Coral and Canals

Panama managed not to live up to stereotypes. When I thought of Panama I thought of sweltering jungles, drugs, the Panama canal, sucking up to US interference and the panama hat. OK, so the last stereotype is true, there are a lot of Panama hats. Although apparently they aren't made in Panama... What I found here were white sand beaches on islands dotted with coral reefs, chilly cloud forest and wilderness beaches. Yes there's an emphasis on beaches. In case you hadn't noticed, Panama has a lot of coast. I never made it down to the Darién where I believe most of the muggy rainforest is, and incidentally a lot of the drugs crossing the gap from Columbia. However I am told there were plenty of drugs on offer - apparently I just look too straight-laced to be offered them.

I started off in Panama by walking over a rickety iron and wood bridge to enter the country, fortunately speaking enough Spanish to sidestep the "you have to buy a return bus ticket that isn't actually a bus ticket" scam. Heading swiftly through banana country I took a boat to Isla Colon in Bocas del Toro. Here I swam, snorkeled and tried to dodge the sandflies for a few days before deciding to head down to Panama City. I didn't arrive in Panama City for nearly a week. I got a little waylaid...


To begin with I ended up in a hostel in the middle of the cloud forest in northern Panama. The name, rather appropriately, was Lost and Found, and being hidden in the clouds and only accessible by steep, muddy path, it had the feeling of being a place where people got lost in order to find themselves. Having had plenty of time in the last two years to find myself I instead found the noisiest silent place that I have ever been. The cloud seems to mute all sounds, and yet there are constant bird calls, and the lawnmower sound of hummingbirds whipping past your head. It was run by a group of "volunteers" who seemed to spend their time decorating (trying to remove the ghosts of a very strange past by balancing out the Egyptian-themed decor with images of local wildlife) and waiting for the evening to start so that drinking rules Jenga could begin. Here I also found a couple of American surf bums who I ended up getting lost with.


Although the cloud forest was beautiful, if was incredibly cold and so I and the two lads headed to Playa las Lajas, where we had heard beach cabins could be had for $10 US per night - the price of a cheap dorm bed in the rest of Panama. Following directions on a scrap of paper we found ourselves wandering down a muddy dirt track into the middle of nowhere as the fireflies lit up for the evening. Finally we found the end of the track and a small wooden sign saying "Cabañas" where we were acquainted with Chicho, the ever helpful owner (as long as I was speaking - he was apparently not so helpful when the lads were trying out a combination of Spanglish and sign language). The cabañas were bamboo, thatched with palm fronds. They had electricity (most of the time), a bed and a door that opened straight out onto a beautiful, empty, Pacific beach. Mine also had the occasional evening crab. We set up mosquito nets and hammocks, being careful to keep everything off the floor (high tides can enter the cabin - did I mention they opened onto the beach?), and then discarded our shoes and proceeded to go feral for more days than I care to remember. I do remember we drank a lot of rum and failed to light a fire. I believe these incidents were unrelated, however it is possible that my recollection of events is slightly rum-addled. This was also the period of time when I gave up on my anti-malarials. Apparently doxycyclin makes me vomit shortly after taking it. Which made the whole exercise seem rather pointless.

When we no longer knew the day of the week and had eaten Chicho out of chicken and drunk all his bottled Pepsi, had collected shells and coconuts and watched humpback whales jumping to our hearts delight, we headed back to civilisation. The guys up to Costa Rica, whilst I headed South to Panama City, getting to ride up front of the bus with a fantastic view because there were no more seats and the driver didn't want to leave a "chica solita" at the road junction. In Panama City I wandered around the old quarter with the ever present queue to ships waiting offshore to pass through the canal and visited the canal itself. Having had the canal talked up to me by so many travellers I met who were heading North, I was rather excited and thus disappointed. After all, it is only a canal, just bigger. Of course I later realised that those people who had been so excited were from countries without canals, and as such the use of locks would be just as exciting to them as it was to me when I was a child.

Having discovered that it was going to be too expensive for me to boat to Columbia I decided instead to head back north, to begin with to brave the highlands and cloud forests for a good cup of coffee or two in Boquete, and then back to Bocas del Toro, to further explore the beaches and coral there, to meet up with some friends and to enjoy some quality down time before the impending return to reality...