Whilst I originally thought that the customs process in Panama city would be a quick exercise as it has been in most countries, this turned out to be an exercise that took the whole day and at the end of it, I still didn\u2019t have the temporary import permit for the bike!<\/p>\n
On arrival at customs I was told I would need insurance. Ok, this is no surprise, \u201cso where do I get it?\u201d! One would think that there would be a little office at customs that sells it but for the life of me I cant understand why there isn\u2019t one. The same thing happened to me on entry into Ecuador and it is such a massive waste of time. The company that sells the insurance is on the other side of town, an hour away!!! Ok, so I leave the bike at Customs and take a taxi rather than running the risk of getting completely lost in the city. Its now about 1pm and I sit down in front of the lady who is processing the paperwork in order to issue my policy, and then her system freezes! Not just HER system, the whole company! Crap!! So I go downstairs to get something to eat and come back an hour later and the system is up and running again, she issues my policy but I notice that she has a few crucial details incorrect so the whole process has to start from scratch. Its now 3pm and customs closes at 4pm! I get to customs with 10 minutes to spare and am praying that someone there will be able to quickly issue the permit, but hell no; Its nearly home-time and \u201cpens down\u201d are at 3:30pm and out of the door is promptly at 4!! NO \u201cexcepshiones\u201d! Bugger, a day wasted and I need to come back tomorrow. What makes this all the more aggravating is that I am only going to be in Panama for another 2 nights (tonight included) so I have wasted a day dealing with the worst of the bureaucratic system!!!<\/p>\n
On the plus side, I arranged to meet David whom I met on the boat from Cartagena for dinner which was great. We met at the rooftop bar of the Tantalo hotel and then had dinner at the restaurant. Both the restaurant and bar are fantastic and worth a visit if in Panama.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow my plan is to ride about 400km east towards Costa Rica and spend the night at Boca Chica on the Pacific coast, that is, assuming I have an importation permit!!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Whilst I originally thought that the customs process in Panama city would be a quick exercise as it has been in most countries, this turned out to be an exercise that took the whole day and at the end of it, I still didn\u2019t have the temporary import permit for the bike! On arrival at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theamericas"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pXwN4-CS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2410"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2411,"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2410\/revisions\/2411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.capetocairo2010.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}