So today (Wed 7 Dec) was an interesting border crossing day. It started with 10min into our 20min drive to the border (Costa Rica to Panama) New Wine (one of our cars) had car troubles, turned out a pipe had come loose so we used nearly all our drinking water to refill the radiator. Not having drinking water for a long border crossing is not the best in heat like this. 5 hours of border crossing pain included queuing for 4.5 hours, Josiah (one of our Aussie team members) and I being sent back to guard the cars for an hour or two, which was a good thing as a couple of guys were paying way too much attention to one of our cars and felt obliged to touch one of the RVs... The front of the queue was crazy, people pushing in from everywhere, people being sent to the back of the queue numerous times, and more... I then spent 1.5 hours deboning chicken and cutting veg for lunch while sweating like a crazy lady, dang it's hot here!!
Panama Border Crossing
On the road eventually and New Wine calls in to say they have trouble with the car, they can't get the gas to go. Turns out it's because they were out of gas! That was a nice easy trouble to solve. And made the rest of us in the other cars laugh :) During this time of checking the car a few of us popped out the cars to go pee in the RV. Picture the scene: run 2 cars up to the RV to pee (in desperate need by this stage). A policeman is checking us at the same time, he asks for my passport, I tell him it's in the other car, he tells me to go back and get it. Aaarrghh. So I run back to get my passport, show it to him and try run back to the RV to pee (time is of the essence before Jesse drives off in the RV), he unfortunately doesn't let me off so easily, he looks at other peoples passports then mine in detail and asks me if I'm married. No. Really? Yes really. Boyfriend. No. Really? Yes really. Can he get my phone number? No. I don't have a phone with me. Really? Yes really. Finally grab my passport (note to self, switch my ring to my wedding finger in this country) and run to the RV. As I'm peeing Jesse starts driving off. Aarrggh. Shout that I'm in the toilet, guys in the RV laugh, Jesse stops, I get out and run back to my car. What a lot of effort just to go to the toilet.
Later on it wasn't so funny when New Wine had trouble again, this time the steering wheel wouldn't work and the car literally broke down so we had to tow it nearly two hours at dusk to the closest town. The towing went well until we had to pull over as we'd lost the other RV. During this time we discovered that Panama definitely has the highest police presence we've seen for a while. There must've been a cop car on the side of the road every 5 minutes. While we were waiting for the RV police pulled up to see what was wrong. They turned out to be really nice, we explained who we were (missionaries), ministered to them and I gave them a bible. They called a hotel ahead to organise for us to stay there, 15min away. Unfortunately we missed the turnoff to the hotel so we had to cross 2 lanes of traffic and do an illegal U-turn to get back, during rush hour. After spending 10min figuring out the best way to do it, we took so long that more cops came to see why we were pulled over on the side of the road. After a bit of sweet talking they not only let us off but stopped the traffic for us so we could cross safely. Nice :)
The hotel was amazing. We put up our popups in the parking lot and some people slept in a room, we had use of the restaurant, free wifi, a great pool and a hot shower with clean hotel towels. And only $4 each!!
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