Yearly Archives: 2009

My friend, Frank, has always said, “I see you in Bocas del Toro. It’s a natural for you.” So, on my first couple of visits to Panama I would ask people who said they’d been to Bocas how they liked it. The answer, almost invariably was, “I don’t know. It rained the whole time I was there. If you read my post yesterday you know how it can rain here. Well, it started last night about seven and it’s 7:25 a.m. and it’s still raining. There isn’t the wind like yesterday but it’s blowing out of the west today instead of the south.

I’m supposed to go back to David today but in order to do that I have to take the 20-minute water taxi ride to Almirante. The closest taxi is three looooong blocks away from the hotel and everything I have would get soaked. And after you get to Almirante you have to stand at the side of the road to catch the bus that takes you across the mountains. I’m just going to have to sit here for a while and make a run for it when the rain stops for a while.

I can see why the rainfall amount here is nearly 11-1/2 feet in a year. One of the people I had lunch with yesterday said that the rainfall in the first 10 days of May this year had already equalled what fell in all of May last year. It seems that it rains for five days out of every four in Bocas…and yes, I did say five days out of four.

I used to have a list of the three prettiest places I’ve visited. After today I either have to make it the four prettiest places or knock one off the list.

In no particular order, the first list was:

• The haute cornice from Villefranche, France, west to Nice.
• The beach south of Quepos, Costa Rica where I stood and as far as I could see to the north and south there wasn’t a footprint in the sand.
• The gorge into the Rio Dulce, Guatemala.

On Friday I got to the bus station in David just a few minutes before nine and got on the bus which departed exactly at the stroke of nine. Within a half hour we started to climb into the mountains. We climbed and climbed and the views were absolutely spectacular. Breathtaking. We were crossing the Continental Divide and at the top of our climb we were actually looking down on some clouds. You had to yawn to clear your ears from the altitude like you do when you’re taking off in a plane.

About two thirds of the way up the driver pulled over to a small, purple-painted house, kissed the girl who came out on the front porch and left his back pack with her. I sort of assume that it was his house and the view he had was a million dollar view.

There weren’t many people on the bus making the ascent. Seven of us to be exact, not counting the second driver and the conductor. All but the smallest busses in Panama have a conductor. He takes care of luggage and collects the fares when people leave.

Several months ago there were torrential rains in Chiriqui Province, especially up in the mountains causing several deaths and sweeping homes into the rivers. There are half a dozen places along the route that had been wiped out and only a single lane existed. In a couple of places it was just barely a single lane and one little slip up and we would have fallen at least a couple of hundred feet.

Unfortunately some snag downloading the pictures in the mountains but will be going back on Tuesday and try again.

On the down slope we started to pick up additional passengers who would ride for a few miles and students here and there. They came out of homes that, if you called them “shacks” you were being generous, but the kids were always clean in their white shirts/blouses and dark blue pants and skirts. All of them Indians.

These shacks are raised off the ground four to six feet. The siding is planks of wood and most often there are gaps between the planks. I’m sure that when it rains, and it rains a lot here, wind would drive it right through the sides of these people’s homes. They aren’t tight fitting. Roofs are most likely to be palm thatched and my guess would be that while rain comes through the sides of these people’s homes very little of it comes through the roofing. Occasionally you see one thatched with banana leaves or tin. Windows are simply spaces cut into the sides of the houses, or framed out and planked around the openings. The better “quality” shack might have shutters that can be closed at night. None of them have glass in the windows. I caught some pictures on the fly out the window of the bus but had to be circumspect because I’m sure the people don’t want gringo touristas snapping pictures. Sometimes there are small, I would presume nameless, villages of these shacks. The majority of these shacks are probably ten or twelve feet square though some of them are quite large. Maybe 25 by 10.

Got dropped off in Almirante and picked up the water taxi out to Bocas Town. Naturally I used my Pensionado discount. It’s a twenty minute boat ride on a fast boat. Staying at the Dos Palmas Hotel. Run by a black lady. Speaks English. Very pleasant place. Built out over the water as so many are. Look down the shower drain and it’s direct overboard discharge. I don’t think the toilet is, though. Almost all of the “facilities” in Almirante are simply outhouses built over the water.

The area itself is beautiful, but I’m not impressed with Bocas Town itself. Someone had told me, or I had read that it was very similar to San Pedro on Ambergris Caye in Belize, a place I detested. I stayed there exactly one night before pulling anchor and dropping down to Caye Caulker which was a cool place.

This is the view from the back porch at Dos Palmas:

A not untypical house in Bocas Town

But there are some places with a view

Main drag in Bocas Town Saturday Morning 10:30 a.m.

Concrete “pumping” Bocas Style

But my hotel is cool

Went down town this morning to look around at what David has to offer. I took a $2 cab ride to the bus terminal first to see where I would need to go to catch the bus to Almirante where you have to go to catch the water taxi out to Bocas del Toro. It’s on an island, you know.The terminal is a pretty good sized place and I thought it would be best to be prepared after having spent two hours in the wrong spot in Santiago my last trip.

I walked around the down town area for about an hour. David is the second (or third depending on which link you click on) city in Panama. Downtown is a bustling place crammed with small shops and large, too, for that matter. On the outskirts of downtown there is a KFC (gasp, choke), a Pizza Hut (I just threw up in my mouth a little bit), a TGI Fridays, a Do It Center (the Panamanian equivilant of Home Depot) and other larger chain stores.

But there’s only so much you can see on foot, so I decided to spend $10 on a taxi to drive me around. I figured an hour would be sufficient to give me a taste of the place and would stretch the limits of my Spanish knowledge if the driver didn’t speak any English. He didn’t.

I was semi in luck.  I asked how much he would charge for an hour of his time. If he said less than $10 I’d be a winner, but that’s exactly how much he said. Since I had decided before hand that that was an acceptable amount, if he thought he got one over on the gringo by asking for ten, then so much the better for both of us.

He drove me all around the downtown area which was a lot larger than I had thought walking around on foot and then we went a bit further afield through nearby neighborhoods and I got to see what the housing was like. Most of what he showed me was middle class, smaller homes that he said could be rented, when they were available, for around $150 to $200 a month. Quite similar to what equivilant housing goes for aroung Chitre and Los Santos.

I only took a couple of pictures downtown.

The fountain in the central park:

Tobacco for sale in the street

There were eight or ten people on one side street selling this tobacco. Each bundle weighs about a half pound and the guy selling this quoted $4 a pound. Since I wasn’t in the market, and didn’t ask any of the other vendors I suspect that was probably a gringo price.

After wandering a bit more and getting a cheap lunch I hailed another cab to bring me back to the hostel. The driver was a young guy who spoke fairly good English. He had lived for about six months in Miami and for three months in Minnesota, working on a dairy farm. “Why,” I asked, “did you want to live in Minnesota?”

“I wanted to see what snow was like. Now I have and I don’t need to see it any more. It got down to 25 degrees below zero one morning. It took me about six months to thaw out when I got back home,” he said.

Across the street from the hostel where I’m staying was this old house. I thought the construction was interesting. It wasn’t typical of the houses in the area which are all modern but I suspect this is what they all looked like years ago:

I also find the flowers and trees down here quite fascinating, too. This is right in front of the hostel. Greg, the owner of the hostel says that all the branches are cut down each year at the end of the rainy season and then they spring back again when the rains start back. Unfortunately he doesn’t know what this tree is called.

Tomorrow I head to Bocas.

Got up early, before six a.m. awakened by voices, loud voices, beneath my window of people leaving the building next door heading for work. Got everything packed and lugged my two bags down to the corner at Via Argentina to get a cab out to el Gran Terminal de Transportes (two hummingbirds buzzing around the flowers here at the hostel in David and they’re about three feet away from me as I’m writing this) at Albrook.

The first cab didn’t want to go there. The second guy wanted six bucks for a three buck ride. Then a lady driver, my first in Panama, agreed to the three bucks. I know the route having been there before in a cab and my friend Frank lives out that way, so what happened next wasn’t a rip off. Traffic, which is horrific under normal conditions was nearly at a standstill and I could easily have taken us more than an hour to get out there. And remember, she’d agreed to do this for $3. Also, there’s road construction going on around that area as well.

Her Spanish was rapid-fire, but I got the gist of what she was saying which was that if I’d pay the ninety cent toll she could get me out there in next to no time taking the expressway.  I agreed and so what if I paid $4 instead of $3. At least she was honest with me, and from my time of driving with the limo service I had  done the same thing myself. I would also, then, when picking someone up from Fort Lauderdale airport and having to deliver them to Boca Raton during rush hour, tell them we were going to go up A1A instead of that River of Death I-95. Sometimes they’d look askance at the suggestion but I’d tell them, “sit back and enjoy the scenery. I’d rather be driving along steadily at 35 mph on A1A than to be at a dead stop or crawling along at five or ten miles an hour because of an accident.

Anyway, I used my Pensionado at the ticket counter and paid $8.80 for the six and a half hour ride to David. Nice, huge Mercedes Benz bus. Air conditioned, comfortable reclining seats, television screens on which they showed two movies along the way (10,000 BC and The Last Samurai, in Spanish, of course). And it’s not a free for all boarding, either. You’re assigned a seat when you buy your ticket. Fortunately I had a window seat so I could watch the country side pass by.

The bus left promptly at 9:30 and instead of  going over the Bridge of the Americas:

We went over the New Millenneum Bridge:

The big difference between now and my trip down here in March is that the rainy season has commenced. Before everything was dry, dusty and brown. Now, though the rain hasn’t done anything to clean up the litter along the side of the road, everything is bright, vibrant green all the way to the tops of the mountains. And mountains there are. It is the Continental Divide.

We stopped off for lunch in Santiago for a half hour and then on for another two and a half hours to David. The scenery was beautiful going through the mountains.The indians shacks along the way were the first real indication of poverty here in the country. And a lot of these were shacks, indeed.

Probably the most depressing thing about Panama is that it seems their national passtime is throwing trash to the side of the road. It is one long, continuous line of crap for hundreds of kilometers on both sides of the road accentuated here and there by large piles of trash and garbage. It’s a shame, and if you take your eyes away from the distant beauty of the mountains and take a closer look you will see a national shame.

Well, made it down to Panama in one piece. The drive from Fort Lauderdale to Miami International Airport on what is commonly known as the “River of Death, I-95, was completely without incident at 11:30 a.m. One of the reasons this was so unusual is that it seems that south Florida drivers completely forget how to drive over the weekend and Mondays, especially if it’s after a three-day weekend, make I-95 seem like an auto wrecking yard.

Going up the departure ramp at the airport was almost like I had entered the Twighlight Zone. There were almost no cars and it’s usually a zoo full of very aggressive drivers. But this time just drove up and pulled in right in front of the check in counter.

Inside the airport it, too, was nearly deserted. Here and there were some people wearing masks, panicked by the “swine flu” scare stories. There was only one person ahead of me as I went through the security check and in the waiting area there were only eight other people in the five-gate zone. I counted them. EIGHT! It was almost as if everyone had either flown out on Sunday or were going to leave on Tuesday. Strange. The plane did fill up at flight time, but I had an empty seat beside me so I was able to stretch out and be comfortable. Usually I get assigned to a seat next to the sweating fat guy/lady. And fortunately I hadn’t booked a flight on “Screaming Baby Airlines,” either.

At Tocumen Airport “Swine Flu Fever Panic” was in full swing. At least  a third of the people were wearing masks and as we exited the plane we were handed a form in which we had to say whether or not we had been in an country with reported cases of the flu and if we had exhibited any of the symptoms in the previous 48 hours. When we handed the form over to the clerk at Immigration who stamps your passport she simply put the form on top of the hundreds of others she’d received without even giving it a glance.  About the best thing that can be said about all the people wearing masks isn’t that it would do anything to protect THEM, because the panic reports on the media seem to say chance are it won’t help you, but if the mask wearers cough and sneeze at least it won’t get all over YOU.

Had a good ride into the city, got my room at Casa Anita (my third visit) and had dinner at an Italian restaurant up the street that I’ve eaten at several times. The special was shrimp over spaghetti in a white cheese sauce and topped off under a broiler so the cheese was nicely browned and crispy. Topped off with two frosty Balboa beers the bill came to just under $10. I could have asked for the “Jubilado” discount which would have knocked 25% off, but I like the owner of the place who recognizes me now and came by and sat at my table for a couple of minutes to chat. If I didn’t know and like him I would have taken the discount.

Totally done in from the day and the two beers so I retired early. Panama doesn’t switch to daylight time, so I was up at a little after 5 a.m. local time. Came upstairs to the common area. Made a pot of coffee and now I sit here writing and waiting to call Lizi, my lawyer. We are supposed to go to Immigration to get my official Pensionado Cedula which will make me an official resident of the Republic of Panama.

Tomorrow I’ll take the six and a half hour bus ride to David (dah-veed), stay there overnight and then head out to Bocas del Toro, a four and a half hour bus ride and a half hour boat ride from the mainland to Isla Colon where Bocas Town is located.