Up to Date Border Crossing Information
 

Hello all I am planning a 5 country trip through CA this December. Can anyone give me any information on if the borders are currently open?

1) What borders are open/closed

2) Do they require a covid 19 test to cross the land border like the airport may be requiring to fly in?

Hello, and welcome to the HUBB community!

It's almost impossible to provide a useful answer to your question, because there is nowhere to get accurate information other than from the governments of the countries involved, and in many cases, they do not maintain an easy-to-find website that makes the necessary information available.

Worse than that, individual countries can change their rules & policies at any time, and they frequently do so without giving any advance notice. Hence you might get accurate information on Monday telling you that you can enter, but when you get there on Tuesday, the rules will have changed.

It's a risky time to set out on a trip that requires you to transit more than one border to get back to your home country. This is the "voice of experience" - I'm a Canadian who rode from Switzerland down to Tunisia this spring, before the pandemic got out of hand. I wound up quarantined in Tunisia for almost a month, and had to leave my motorcycle behind when I left on a repatriation flight back to Canada.

To get the motorcycle back to Switzerland in the future, I have to cross several borders: first get back into Tunisia, then out to either Italy or France (two countries served by ferry from Tunisia), then finally back to Switzerland. I think it's going to be mid next-year before I can accomplish that.

If you are based in the USA, you might want to revise your plans and just tour Mexico. That only leaves you with one border to cross to get home, and that is your home country's border. Home countries always let their citizens back in, regardless of how tightly they may have closed up their border to everyone else.

If you do set off on a 5 country tour, make sure you are mentally & financially prepared to leave your motorcycle behind (in storage) and fly back home if borders get closed after you have crossed them.

Michael

Michael's right, of course. And if you're even thinking about taking this trip, you'll do best to get out of the mindset where you ask questions about a situation and get answers you can base your plans on. The best you can do is collect information continually and try to extrapolate into the future, with all the uncertainty that implies.

Current information is available. People have been posting here and on other forums about Central America borders--mostly about how they're waiting around for opportunities to cross whichever one comes next. Rumors abound, hard information is scarce, and predictions about the future have been coming up lacking. Or maybe that's just MY predictions.

Contrary to what Michael says, our government has been refusing entry to American citizens at times, although I might not know this if I didn't live next to the border. They're not supposed to, but it's been happening. Whoever you are, it's worth staying aware of any potential vulnerabilities you might have on this score--ethnicity, immigration status, political leanings, etc. I'm not normally prone to paranoia, but these really are extraordinary times.

Hope that's helpful.

Mark

Guatemalan borders are open(at the moment) for tourists , as long as you have a negative Corona test , not older than 72 h .

For what it worth, I know a guy, Nate the nomad Allen, who has been stuck in Turkey for months. He is making the best of it. In fact, he is having a great time, but it slowed his RTW plans. Maybe for the better.

A friend of a friend stopped by at my home in New Jersey to ask advice on his planned trip from New Jersey to TdF. Over coffee and donuts, I gave him a brain dump of experience and advice based on my travels, and in the end, cautioned him he may have issues crossing borders. Ultimately, he shipped his bike to Columbia and started his trip there.

After our talk, I spent time looking at the US State Department travel advisory website and followed links to individual US embassy sites for the chain of Central American countries. There are notices about each country's entry policies and restrictions. Each of the US embassy sites was organized a little differently, so it wasn't easy to put together the details. My research is a few months old and I wasn't motivated to figure out each country's rules. Suffice to say, there was a range of requirements, COVID tests, and quarantine periods. I assure you, the rules change all the time.

If you are determined to travel now, go for it. Be prepared to get COVID tested in a small window of time before crossing a frontier and potentially quarantine for moving on. And then you have to decide, given the daily exposure to people as you travel is it worth the risk? I am far from risk-averse, but for 2020, and it looks like the first part of 2021 will be spent at home. Yeah, it sucks. I was planning on competing in a raid rally in Peru in August 2020 -- canceled. Crossing my fingers and toes travel will open up by August 2021.

hello
anybody know if a Canadian with a vehicle can get thru the us_ mexico border in order to get back to Canada vincent

Americans are allowed to go through Canada to get home to Alaska, so... maybe? You'll have to check with the US border folk, and even then it may change.
Good luck and let us know how you do!

Costa Rica's land border remains closed. so assuming you made it as far as nicaragua, that's as far as you'll make it.

Anyone have any updated actual info on Central America land borders? Planning a trip to hopefully as far as Panama and return to USA in December.

I just crossed into Mexico with a US reg motorcycle and an Irish passport with no Issues at all. Irish goverment website says the border is closed but that's just non-essential travel for non-US residents crossing into the US according to the US website. No restrictions entering into Mexico, no covid test required. I crossed at Colombia, near Laredo. I'll cross into Ecuador in a few months so I don't have any info for that yet. Hope that helps somewhat!

A friend of mine rode from Texas to Panamá and back about a month ago - no problems. The Covid-19 requirements were varied...

As others have noted - there's no guarantee that things will not change. We went to Iceland for a month's camping and found when we arrived that we could not return as we had arrived (via the USA). Since Iceland is in Schengen entry to the USA from Iceland was prohibited (the fact that the total number of Covid-19 cases in Iceland since the start of the pandemic is less than the average day's cases in Texas obviously has no bearing on the sense of this...) .

Logic is irrelevant, flexibility is key.

Alternate plans
 

Consider postponing a long overland trip complicated with COVID requirements and potential delays. Think instead about taking a week or several weeks on a rented bike in one country. I went to Peru in late August for a couple of weeks and had a blast recovering from cabin fever. There are self-guided rental options in many if not all Latin American countries. Yeah, a short and single country trip is not as exciting as a big DYI trip, but it's better than staring out the window at home...