Getting to Costa Rica was a nightmare; it didn’t stop pouring rain for the 2 days it took for me to get from Panama City to San Jose when it was actually supposed to take 15 hrs in a bus. The heavy rains came late in the wet season this year, and apparently with more rainfall than usual, so a bunch of mudslides and bridge collapses shut down many major highways and closed off cities from road transport. It was almost impossible to get out of Panama too because Nov 3^rd was a national holiday celebrating their Independence from Colombia. Their Independence Day is actually more like a 5 day weekend holiday, and every Tom, Dick and Harry was both trying to get into the city and out of the city, causing every bus to be fully booked. I bought the last seat on my bus, which was actually the last seat in the back of the bus, conveniently located right beside the most foul-smelling, pee-covered toilet ever; I cringed every time the door opened, and since we had 46 people on the bus, it opened pretty frequently, offering a lung-full of sewer air every 10 minutes.

perfect depiction of a blocked road, from Frank Delargy at Virtual Tourist

We first hit a mudslide at around 9pm, after the Costa Rican border but still about 5 hrs away from San Jose. The bus decided to park beside it and wait, asking us all to get some sleep while we waited for the road to clear. When I woke up at 6 am, everyone else was also sleeping and looking out the window revealed no one had even arrived to start clearing the road. After spending 8 hrs in the nearest town listening to the radio and waiting for the road to clear, a police car drove through with loudspeakers announcing the way had been cleared. We drove on, passed the first mudslide, drove over an extremely distrusting, temporary bridge to replace a collapsed one, and then hit another mudslide. We waited roadside, this time only for 3 hrs, and finally made it to San Jose at midnight the next night.

Luckily I had a friend on the bus who spoke English better than my Spanish and kept me up to speed, and also got me a taxi out of the sketchy suburbs where we arrived too late for anything to be open, and I spent the night at a friend’s place. His mattress on the floor felt like a five-star hotel, and so did showering off the pee and crowded bus aroma of the 2 day journey. It was still raining outside, for the next 2 days I was there, but I wasn’t in a rush to get out of there knowing how many more mudslides still had to be cleared all over the country