Panama

On the 29th September we crossed our final border and entered into Panama – a moment which brought up a lot of conflicting emotions for us (as you might imagine). We vowed to wring every last drop of enjoyment from our last two weeks of freedom before returning to the reality of work/job hunting, finding somewhere to live, retrieving boxes of stuff from parent’s attics, and all those other fun pursuits. But first, we needed to get some sleep – a week’s worth of long journeys on crap remote roads had left us totally cream-crackered.

We checked into The Purple Hostel in David, just south of the border from Costa Rica and Panama’s second city. Whilst the name of the place intimated some kind of colour preference, nothing could have prepared us for the sheer scale of purpleness we found there. Everything you could imagine was purple….the walls, the sheets, the towels, the plates, cups, cutlery, right down to the lavender cleaning products. Even the most unobservant of laymen could have detected the distinct (purple tinged) whiff of OCD. David is the jumping off point for a number of interesting places in Panama, but the city itself does not have much to offer the tourist. Still, we dutifully attended the one museum in town (an old house filled with a variety of tenuously linked artefacts), enduring an hour-long private tour conducted solely in rapid Spanish. For some reason, the guide was very interested in the age at which British men lose their hair and quizzed us at some length on the matter. Our other cultural activity – watching the local marching band conduct their practise session in the loading bay of a supermarket – was a more joyous affair.

Rested up (and purpled out) we caught the bus to Boquete to seek out a wilder side of life. Boquete is situated in the Chiriqui Highlands, an area of cloud forest known for its cool climate, coffee plantations and adventure activities. Bar the coffee bushes, it’s not unlike Austria or Switzerland…alpine and really rather civilised. Not content with merely admiring the lush vistas we signed ourselves up for a double whammy of adrenaline tours. First up was white water rafting. The rivers in this area run pretty fast in the dry season, but in the wet season (ie. now) they go up a class or even two, making for a pretty hair-raising ride. By some miracle we managed to get through 15kms of Class IV rapids without the raft flipping, though some members of our party did find themselves overboard! I’ve certainly not seen waves that big in a river before, though luckily for me Phil was at the front of the boat absorbing a lot of their impact (cheers love)!

Next up was a canopy tour through the treetops of the cloud forest. We donned harnesses and hard hats, hiked up to the highest point of the forest, and then made our way back to the bottom via a series of thirteen increasingly scary zip wires. Phil graciously allowed me to go first on the majority of the lines – obviously chivalry is not dead. Our guides were a bunch of cheerful yodelling Panamian guys, including one who appeared to be auditioning for the Latin American version of Top Gun – cute!

After all that excitement we were ready for somewhere a bit more chilled, so we travelled over to the Caribbean side of Panama to visit the Bocas del Toro archipelago, a half hour boat ride from the mainland. The islands are famous for their diverse wildlife - above and below water. The day we arrived we spotted hummingbirds, parakeets and loads of other colourful birds just hanging out in the main plaza.

The following day we took a sailing and snorkelling trip round some of the more remote islands and were lucky enough to see dolphins, jellyfish, starfish, sea cucumbers, and some pineapple eating sergeant fish. Bocas is also known for its party atmosphere so we felt obliged to go and check out the nightlife in the local bars (it’s a tough gig). The tourists seemed to be fairly well behaved in general, seeming more interested in watching one of the locals do round after round of ‘tequila suicides’ (snort the salt, shoot the tequila, squeeze the lime in the eye) than getting involved themselves – funny that.

The San Blas islands, situated further down the Caribbean coast towards Columbia, are home to the self-governing Kuna Yala people. They have a distinct non-written language, wear traditional jewellery (beaded leg and arm bands) and clothes (the most striking of which is the reverse appliqué mola blouse), and try to maintain their cultural practices in the face of increasing contact with the outside world.

Whilst searching for information about San Blas online, we came across a site for the Andiamo – a fifty foot yacht offering reasonably priced three day sailing trips round the islands. We figured it would be a pretty unique way of exploring the place, so we signed up then promptly got ourselves down to the supermarket for those all important rum supplies. The skipper of the yacht was quite a character – a Chicago born Brazilian-Italian poker champ called Tony (cue Sopranos accent) with a wealth of knowledge and opinions on all things Latin American. His live-aboard cat Lucy was pretty sweet too.

If you conjure up a picture of a Robinson Crusoe desert island – yellow sand and palm trees, solitary thatched hut in the centre, azure water lapping gently at the shore – you’ve pretty much imagined what the San Blas are like. Over three hundred of these islands make up the archipelago, some home to Kuna Yala families and others to their coconut plantations. The islands were originally covered by mangrove but the Kunas cleared them and cultivated coconuts instead. Traditionally they traded these with the Columbians for all the commodities they needed. Until fifteen years ago coconuts were their currency, no other form of money was used. However, things are changing rapidly - a new paved road has brought increasing traffic into the area, and plans have been agreed to develop the mainland for tourism. Another problem is that the archipelago is an important cocaine smuggling route for the Columbian cartels – an estimated thirty tonnes a month passes through these waters, with some of the local population inevitably getting caught up in the trade. I guess there always has to be a dark side to paradise.

For us though, our three days in the San Blas were pretty idyllic. Very little sailing was actually done (due to a combination of things breaking and the wind being wrong) but we puttered around, dropping anchor at various picturesque spots to snorkel or hang out on the beach. The rest of the time was spent reading, eating and chatting to the other couples onboard. Oh, and Phil also spent several hours fishing, finally managing to catch a massive beast…which unfortunately turned out to be a large rock. Oops.

The first thing that most people notice about Panama City is the skyscrapers – lined up resplendent along the water front. It’s for this reason that the city has been likened to Miami. Take a closer look though, and it becomes apparent that half of the buildings are in a state of construction – cranes sit atop many like sentinels. Apparently the reason for this is that these buildings have been commissioned purely to hide drug money – the apartments and offices are not sold, so there is no compelling reason to finish them. As our skipper Tony told us “nothing in Panama is ever as it seems”.

We arrived in Panama City chilled out and ready for a Saturday night out on the town. We checked into a hostel in Casco Viejo, an area that houses an interesting mix of embassies, beautiful historic buildings, cool bars, expensive restaurants, derelict houses and slums. Wander down the wrong street at your peril. We went for a slap-up steak dinner with a bottle of red, and then hit the open air Relic bar for some rum and cokes. It’s housed in a restored colonial building, overlooked on all sides by squatted buildings in various states of disrepair – a bit like a dicier version of Dalston. We liked it a lot.

We thought that it would be totally rude to go to Panama without seeing “the big ditch”, so the next morning we went to the Miraflores lock to watch the huge boats negotiate their way through the Canal. The project was begun in 1878 by the French, and was eventually finished in 1914 by the Americans. It’s now owned entirely by Panama, supplying a massive amount of revenue for the country. For the largest boats it can cost $100,000 to pass through the canal, but it saves them up to two weeks and $1.5 million in fuel and worker costs. Not a bad deal. After that there was just enough time to check out the duty free malls before heading down the Pacific coast for a final slice of beach life.

We chose to spend the last two days of our trip in Playa Venao, a gloriously isolated bay on the Azuero Peninsula with great waves and spectacular sunsets. Just one last surf for the road….

Susie and Phil xxx