People and car arriving in Panamá

Once the car was loaded, we couldn't wait to leave Cartagena. Not because we were not having every service there, but because we had really spent enough time in the stifling hot weather. The hotel we were in both in 2025 and in 2026 had come to feel like home, and the staff gave us desert on the house and a lovely card before we left.

The car was loaded on a Thursday, and Friday we set out to get tickets to fly to Panama. This turned out to be easier said than done. Again we could not get Copa (the only airline flying direct for about 1 hour and 20 minutes between Cartagena and Panama City) to accept our credit card online. We went to the airport to get tickets, spent two hours trying every which way to buy them, including a call to their sales team, asking a travel agent in a different hotel for help, and having a nice taxi driver wreck his brain trying to find alternatives, before giving up. Copa had closed all their physical agencies in Cartagena. We then had to accept defeat and got tickets with Avianca to fly via Bogotá and spend over 5 hours on Saturday afternoon for the quick trip across the Darien Gap.

Our resident Uber driver, Leo, picked us up at the airport and took us to the hotel. We shared some drinks with him, and tried to sleep in a room where the air conditioning didn't want to work. After having several engineers trying to fix it, and trying 3 rooms, we again gave up and the next day we changed hotels. At last the people had arrived.

The ship with the car arrived on the Tuesday, and we picked the car up in Colon on the Thursday. Leo drove us there, and we took the opportunity to go to the tax free zone to learn what it is all about. It is not a place you would go for a nice day out! Shops, cars, people and heat. No cafes, no restaurants, no toilets, nothing to do but to shop and then there are rules around how you can shop too. It was a nice day all up, and we received the car from the same place where we had loaded it in 2025. The same people were looking after the unloading process, and they too have become friends.

We were still not ready to leave Panama City for the last drive back to Costa Rica. The car went to the service center for a check-up, which was needed after not having had anything, other than a change of oil in Brasilia, since Montevideo.