Final border crossing in Central America

Early start to get the first boat to Golfito leaving at 6am. We were lucky to get there 20 minutes before as it was full and some people even had to wait for the next boat. As it's Costa Rica, things were relatively organised: only one desk to pay for the ticket, a price for the bike as well and everyone on the boat got a seat and a life vest.
After 20 minutes, we arrived safely at the other side. Golfito is really cute, a Golf within the Golf (best to see on a map again), surrounded by rainforest.
From Golfito, we headed towards the border to Panama. We took some smaller roads again, pretty much in the the middle of nowhere and some bad gravel as well, but everything was green and hilly and there was only very few traffic.
Before getting to the border crossing post, there's 2 roads running in parallel, one in Panama, one in Costa Rica. Theoretically, you can just cross, but it's probably better to get our proper stamps considering we want to travel some more countries on our trip...
So we continued to the immigration office a little further up the roads - and were sent back as we hadn't officially left Costa Rica yet. This was just the immigration to Panama. So we had to go back some 500 meters on a different road, pay 9US$ exit fee (got a receipt for 8$ only) and received our stamp. We then headed back to Panama immigration and saw some Americans discussing with the lady behind the counter. Seemed like they had problems getting in. They wanted a printout of an onward flight ticket from us and we told them we were travelling by bike and leaving Panama by boat. We could even show them an email. After some discussion, we were fine and got our stamps.
The whole procedure seems to be pretty random. The lady asked me if I could help translating for the Americans. They needed to prove that they were leaving the country again. When I talked to them, they told me they were on holidays in Costa Rica, had a flight ticket from Costa Rica back home (which they could show on their iPad) and a parking ticket on the Costa Rican side (in their hands) as they only wanted to spend a day on the Panama side. This was obviously not enough proof that they were going to leave the country, the lady insisted on them having also a bus ticket out of the country which they didn't have. Interesting policies!
I guess it was a bit of luck for us and also being able to speak at least some Spanish, so an email reservation confirmation for a boat was sufficient for us to enter country number 10.
We finished the last 25km to La Concepción, where we found an AirBnB and spent the night talking to our host Edwin.Read more