In Panama, Specifically Boquete

Hello everyone,
My brothers and I made it to Boquete today. We had a little hang-up leaving Pavones. Both Ed and I screwed up our alarms and we "missed" the bus at 5AM. I say missed, because we weren´t at the stop, but judging by our experience trying to catch the next bus I´d say we didn´t miss much. After realizing that we missed the bus, we went back to our hostel (Carols) and slept till check out time. The next bus was supposed to come at 12:30, but we knew it wasn´t going to make it into town cause of the road being washed out. We walked up to where the water had washed out the road and there was a crew working on it. One of them recognized us from the night before and told us in Spanish that there was no way the bus was going to come down that far. Thankfully, for only $10 their buddy would take us to the bus stop that the bus is supposed to go to. My Spanish is lacking, and communication has been really fun in Pavones because there aren´t to many English speakers out there. In particular, the language barrier was fun today, because we couldn´t tell if we were going to get out of Costa Rica.

We adopted a guy about our age, also no English, who I determined was going to Panama. We basically followed everything he did and made it to the border crossing. The border is confusing as shit. There is 2 things you must do. 1, get exit stamp from CR. 2, buy tourist postage stamp looking thing and get entry stamp from Panama. In practice, it´s more like, "ahhhh, were the fuck do I go". To be more specific, the borders are about 500 meters apart and the city of Paso Conoas goes right down in between the two. After trying to ask the police where to go to get the exit stamp, it was determined that it was a blue building. There was some debate and finally a tout got involved and wouldn´t leave us alone. The good news is that he helped us. The bad news is that we paid him about $5 to do it and tried to get him to leave us alone (unsuccessfully). However, the border is a mad house and even though we didn´t want his help, in the end it probably saved us some time and ass pain. One thing is very odd though. You can walk straight on through the border into Panama without checking in at all. It´s unwise to not check in because you´ll probably end up paying for it when you try to leave Panama, but it´s possible.
Anyway, we think we´ll stay in Boquete for a few days because it´s neat and there is a lot to see and do. It has many coffee plantations that you can tour, a cloud forest, a volcano and national park, hiking, rafting, and canopy tours. After that, it´s on to Bocas Del Toro.

Observations...
Costa Rica is really cool. I highly recommend it. I wish I had more time there. However, out of the big tourist areas an intermediate level of Spanish is almost a requirement. No Spanish experience is a bad idea.
Panama is much more modern or upscale than Costa Rica. It´s also cheaper and its currency is the US dollar. It has all the eco tourism opportunities as well as really chill places like Costa Rica. If you are looking for the Pura Vida atmosphere, CR is where you ought to head though, because Panama is a little conservative. If you want a place though that isn´t too much a transition from the US as far as comfortability goes, Panama is the place.

Later,
D