SKRG - MRPJ
José María Córdova International Airport - Puerto Jiménez Airport
With our departure from Medellin, we conclude two things: 1) our Andes hopping trip and 2) we leave South America for good.
It’s been quite a trip around South America. We first entered the sub-continent on September 25th on a flight from Trinidad & Tobago - Boa Vista (Brazil). And we exit South America on November 23rd, almost 2 months later. What a journey this has been. We’ve seen some incredible landscapes along the way: the Amazonas, the Argentinian Pampa, we reached the southernmost point of our journey (Ushuaia), we saw open pit copper mines in Chile, hopped along the Andes (when the weather allowed for it), saw the incredible mountains along the Atacama Desert, Bolivia, and Ecuador, landed in the world’s highest airport (El Alto, Bolivia), and entered back into the tropical rain forest in Colombia.
We head northwest to Costa Rica, to a special place in my heart: Puerto Jimenez. For the first time in a very long time (after we left the Falk islands), we are feet wet as we leave Colombia and enter Panamanian airspace:
That piece of land in the horizon is Panama. But we continue our journey to Puerto Jimenez. On our descent, we cross the border with Costa Rica and get a view of Ciudad Neilly, the mountains in San Vito de Coto Brus, and the palm oil plantations in the Pacific coast of the country:
Puerto Jimenez is where my mother lives, so I know this area quite well, and have taken off this airport multiple times. It’s a VFR-only airport right at the shore in the Golfo Dulce:
This is the worst landing I’ve done so far. Our friends at the Microsoft Flight simulator put some trees right at the start of runway 36, which makes landing impossible. Still, I digged it and touched down the plane with an acceleration of 11G! If this were real life, the plane would have suffered considerable damage (or outright crashed). But in real life we don’t have tall trees in runways, so screw that.
