Rio Sereno is a town on the Costa Rica border. Drive up to Volcan and keep going as the road turns west, and it will take you through hills and mountains and some gorgeous scenery to the town. We (Cedo, Lauren, Joel, and I) had no particular reason to go except to see the area and have a day out.
The town itself is small, and there are a lot of little markets lining the main street.
Were were actually in Costa Rica when we ate lunch. The other side of the street was Panama. There was a duty free store just down the street with some excellent prices on liquor, but we were told it isn’t to be taken back into Panama. There was a border agent from each country in the street so we decided saving a few dollars wasn’t worth any possible trouble. The immigration office was just above where we ate lunch but we didn’t go there since we weren’t planning to cross the border.
Cedo has a lot of siblings, and it happens that one of her brothers lives in Rio Sereno so we stopped by for a visit.
The best thing about driving through this area is the scenery! The road is very windy with lots of ups and downs, but there are some really beautiful views. There are a lot of plantains and coffee grown there, often planted together. It is also cool and moist enough to grow a lot of vegetables, but most of what we saw was coffee, plantains, and cows.
We were also very surprised to see a couple cyclists making their way up the hills! They weren’t young folks either, but looked to be retirement age and quite loaded down. What a difficult ride that must be!
It’s a cool, cloudy day in David after a nice rainstorm, a good day to catch up on blog posts. I have a few other things waiting so stand by.
The Panama Adventure 
Road trips like this are always such fun!
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Yes! You’ll have to do that one sometime too 🙂
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Beautiful scenery shots! A stupid question, lol: How do the border patrol know if you are crossing and need to check you when it is a town divided with both countries? Are they watching you cross the street? Just curious 🙂
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Not a stupid question at all because it is totally confusing! We didn’t cross the border here but I understand there is a bridge. At Paso Canoas where we have crossed you can easily walk right past the immigration buildings on either side. There is a checkpoint down the road on the Panama side where they can catch you, but not on the Costa Rica side. At Rio Sereno there wasn’t a check point at all. They do have random check points around here (where they often just wave us through) and I wouldn’t want to risk it, but it does seem very possible someone could just walk into either country.
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Thank you for taking the time to answer. This is interesting and I certainly wouldn’t want to risk it either.
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