In which Amy McDaniel and I visit Panama for a week.
We went because of frogs. Kind of. A month ago I sat down to read The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, which begins with a look at the golden frogs going extinct in El Vallé de Anton. Unrelatedly, Amy said something about taking a trip. I said, “Let’s go see these frogs.”
And Amy’s dad served in Panama when he was in the Army, so she’d always wanted to go. She started putting together an itinerary.
Panama City
We arrived at 2am on Thursday, the one before this last one. We spent two very long and antsy hours going through customs.
We met our ride from the hotel and he drove us through the darkness, winding finally through the empty and ancient-seeming streets of Casco Viejo, where he dropped us off at just after 4am. We noted it was a beautiful place and fell asleep.
Note: you can click these images and scroll through larger versions, for an abbreviated story of our trip.
We had a late breakfast at Caffe Italia: sandwiches and I had a perfect cappuccino. My high school Spanish wasn’t coming back to me because even though I studied it for four years, I never got it the first time around. We went to one of the very few (perhaps two) bookstores in Panama City and bought a English/Spanish dictionary, which we carried with us and sort of reverentially called “The Book.”
Miraflores Locks
We went to the fish market (Pescado Mercado; I got that) and nibbled on some ceviches. Then we got in a cab to visit the Miraflores Locks, one (out of two) of sets of locks on the Pacific side of the canal. Our cab driver decided to take us around the museum himself.
Unfortunately, we went to Miraflores in the early afternoon, and they only send commercial boats through in the morning and the night, so we didn’t see any big ships go through. Luckily, though, we did get to see some small, pleasure boats go through. It takes about ten minutes to fill up one of the sections with tons and tons of water. Then they open the huge doors and the boats pass into the next, higher section.
Here’s a video Amy took of one of the exhibits at the museum. It shows a time lapse of what it looks like for a boat to enter the canal. Not pictured is how the floor moves, heightening the sense of reality.
After the locks, our cabdriver/new friend who spoke a different language, took us to Panama Viejo, which was the first city in Panama. Now it is all, entirely, ruins. After it was destroyed by weather and pirates the early Panamanians moved to Casco Viejo. This was the early 1600s. If I’m wrong at all, remember that we spoke a different language than our guide.
Guna Yala
After spending a couple days in Panama City, including the chance to relish an amazing tasting menu at Manolo Caracol, we woke up early on Saturday—5am—to be picked up for our trip to the San Blas islands. Unfortunately, the driver misread our pickup location, and we nearly missed the trip. After a hectic hour and much help from a wonderful English-speaking hotel clerk, we worked it out with a cabdriver to take us to meet the caravan, already on its way.
It was a harrowing 3 hour drive across the mountains. The roads were steep, windy, and often half-formed. About halfway into the trip we entered the sovereign territory of the Kuna Indians, called Guna Yala. They won their independence from Panama in 1925. They control the San Blas islands.
Germain, our driver, liked to go really fast, especially over waves. We caught some major air. We pulled up to an island at random and hung out for a few hours.
On the way back, we stopped at the Community.
There was a Texan on the island, a guy on a humanitarian mission there “to help them out,” and he very kindly escorted us around the island and told us about the Kuna people.
Panama City Motel
(listen to the Sugar song)
We were shuttled back to Panama City where we stayed the night in a hotel. It was good to have modern comforts, as our sunburns were still killing us. We were careful, though, not to get sucked into luxury—perhaps a real problem in Panama, as exemplified by this example from The Book, our dictionary:
We spent just over 12 hours in the hotel, didn’t even get to swim in the infinity pool, before we were off to Gamboa, where we’d tour the canal, see the wildlife, and spend the night on a houseboat.
Lake Gatun
Our guide this time was named Juan, and he was friendly and engaging and informative. He told everyone a lot more info about the canal, and kept an eye out for interesting birds, monkeys, and crocodiles. He’d be talking about how one of the ships was excavating for the canal expansion, when he’d pause and say “Oh look over there, a flycatcher.”
It was a highlight of the trip, to be so close to container ships as they moved through the canal. They pay around $400,000 for the passage (as opposed to $4M to go around the whole continent), and it takes 8-10 hours (as opposed to 2-3 weeks).
We saw a crocodile on the way, not pictured. Pictured? Many monkeys. I think these ones are called Whitefaced monkeys.
Amy fed a tamarind:
We arrived at the house boat on Lake Gatun, the manmade lake that provides water for the locks. We ate lunch there, then went on a kayak trip to a waterfall. There were about a dozen of us. We swam around a bit and then everyone took off except for Amy, me and Juan.
A few other employees stayed, too. Luis took us fishing.
El Vallé de Anton
When we arrived in El Vallé we checked into our hotel, which had a restaurant called O’Pedro’s. We had lunch there, and realized it was St. Patrick’s Day. What luck! Then we went horseback riding.
Then we went to the zoo, which really seemed like it could have been someone’s backyard. Chickens were wandering amok. There was a cage for iguanas, and then there were a bunch of iguanas wandering around free. There were hundreds of plants sitting in 5 gallon paint buckets, some which seemed like they needed to be repotted. At one point while trying to find the frogs, we actually thought we were trespassing on private property, because we walked past someone’s house. The cages were rudimentary. Here’s the zookeeper’s shed:
I took a ton of pictures at the zoo, which you can see at my Google+ page. Here are just a few of the animals we saw:
After the zoo, we ate lunch at a Peruvian place. Here are two things I haven’t written about Panama yet: 1) there were no bugs; 2) the food, unfortunately, was nothing to write home about. But at this Peruvian restaurant we ate some delicious fried rice.
Then we went on a hike to look at the square trees. Apparently this is the only place in the world that they exist.
Back at our hotel, we swam in a hot water swimming pool. Because El Vallé is a volcano there are some hot springs. It was so restful!
That night we had dinner at an Italian restaurant (interesting that our first and last meals were Italian). There were no cabs running at that point, a feature of the town that we didn’t know, so the owner of the restaurant, an Italian expat, shuttled us back to O’Pedro’s. We played pool and waited for Maria Rojas to drive us to Tucuman, the airport, so we could fly home.
One week in Panama.
Goodbye, Panama, and thanks!
