To Panama
Woke up in my tent at the edge of a ravine, a hundred feet above the roaring Rio Chirripo Pacifico. A twenty minute walk downhill from the village of San Gerardo de Rivas, Costa Rica, which had been my favorite place in the country. The four nights I’d slept on the ground with the sound of that river, three days walking up and down mountains in the mystical cloud forest, had been redemptive for this tired traveler. I felt a renewed vigor to continue on with my migration.
On a long journey, these things come and go, so it’s best to take advantage when you feel the impulse. I didn’t know exactly what I’d do in Panama —after four months on the road, the idea of getting off the road for a while, maybe finding a place to volunteer at, was starting to sound really good. I also didn’t know how I was going to cross over to Colombia. There are no roads through the Darien Gap, the southernmost part of the Central American isthmus. It is conceivably possible to walk, but it’s about a hundred miles through dense jungle, with a fantastic variety of dangers in that roadless country. Jaguars, poisonous snakes, malaria; indigenous tribes, guerrillas, paramilitaries and narcotraficantes. None of which were eager to have gringo backpackers walking through, unless perhaps for the purposes of kidnapping and ransom.
So that was clearly out. Not that hard-core. The two main routes for travelers are flying, or taking a sailboat from Colon on the Caribbean coast on a four or five day’s sail to Cartagena. I made a rule at the beginning of this journey: no planes — as I wanted to see how each part of the earth turned into the next. And the sailboats were somewhere between five hundred fifty and seven hundred dollars, the difference presumably being hidden fees for customs and borders and transport. That would be about twenty days’ budget for me, and too rich for my blood. My perhaps far-fetched plan at the moment was to go to Colon and the other ports and see if I could find work as a deckhand on one of the sailboats. Despite it not being very far in terms of miles, South America still seemed a world away.
Leaving San Gerardo meant the better part of a day’s journey to the southern border, and then into Panama. As I’ve been traveling, several things have become clear about Central American border crossings. Thus far, they actually haven’t been that bad, but they’re always a little stressful and generally confusing. But however “not that bad” they might be, you definitely want to get there before dark. The stress and confusion levels go up significantly at night. And more, you not only want to get there before dark, but in time to catch the last bus that leaves the other side of the border. After that, you’re relying on taxis and colectivos, which get very expensive and irregular. There were buses leaving the Panamanian border for the city of David, the first significant place to the south, until 7 o’clock. Barring some unforeseen difficulties, I should be able to do that with a couple hours to spare.
I broke down my campsite, and after four days in the cloud forest, everything was damp or wet. Rigged up a clothesline, and hung every item out in a much-needed morning sun. Cooked some eggs and tomatoes on my campstove and wrapped them up in a tortilla, ate my breakfast in a seat on the edge of the ravine. By nine o’clock everything was dry, and at nine forty-five I was standing on the side of the road with my pack, waiting for the second bus of the day heading down the mountain, which came promptly at ten. Sat back on a mostly empty bus blaring reggaeton hits, the same ones I’d been listening to for four months, and savored the view out the window. Loved the terrain, the deep-cut river canyons, deep fertile greenery, white water, sharp young-feeling mountains, jungle farming — mostly coffee.
Came down into San Isidro around eleven thirty, and got off the bus early, right at the Tracopa Terminal where I’d landed five days before. A bus was leaving for Paso Canoas at the border in five minutes — how ‘bout that for a turnaround — and I bought a ticket and got straight in line. San Isidro is right on the Panamericana, which runs along the flatlands parallel to the Talamanca mountain range, so the highway was pretty good and the going relatively fast. Mostly farm and ranchlands, much drier than up in the hills.
We got into Paso Canoas at 3:30, and the bus dropped us right at the border in the middle of a hot and dirty town. I walked into Panama unwittingly — it was very difficult to tell where the actual border was — to find gridlocked traffic, a cloud of people trying to sell me and tell me every which way. I was looking for Costa Rican migracion, but when I found myself at a big hangar-looking building with a strange design that looked like giant legos and “Panama written in rainbow letters above, I knew I’d come too far.
So I walked back and a few hundred yards past where the bus had let us off, I found a grim bureaucratic-looking building with long lines, which had to be the place. Made my way through hundreds of schoolchildren in blue uniforms who were not in line, where I found the migracion window tucked around a corner. After waiting twenty minutes it was my turn, and I slid my passport across, only to learn that there was a departure tax which I had not previously heard of. To make things better, it was not possible to pay this tax here at migracion — I had to go across the street to one of two yellow shacks and pay there. Went and paid my tax, then had to stand in line again to get stamped out. /Sigh.
That accomplished, I walked back towards the border, and after a short wait I sidled up to the window to come face-to-face with an older military-looking, no-bullshit mustachioed guy. As soon as I gave him my passport, he looked me up and down and asked brusquely, in accented English: “How are you leaving Panama? Ticket?” Not this again. I don’t know if this is a thing these countries are focusing on, or if I just arouse suspicion, but this was the second country in a row where they needed to confirm that I would be leaving before I entered. I’d researched this online, and apparently it was fairly rare to be asked this on a land crossing. But not for me.
I told him that I was going to take a boat to Colombia, that I’d traveled all the way from the U.S., and had left every country. Look at the stamps, I said. I promised him that I wasn’t going to stay in Panama, in two languages, but he wasn’t having it. Walked back over to Costa Rica to find the Tracopa office and try to buy a ticket from somewhere in Panama to Costa Rica. I took the cheapest option, a ticket I would never use from David, Panama, back to San Jose for $28. A day’s budget, wasted. I hate these policies. Left Costa Rica for the third time that afternoon, back under the rainbow sign, and up to the same window. Barely looked at the guy as I shoved over my passport and bus ticket, so tired of borders. He asked how long I was staying in Panama, I said a month? and he stamped me in.
A little ways down the road into Panama was a building with these two-thirds length futuristic buses in off-white, they call them sprinters, that were leaving for David every seven minutes. I got right on at six o’clock as dusk was falling. An air-conditioned ride that quickly filled up, and we were driving down the Panamerica. Not terribly different from Costa Rica, but little differences were immediately apparent. Trash on the side of the road. Less forests, more ranching. Women getting on the bus in traditional dresses, mostly one bright solid color with simple white embroidery around the sleeves and neck. In Costa Rica, at least the parts I saw, almost everyone was wearing modern clothing.
This sprinter was racing down the highway, the driver pushing its engine to its limits, passing every vehicle in sight. A woman sat next to me wearing this amazing ornate long white dress, very much like Spanish colonial garb from the eighteenth century. I wanted to talk to her but we were all holding on for dear life, and I couldn’t think how to start a conversation. It was dark when we got to David, a non-descript busy bustling dirty Centro-American city; traffic and little tiendas everywhere. The bus station was sprawling and hectic and it was very hot. Tropics. I got a taxi and asked the driver if he knew the Purple House hostel, and he said he did and would take me there for $3. I was coming down with a splitting headache.
We found the hostel after several trips around a neighborhood, and a woman came out of a building painted purple with a big sign that said “Purple House Hostel” and informed us that this was not the place. After some discussion, the driver got back in and we drove way out into the suburbs and got lost, which was very awkward, him asking people on the street who had no idea what he was talking about, but eventually we found the other (new) Purple House, which was not purple. Apparently there had been a change in ownership and location. The gate was locked and the place quiet, and only after the taxi driver honked repeatedly did a man in his thirties with dreads come out and open the gate.
The driver asked for an extra dollar because it was a long way further than he’d thought, and I said ok, but then he gave me two coins back from my $5 bill, which were Panamanian Balboa $1 coins, which he assured me were good, even though they use dollars in Panama. Apparently they are interchangeable. After signing in at the new PHH, and paying $10 for a bed in an empty dorm, I asked the dreaded guy at the desk if there were any restaurants nearby or places to get food. No, he said, you’ll have to call a taxi. The last thing I wanted after my thirty minute ride. Nowhere to buy food? I asked. He said the house across the street had a tiendita, that was closed, but maybe they would open up for me. I had just gotten driven out to nowhere.
Graciously, the couple that had a little store attached to their house did open for me, and they very kindly tried to help me come up with a meal out of what they had on offer. It took several minutes to formulate something, but I bought a can of Campbell’s Pork and Beans, a plantain, two eggs, and some strange small yellow corn cakes that the label called tortillitas. Later, I was told that they were a kind of arepas, my first encounter with this South American species of tortilla. Frustrated with my station in the world, I walked back across the street to my hostel, where they gave me some oil to cook with. By now my headache was raging, and I drank water and took an Ibuprofen, but it was too late.
I heated up the beans, cooked the plantain in oil, then fried the eggs in the same pan and then the corn cakes. The hostel was a humid swamp, and I sweated over the stove and burned my fingers repeatedly. There was no spatula, and it is difficult to take big slices of plantain or eggs out of a pan with just a fork. After eating I went to lie down in my air-conditioned dorm room, but a few minutes later I lost my solitude to a young man in a fancy suit and two big suitcases that barely fit in the room. He saw me lying down, said he didn’t want to bother me, but then proceeded to unpack and unpack all the contents, taking books out of wrappers and boxes, all while playing music on his phone. He was a traveling salesman, come from Panama City to sell motivational books. My headache was bad enough that the pillow hurt my head. The last thing I remember before I somehow fell asleep was the guy asking me if I wanted to buy some of the books. I said in a beaten voice, no gracias.
Woke up and felt exhausted but decidedly better, decided it was time to get right out of David. Didn’t even know exactly where I was going. I could go north to a town in the mountains called Boquete; farther all the way across to the Caribbean and the Bocas del Toro islands; or continue south towards Panama City (though this part of the Central American isthmus really runs west to east, then north towards the capital). At the front desk, asking how I could get a taxi, the woman there said that her sister was about to drive to Boquete, and I could catch a ride. Done. My decision was made for me.
Ten minutes later I was in a little red car, with the woman’s from the front desk’s sister. She spoke decent English, but also a clean Spanish that was easy for me to understand. I was so happy to be riding in a car, not a bus. We picked up her boyfriend in a nearby neighborhood, then the boyfriend’s sister, who had to tear herself away from her crying toddler son in the doorway of her house. The boyfriend and his sister both worked as cooks at a restaurant up in Boquete.
We drove up, first through flat dry ranchland, then into greener hills. A light rain started falling, and they explained that they have a name for just this kind of precipitation: bajareque. It was the same mist-rain I’d encountered in these same mountains in Costa Rica. They said Boquete was much better than David. Why don’t you live in Boquete, I asked? Too expensive, they said. The gringos discovered it fifteen years ago when it was featured in AARP magazine. After an hour of gradual incline, we crossed over a line of dark green mountains, then down into a valley where there was a charming little town spreading out into the hillsides.
They dropped me off at the Central Plaza, and it was much cooler here than in David. There were green mountains on both sides, and I could see a bridge over a river a block away. I didn’t know where I would go, but saw Mamallenas Hostel on the other side of the plaza, and walked right over there and got out of the rain. It was about nine thirty in the morning. Feeling exhausted and knowing I’d need some days to recover, I just went ahead and booked three nights. Usually I like to book one night and see how bad the dorm room sleeping is, but I didn’t want to move. It was shocking to me at this point on my journey how much one day of traveling was taking out of me.
They said my bed would be ready in a couple hours. After hanging around on the very comfortable reception couches for awhile, sending emails to various volunteering positions in Panama, I walked a block to the Supermercado Romero, which just might have been the best grocery store I’d found since the states. I spent about an hour shopping, marveling at the products available for purchase. Bought blue cheese, havarti, smoked ham, granola bars, fettucine, among many other things. It is dangerous to expose a person to this variety of product that had not been available in months in a single moment. I went back to the hostel and cooked a croque sandwich with two kinds of cheese and felt somewhat vindicated. It rained gently for hours, and when they told me my bed was ready, there was nothing to do but take a long nap.
