Panamá: Ivy on the Wire (Part I)

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**Note - the date on this entry, July 2, 2007 is the day we left Panama. I've kept all time references the way they were when I started writing...life got in the way of my travel blog, so there will be quite a few entries coming in short order!**


So much to write and only one more day until docking in Guayaquil, Ecuador! Not much time has passed since my last blog, I’m aware, but I am now officially on the other side of the world - we passed the Equator, ironically, as I napped this afternoon, quite exhausted from a night of sleep cut short by an early awakening to read Huasipungo and compile some quotations from Darwin’s Descent of Man for a presentation in class today. (We’re not even one degree south latitude yet, but I’m pretty thrilled that I’m technically in the Southern Hemisphere!)

Panamá: Unexpectedly Awesome

I have to confess that I was not particularly looking forward to Panama. Sure, there’s the canal, but I really had no idea what else to expect. What a beautiful, complex, conflicted place I found in place of my mediocre expectations. I was surprised to learn, for instance, that it’s become a leading destination for American retirees - apparently, it’s the new Costa Rica in that way. (No place goes untouched by Americans, it seems, especially not one where we’ve been substantially involved for just over a century.)

There was an interesting wrinkle to being in Panama on an enormous ship: we had to use “tenders,” or basically the ship’s lifeboats, in order to get from a point about 2 miles from the shore where we were anchored to, well, the shore. It took a while to get the tenders running on the first day, since the ship was at times rocking at angles that opened and shut the drawers in my room. Fortunately, it was all ironed out by 4pm, when I was due to be on shore to take a partial transit of the Panama Canal.

A man, a plan, a canal...

The canal is absolutely mind-boggling. We began our transit right outside Panama City, where literally dozens of ships were lined up on the horizon waiting to go through. Fees for passage through the canal can run up to a quarter million, which apparently is pennies to large companies in comparison with the fuel and supplies for 17 days that would be necessary to go around South America. I don’t know that it’ll be clear from the pictures, but I took a few shots trying to capture the sheer number of ships waiting. The exact statistic escapes me, but I don’t think more than forty ships can transit per day. We followed a small-ish freight ship through the Miraflores Locks and the Pedro Miguel Locks, the two sets of locks on the Pacific side. Two days later, I saw (but did not pass through) the Atlantic-side version, the Gatun Locks. Miraflores and Pedro Miguel get ships from sea level to an enormous artificial lake between the Pedro Miguel and Gatun Locks that’s almost ninety feet higher. The most impressive part of this whole thing was without a doubt watching the IMMENSE lock chambers fill with water within five or six minutes. (Each of the lock chambers are slightly longer than one thousand feet…Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_Locks) does a pretty good job of summing up the enormity of the locks. The canal is beautiful at night, and the size of some of the ships transiting the other direction (a couple Panamaxes, the largest vessels that can presently get through the canal) left me speechless. The biggest freight ships carry thousands of “containers,” each the same size as the trailer of an 18-wheeler or a freight train car.

Unfortunately, we passed through the Gaillard Cut well after sunset, so I never quite got a good look at it. Those who built the canal (thousands died doing this, of course) had to cut about twelve miles through Panama’s continental divide. The amount of stone they removed would fill a 12-square-foot column from the surface to the core of the earth, and much of it went into building the Fuerte Amador Causeway, the shore to which the tenders took us. Hopefully a few pictures are worth a few thousand words on the canal - I still don’t quite know how to write about it. Once we reached Gamboa on the shores of the Gatun Lake, we boarded a bus that took us back to the Causeway and hopped on a tender to sleep on the ship.

I'll never complain about humidity in Virginia again...

As usual, I had gotten some crazy ideas in my head for what to do in Panama, and fortunately these ideas tend to have some traction among my fellow TAs/faculty/staff. Stephen and Alla were game to try a hike in the rainforest called Parque Nacional Soberanía. This park was about 20 miles north of Panama City, and our very friendly but somewhat crazy taxi driver was more than happy to get us there; once I realized he had taken us to a closer park that I wasn’t quite as interested in, he was more than happy to continue on, and told us how to catch the bus back to Panama City. (Crucial information; though our drop-off was a distant second in confusion factor to the beginnings of our Santiago pilgrimage in Spain in Dec. 2004, being left at the head of a trail through secondary-growth rainforest in heat approaching 90 degrees, humidity through the roof, and very thirsty insects wasn’t far behind.) So, Stephen, Alla, and I lathered ourselves in a mixture of sunscreen and mosquito repellent and set off down a slightly muddy trail that was wide enough for the passage of one vehicle or several curious hikers.

I’ve never seen anything like the Panamanian rainforest. It is absolutely the greenest place (this goes for the country as a whole, but especially the rainforest) that I have ever seen. Foliage is absolutely everywhere, and endless combinations of wild grasslands, palm trees, deciduous North American-style trees, and wetlands nurtured by small rivers repeated along the trail. My numerous attempts to catch a beautiful and rather large bright purplish-blue butterfly on camera inevitably failed; these guys would never sit still, and it was as if they sensed being photographed, they would fold up on the leaf of a tree and blend in with it almost perfectly. Of course, some of these butterflies aren’t so lucky, and end up pressed between sheets of glass in markets around Panama, but they were a treat to see live (and I didn’t really want one hanging on my wall.)

Our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom!

Our astonishment with the rainforest took a long time to gradually wear off - or get sweated away - when suddenly we heard a LOUD crashing sound from the branches to our right. We had just passed a group of Americans who were on a birding tour; they seemed to have NASA-quality optical equipment to spy various birds of Panama, even though Lonely Planet and nearly every source I saw said the birding in P.N.S. is best done at dawn. (I think there are something like a staggering 500 species of birds in that park alone.) We didn’t see so many birds, partly due to the time of day, but what was making the loud crashing sound? MONKEYS! Yes, these are the famed Capuchin monkeys, who are agile aerial dwellers but seem to break most of the branches they leave or land on. After a couple minutes of gazing at them in silence, and seeing a few in flight between trees, we got the distinct sense they were checking us out as much as we were examining them, their white faces in stark contrast to their black body fur, just like the ones we’ve seen in movies and TV. Stephen said it best about half an hour before our primate encounter, somewhat jokingly but not entirely: “I’m gonna be pretty bummed if we don’t see any monkeys.” We hiked on, way excited about the monkeys, but a little concerned about making the bus from Gamboa back to Panama City. We had seen various dilapidated distance signs, and by the third one it was apparent they were counting up (5.0 km was the point at which we turned around); unlike American signs, they were not telling us how far it was to point X. Had we had time, we might have gone the other 12km until the virgin-growth forest started (of course, there’s no trail through that, so we would have had to turn around there anyway.) The same plants and animals inhabit primary- and secondary-growth rainforests, it turns out, so I don’t think we missed anything fundamental by not journeying further. When we found the birding Americans again, we asked their leaders if it might be possible to give us a lift to Gamboa to catch the bus. It turned out the Americans wanted to march on, of course, but Carlos (the leader of the tour group) was amazingly kind and gave us some mango juice from a cooler and told us a little bit about the forest. He had a device around his neck which played recorded birdcalls in the hopes of attracting certain species - this was perfect, except that some of the calls ended with a sort of CB-radio static. This amused me to no end, and perhaps drove away (almost certainly) some birds who might otherwise have been lured in.

But fortune smiled on us once again. The Smithsonian has a research station inside the park somewhere, and we had seen a lady driving a Smithsonian-emblazoned pickup truck past us as we walked into the rainforest. We hiked on back towards Gamboa, but were flagging in the mid-afternoon heat. She stopped when we flagged her down, and gave us a free ride to the bus stop in Gamboa, meanwhile telling us she was a grad student at Michigan State studying plant speciation. I should mention that when she came along, Stephen, Alla and I were looking at a second group of monkeys - this time howler monkeys, who never let the full howl go, but their pre-howl sounds struck us as remarkably canine. Much less shy than the Capuchin monkeys, they saw us and kept about their business, which seemed at that time of the day to be sleeping in trees or lazing around finding a new place to sleep. The approach of the pickup disturbed the monkeys, and irritated me at first until I realized the driver was the Smithsonian lady, this time heading the right direction.

We made it to the Gamboa bus stop about five or ten minutes before the bus to Panama City stopped there. What timing - the next was over two hours later, and would have left some pretty tired, hungry Americans miles from where they needed to be. As many of you know, I enjoy traveling with “the people” - taxis and so on are nice, and sometimes unavoidable, but nothing’s wrong with a bus or Metro ride as long as it’s reasonably safe. Here were Panamanians going back to the city, with a much higher tolerance for being packed in like sardines than Americans have. I was trying to understand a few conversations around me. Panamanians, like Cubans, have a pretty choppy way of speaking Spanish, which is foreign enough to my ears that are more accustomed to the Spanish of Spain, Argentina, Mexico, etc. that at times I had to ask Panamanians to repeat themselves, something I don’t often need to do. Since they were just casually conversing among themselves and a million conversations were going on at once, I wasn’t able to pick up much from what I heard, but the bus was quite an experience indeed. The largest contingent of people got on outside what our taxi driver on the way out had told us was “the political prison” - a bit disconcerting, but ended up being fine. (Who knows if it still is, or whether these people had anything to do with it?)

When we got off the bus, it was the first time I had truly seen Panama City. We were close to its epicenter, the Plaza 5 de Mayo (a date I thought was unique in importance to Mexico - apparently not), at rush hour. It’s a vibrant part of the city - you simply have to elbow your way through the space between jam-packed shops and the street vendors that form a dense layer between them and the cars emitting TONS of exhaust. Panama can be a hard place in which to breathe - thank goodness there’s all that rainforest putting out oxygen. Long taxi rides are taxing on the lungs indeed - exhaust filtration or moderation simply doesn’t seem to exist, so taxi riders (and the poor drivers!) spend the whole time taking in smoke from the car in which they’re riding as well as everyone else’s. Our target was a seafood restaurant that came highly recommended in every guidebook we had seen - forming a sort of balcony over the city’s largest fish market. With very few questions about the freshness of the fish and the vetting of tourism book authors who had come before us, it was a nice place to relax, eat a ton of fish for very little money, and drink a Panamanian lager. Some Panamanian club soccer game was on, and the restaurant’s patrons seemed very interested at some points and completely tuned it out at others; the owners or waiters would change the volume based on the perceived level of interest, but there weren’t a whole lot of people eating there yet. From there, a taxi ride to Via España - I had a couple shopping missions, one for molas, the brilliantly colored woven cloths of the Kuna people in northeast Panama - this ended up being a sort of clearinghouse run by an American woman who also sells them on eBay - a fantastic selection indeed. Her son has apparently paid his way through college by running the eBay mola business; as I said, Americans are everywhere, and there’s a growing expat community in Panama. The more I saw of Panama, the more I understood why increasing numbers are doing this!

Bookstore disappointment, and reasons for it

Stop two was a little further up Via España, one of the tonier and more Americanized parts of Panama City. If you were likely to see an American brand or a European one in any part of the city, it was along Via España. Lonely Planet had praised our second stop as “the best bookstore in Central America,” and we had almost given up walking when I spotted it. Exedra Books may be the best bookstore in Central America, but to American eyes, it’s pretty underwhelming. There’s a little café, and a decent selection of books in English, but I couldn’t find even one solitary book that I need to buy for Ricardo Padrón’s literature class on the ship - and those are all in Spanish. Our first day of class after Panama, Ricardo told us a little about some conversations he had with employees at Exedra and even a Panamanian author he ran into there. The author placed the percentage of population she would call “readers” at two percent. (This wasn’t an official literacy rate, but rather her best guess of people that read for pleasure on a regular basis.) We Americans were floored by what Ricardo had to say, and he encouraged us to keep checking out bookstores as we go along. Once books hit about $5, the average Panamanian will be much less likely to buy them, so there are a lot of vanity presses or self-publishing authors. Unlike in the States, though, it’s for pure motivations of economy - authors simply won’t sell their books to such a limited reading public that is strapped for cash unless they keep the price down as much as they can. Well-established Panamanian authors can publish their books with much better known Argentine, Spanish, or Mexican presses, but this prices their work well outside the economic means of the average reading Panamanian. The irony of this situation is obvious, but explains quite a bit about why I wasn’t quite as impressed by Exedra Books as I might have been had I never seen an American, British, Spanish, etc. bookstore. It’s pretty sad, when one stops to think about it.

To be continued...Panamá part 2 on the way.

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Comments

[tupapi]

5 de Mayo
The Plaza 5 de Mayo in Panama has nothing to do with Mexico. The monument at the center (I don't know if you saw it) was done in honor of the firemen (or "bomberos") that died at the "polvorin", which was a fire/explosion of a large gun powder storage that took place on May 5, 1914. At he time, Panama had a large and proud fire department. It was a terrible tragedy. http://www.bomberosdepanama.gob.pa/Polvor%EDn.htm (in spanish)

[Yon Yak]

Hmmmm.
seems like you're having quite the adventure, mom.