Our first border run story

For this border run in Panama in the Caribbean side. We lived in the beautiful Caribbean side of Costa Rica, so it made the most sense to go to Panama border in the Caribbean side. 

We drove from Cahuita, where we used to live, to Sixaola which borders with Panama. It’s less then an hour and a half of drive.

Just before the bridge that leads to the border, there’s a big roofed and supervised parking lot to the left of the bridge. The name is “Parqueo Mayela” (you can write it on Waze), They charged us 1000 colones per hour or 6000 colones per day. We parked there and went out of the parking lot and 10 meters away from there is the booth where you need pay the taxes to exit Costa Rica. It was 6$ per person back then.

From there we continued to the Costa Rican immigration where they stamped our passports with exit stamps and continued to the Panama immigration booth. Actually, to get there you need to physically cross the pretty big bridge

They required negative COVID tests (when we where there it was required from age 17 so we didn’t need it for the kids but now they canceled this requirement but better keep checking the regulations). It is also required to bring a flight ticket from Panama to Costa Rica although we weren’t asked for it but it is required.

Usually you have to stay about 2 nights in order to complete the visa renewel but since we’re in a process for citizenship in Costa Rica we asked if we can stay for less amount of time and they agreed for us to stay for only 3 hours.

There’s not much to do in that area, not even a restaurant but there is a very nice duty free store. The first floor is cosmetics and candies but on the second floor you have a nice variety of shoes and active wear, clothing, electronics and toys and good prices. So we did some shopping for a few hours and turned back to the immigration booth and got our stamps.

Outside the booths there’s a big advertisement of Bocas Del Toro on the wall which looked so good, we actually heard good things about it so we were sorry that we didn’t go there, but maybe in the future, who knows?

We crossed the bridge again to the other side and got to the Costa Rican immigration (you’ll need to present a plain ticket for exactly another 90 days later) and got stamped back in Costa Rica.

And that was it! So simple! For a border run I would definitely recommend on the Caribbean side. Especially after we went through on the pacific side, you can read about our second border run here.