Leave Panama with the bike still there. Possible?
 

Hi folks, I'm in Nicaragua, heading for Panama. I'm on an old bike that is registered in the Netherlands and I bought it only to do this trip. Once in Panama I can give it away to any one that's interested. Can I leave Panama with the bike still in the country or will they stop me at the airport?
Thanks for the help,
Adrian.

I've never done it so don't take my word for it , but there are people who report having left their car or bike in Panama while they took a short side trip to Colombia by air. So it would seem that you can indeed get out of Panama without taking your foreign plated bike out of the country. The legality of that is another question. If you never ever go back to Panama they can't do much about it anyway. But perhaps they do make a distinction between your destination for air departure .

I can tell you that Panama physically gives you two stamps in your passport when you enter, one for you, and one for your bike. I flew my bike to Bogota so I had an exit stamp and the guy did have a pretty good look at my passport when I was leaving. Hard to say what would happen....

What I would suggest is dumping your bike in San Jose, Costa Rica then flying out. I left my bike there and flew home for six weeks. They don't stamp your passport for the bike when entering and when flying out the only thing they checked was that the name on my passport matched my flight boarding pass. I wouldn't even say they had customs, just a security check for leaving. I did at the end of November.

The Aduana in David are very helpful with storing your vehicle officially at low cost (1 dollar a day for the first month and then 2 dollars a day I think) while you fly home and, they may also have a system where you can surrender your vehicle and get your passport stamped so you can leave the country

Apparently, this sort of non-sense seems to apply in Colombia and we personally heard stories of people who "did the mistake" to fly out for personal reasons and then got trapped when tried to ship their vehicle out of Colombia

Never heard anything about Panamá.