Beach Days

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! 

Bahia Ballena

Yesterday I described the facilities we find so helpful on our journey and while I am certain the toilets and showers look rudimentary to a North American eye they serve us well. 

The other thing is the beach. It’s not bright yellow sand, most of Central America is basically volcanic so black rocks and black sand are the norm but this a lovely empty beach. All to ourselves. 

And if you look carefully there is no trash. Ticos are obsessive about picking up after themselves and they value the country’s eco-tourism reputation so trash is a scarce commodity in public places. 

During the day the tide goes out at the moment and I wanted to ask Webb Chiles, a sports fanatic, if that was a football length out to the water. I have no clue but I figure it must be close. Is that 200 yards? Perhaps I need a quarterback to come out and measure it for me. But in any event it’s a long walk for a swim…well worth it. 

The waves are mild and the water is warm here, shallow over black sand so it’s like a frying pan on low heat. 

The campground itself is huge though not all of it is accessible to tall vehicles. You’d be surprised how limiting a tall vehicle is when overlanding. Parking garages have height restrictions as do campground entrances and in Mexico even supermarket parking lots have height barriers. Apparently those are to keep buses and collectivo taxi vans from parking in front of the shopping malls, which makes life awkward for us. Around here the campground is criss crossed with low wires because each palapa has a light bulb and a twin 15 amp outlet. A van would bring all the wires down. 

We are too tall at 9ft or 2.8 meters but how the big expedition trucks cope I don’t know. Even on city streets sometimes we fear clipping overhead wires. 

For the moment we have found our happy spot. Panama is getting back to normal and the protests are over so the highways are open. One day we’ll wake up and feel the familiar urge to move and that will be the day we leave. We pay day by day here so any day may be the last. 

I’m sure you understand it’s not easy to leave. We have cabbage and apples but we’re out of bananas rambutans and lettuce. We started our back up bag of dog food and we have plenty of treats so Rusty is okay. Layne keeps cooking from her stores, smoked pork chops and air fried potatoes last night, and we are going to bake today. 

To get to Panama we need to pay a vet to organize Rusty’s exit papers. Some vets charge $260 according to iOverlander so we may have to go back up north to the vet who treated Rusty for ant bites as she seems much more reasonable. Panama and Costa Rica make pet travel expensive and bureaucratic I suppose because they can.

I wouldn’t get a dog if I were planning to overland a vehicle but I won’t leave him behind. 

I expect we’ll be on the road later this week back up into the mountains then when we have Rusty’s documents we’ll drive the Caribbean coast which I’ve never seen, passing through Puerto Limon and Puerto Viejo to Sixaola so we can drive the Caribbean coast of Panama too.

If like Joebob you are following along on the map you might enjoy checking out Rocking J’s in Puerto Viejo. We plan on spending a night there and I’m not sure if we will be laughing at the antics or clutching our pearls. It’s in the iOverlander app as well and also with mixed reviews…

Meanwhile we have some beach lounging to do. Soon enough we’ll be on the road and doing useful stuff. 

Don Trino Campground

 Monday morning in the campground. What joy! What bliss! There is but one other tent far out of sight and we are alone in our little patch of Costa Rican waterfront. 

We arrived at the campground Saturday afternoon and managed a quick swim as the sun was setting but we’ve been back in the water twice  a day since then. This is the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica so tides are big and lots of sand is uncovered at low tide. 

The locals mostly come for the day at the weekend though some bring tents. Our mobile home (“casa rodante”) creates some interest and we showed our home to Jorge who was next door and fascinated by our roaming life. He’s an IT manager in the city of Alajuela three hours inland and he had brought his family to spend Saturday night under canvas on the shore of Bahia Ballena (Whale Bay) at the campground. 

So let’s see, we think this campsite is brilliant and not just because we are alone here during the week. Ticos unlike Mexicans are quite restrained in public. They don’t play loud music and they aren’t very effusive or openly curious about the gringos in their midst. So being surrounded by quiet conscientious Costa Ricans of a weekend is no hardship.  They even pick up and bag their own trash! 

Still you have to understand this is no Kampground Of America. The caretaker cleans and removes our trash bags after sloshing the loo and shower with disinfectant. We put toilet paper in the loo for our convenience but this rates as A plus on our travels! Toilet seat, proper flush and regularly emptied toilet paper basket. Big thumbs up! In Latin America you don’t flush toilet paper or you’ll bung up the sewage system. Indeed we have a separate basket in our van toilet compartment. When I’m back in the States  I get confused remembering to flush the paper!

And the shower, ah yes indeed. This is all we need, cold water is no hardship this close to the equator. We have nails to hang our clothes and a place to put shampoo. Big thumbs up!

This is what we look for when we spend twenty bucks a night. Then we like to have a pool or better yet smooth sea water to swim in, not a surf break. If surfers like a spot we generally don’t. Rusty likes no dogs but when there are some, as there are here, he growls if any of them come too close to his home. He’s figured out they are all pretty scared and he doesn’t hesitate to tell them to stay clear. I like my dog’s new level of confidence that he’s developed on the road. 

So here we are on a hot dry sunny day with a muddy van after our driving adventures. We’d better wash the mats and stuff hadn’t we?

Well yes indeed and then hang them out them out to dry but first I wanted to mention that other critical feature we look for in camp life: plug in electricity. And here it is inside the palapa we get to use which also has an electric light. Notice all you fussy engineering types it’s just a household outlet but at least here it’s protected from the rain… the big black box is our voltage regulator and step up converter. Electrical outlets as far as Ecuador are 110 volts like the US but from Peru south they are 220 volts like Europe. So our magic box will step 220 down to 110 for us but it also prevents electrical spikes. We were having a few Monday morning spikes yesterday so the box interrupted the current from time to time saving our system from extra work and overloading our inverter. Brilliant!  (In case you’re interested we have a 3000w inverter so we bought a 3000w step up regulator so we can run the air conditioning through it. However in Central America we use shore power to charge our batteries and run the a/c at night off our 600 amp battery system. I fear if we try running a/c direct off shorepower we’ll blow the campground electrical system…)

In an all electric van we need to plug in if we aren’t driving for a few days. We can idle our engine and get lots of juice that way if we have to but in a campground a plug is much easier for us. So Don Trino has everything we need. Plus the sink. 

Most of Costa Rica seems to have potable water at least so far. So we fill our tank using a bucket and a siphon though we still filter our drinking water through our Berkey. But it’s nice to be able to wash dishes outside the van and do some laundry by hand. 

Even though it’s not all spiffy like you’d see in the States it’s nice for us to find this level of amenity on the road. We might stay a few days before we head toward Panama and our container shipping plan to get to South America.