Panamá Capítulo Uno

I left Berkeley with a heavy heart at the end of the spring 2010 semester. I had met the most wonderful people and seen some of the best that California had to offer. Having succumbed to the Anti-Americanism that had swept through much of the world prior to the Obama years, I had truly been won over by the Golden state, and most of all Berkeley. Luckily, I still had one more semester to look forward to. In the meantime, I had a whole 3 months of summer to fill up. The plan: to cover the length of Central America, from Panamá all the way to Mexico. This would of course, include an obligatory hop over to Cuba. I had long been enthralled with the idea of visiting this Communist bastion and wanted to see the living museum for myself. But first, Morten and I had to make our way through eight rather spectacular and at times, challenging countries. How the earth managed to pack so much spectacular-ness into such a tiny isthmus, I shall never know.

We began our journey with a 10 hour layover in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. This was the result of stinginess when booking our flights to Panamá City: the price we paid for saving $10 was a 10 hour delay in getting to our destination. It was in San Salvador that Morten- a Norwegian unaccustomed to concepts of humidity and warmth- got his first taste of the climate for the coming months. Stifling heat, air so dense it felt like trying to breath liquid. We scoured the length of the airport for areas where the air conditioning draft was strongest and stared at the jungle beyond the glassy airport walls expecting monkeys to appear. They never did. Finally, we boarded the flight for Panamá City and landed at 10 pm. I recited my pre-rehearsed spanish phrase that would inform the taxi driver of the address of hostel. When he appeared my spanish fell into a blubbering mess. Eventually I showed him the address I had written and he knew instantly: "Ahhhh Hostel Mamallena!" After that I temporarily gave up on trying to learn sentences so as not to denigrate the Spanish language.

My first task in Panamá was to find some anti-malarial tablets. This was going to be interesting, given our limited grasp of the Spanish language. I'd read on the internet that they sold Chloroquine in most Central American pharmacies even without a prescription. So I studied up on pharmaceutical phrases and hit the streets of Panamá City. When I asked the first pharmacist "Tienes Aralen o Chloroquine?", she looked at me strangely, then went on a huge Spanish rant. Naturally, we understood none of it. Luckily, another customer realised the extent of our incompetency and translated our need for anti-malarials. She then told us that the pharmacist said that they hadn't stocked Aralen for yonks. Furthermore, if I wanted any medication I would need prescription from a doctor. I guess the bloggers were wrong.

So we set off to find a doctor. Luckily there was one three doors down. He even spoke rudimentary English and happily sent us off with a hand written script on a dodgy notepad. We tried numerous pharmacies to get my drugs, but none of them had them. Finally, one pharmacist, upon sensing our frustration and understanding that we wanted anti-malarials, showed us another drug that sounded vaguely anti-malarial and was made of slightly different compounds to Chloroquine. I managed to decipher her instructions about the dosage, and walked away sincerely hoping that a) the drug really was anti-malarial and b) I had deciphered her spanish about the dosage correctly, so as to prevent death from overdose. Drug problems aside, we set off to explore Panamá City. First stop: Casco Viejo, the historic part of the city which came into being after pirate Henry Morgan trashed the original old city in 1671. Determined to show Morten my navigation prowess, I memorised the map and pranced ahead confidently. After prancing only a few hundred metres, the suspiciously seedy looking fellows and ramshackle buildings led me to believe I had led us into the 'dodgy' part of Casco Viejo that the Lonely Planet had explicitly warned against. Nonetheless, I forged on confidently, pretending I knew exactly where I was. This was a good old trick of mine that I'd practiced many times in African cities whilst travelling alone as a petite female- I like to think that my 'confident' air of strutting around streets and boulevards is what has prevented me from experiencing any form of violent mugging, despite my obvious status as foreign tourist. Little did they know that in my mind I was shitting my pantaloons.

Luckily, dodgy Casco Viejo gave way to the significantly less dodgy and World Heritage listed area of Casco Viejo. We passed by numerous churches, theatres, the President's house and paused at the Plaza de Francia to look at ships being spat out of the Panama Canal. We pigged out on some scrumptious gelati at the Plaza de la Independencia, where Panamá declared independence from Colombia in 1903. We frantically gobbled up ice cream before the Central American heat melted it all. This episode set into motion a subsistence diet of ice cream for the next two days.

No trip to Panama City is complete with a trip to see the Canal. We set out for the nearest set of locks, the Miraflores Locks. Unfortunately, no ships were going through the locks at the time but even just to see the locks was quite something indeed. It was truly impressive feat of engineering. Apparently the average ship pays $30,000 USD to go through the Canal, and for each ship that goes through the canal, 52 million gallons of freshwater is released. It is staggering stuff and the government us currently building another set of locks to allow larger container ships through. After scrambling onto a chicken bus for a ride back into the city, we set off to the Causeway (a strip connecting some islands near Panamá City), for the purposes of eating more ice cream.

Whilst Panama City had been a nice introduction to the Central Americas it hadn't felt like anything remarkable. The city's grinding heat and humidity had been a shock, and it wasn't helped by feeling that we were constantly breathing in car exhaust fumes. Hence for out next stop we chose a destination that was the polar opposite to Panama City- Santa Fé, a beautiful mountain town in Panamá's isolated interior. After a fairly chaotic minibus changeover at the town of David and an awesome hoon down windy mountain roads at hair-raising speeds, we got to Santa Fé, managing to find the only hostel in town, Hostal La Qhia. The place was a stunning mountain house and we bunked down in the garden hammocks with bottles of Balboa (one of the staple Panamian beers) in hand. There were hardly any other visitors, bar the occasional frog, a resident cat and chirpy jungle insects.

It was here that we got our first taste of independent hiking in Central America. The lovely Belgian owner Stephanie gave us a number of recommendations, and we set off for Salto de Bermejo. However in order to get there we were given a hand-drawn map, with few topographic features, no scale... the sort of thing a sophisticated 7 year old would draw. Instructions were along the lines of, "walk up the mofo hill, once you reach the small green house with the red roof, there should be a track opposite... follow the track until you reach the rickety old fence... then veer left down the small path in the jungle... on the left there's a leopard on the right there's a poison frog and if you get lost, best of luck finding your way back!!" We had a few "eeeek where's the track?!"moments, particularly when we got to an overgrown grassy clearing that seemed to be full of mini-tarantulas. But we forged on, followed by the occasional iridescent blue Morpho butterfly. Eventually we were greeted by the roar of Salto de Bermejo, a stunning 2 tier set of falls with a welcoming pool below. We had the whole place to ourselves and jumped in for a refreshing swim. Santa Fé, thus far had been nothing less than amazing. We hadn't even been speared by any poison frogs or eaten by any leopards! On the way back, we even met an enthusiastic farmer who insisted we sit down in the middle of the road and talk to him for half an hour. Though most of what I said comprised of him asking "Entiende?" (You understand?) and me replying, "Lo siento, no entiendo", (Sorry I don't understand), the man seemed genuinely pleased to have found someone to talk to and was truly proud of the little town he came from.

The next day, we arranged to go tubing with William, the local tube owner. We made our way down the steep hill to the William's house, on the banks of the the River Santa Maria. William nobly gave us the more inflated tubes and we settled in for what we thought would be a relaxing float. However el Río Santa Maria had a fair few decent rapids in stall for us and our tubes were quite unobedient when it came to directional instructions and our hands made mediocre paddles. But the river did not have malicious intentions and even gave us some awesome jungl-y riparian stuff to look at- a jesus lizard (lizards that appear to walk on water), kingfishers and William's dog, who was a real trooper and spent the whole time navigating the rapids like a pro. And we got all this for $10! Remarkable stuff, given that the same thing in any Western country would have cost at least $100 and the companies would have made us sign off on a dozen insurance and waiver forms.

Our last day in Santa Fé was spent walking up to Alto de Piedra, where there was yet another stunning waterfall. This one was much smaller than Salto de Bermejo, but beautifully tucked in a gully with smaller pools further downstream surrounded by a lovely jungle setting. The sun would occasionally stream through the canopy, making the water look extra green and stunningly clear. Huge blue Morpho butterflies fluttered by, attracted to my blue T-shirt and sarong- they are territorial creatures and saw my inanimate possessions to be a threat. After the obligatory shower under the waterfall, we managed to hitch a lift with some friendly locals, and thankfully avoided having to walk down the 9 km mofo hill we had just walked up.

Santa Fé had been a dream, but it hadn't even originally been on the Panamá plan and we had managed to spend more days there than we had meant to in the first place. We could have easily spent another 2 weeks there, but it was time to get moving. Our next stop was the famous mountain town of Boquete, where we would struggle up Panama's highest mountain, Volcán Baru and engage in some seriously fun white water rafting.