking for a vet to do Rusty’s papers for Panama but it was tough. Many vets speak English but their assistants and office staff are less likely to so it’s lucky we speak Spanish.
Costa Rica and Panama are notorious for the most complex dog entry requirements in Central America. Fantastic. Mexico and El Salvador and the US are easy with no requirements at all. All the vets but one told us we need to budget a week to ten days to get Rusty’s papers for the border crossing. One vet in Jacó told us they only do papers for Nicaragua as Panama’s requirements are excessively complicated. Even more fantastic.
A vet in San Vito, a small village in the mountains of southern Costa Rica offers a one day turn around. Believe that if you will but we’ll give it a try. This post (below) in iOverlander got us thinking it might be worth the two day drive out of our way. The English is a bit fractured as the poster is Swiss (their url ends in .ch) but the information is invaluable. This is what you look for as you travel:
So we called ahead and have an appointment for Monday morning as soon as they open at eight to catch the vets before they go on their farm rounds. The trick is that they have the government agriculture office SENASA next door and no doubt they get preferential treatment when they ask their neighbors for exit paperwork for one of their customers. It’s worth a try.
So we’ll be lab to leave early Saturday morning and take the ferry to Puntarenas then drive down the Pacific coast until we get tired and stop for the night. Sunday night we’ll try to be as close as we can to the vet’s office to do this absurd paperwork dance.
Meanwhile we hang at the beach and see what develops. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps a swim. Perhaps more noisy neighbors!
I’m reading a couple of novels simultaneously while I’m here. Webb recommended La Débâcle by Emile Zola, a story of the French debacle in the Franco Prussian war of 1870. And I like history so this was up my alley.
On the more relevant subject of Central America I finally remembered the title of a half remembered novel by a former winter resident of Key West, Robert Stone who died in 2015.
“A Flag For Sunrise” is set in two countries in Central America, Compostela which is Honduras and Tecan which is Nicaragua. It has a wide ranging cast of characters, smugglers, revolutionaries corrupt officials, a whisky priest in the style of Graham Greene and so forth. The plot such as it is revolves around the forthcoming revolt in Tecan on the largely forgotten Caribbean coast. It’s an odd story and I suppose dated but I find it easy to picture. Perhaps its greatest merited to ten food me not to lose my way with alcohol!
