Planning

First, hurray to the Braves!  Boom!  World Series Champions!  We watched the games on TV here in a trial subscription.  Sure would love to have been at the parade! 

Now back to the story.

It is not our intention to live as vacationers.  This is our life. We want to use our time wisely but not let days go by without having a significant experience.  That’s a much more delicate balance that one would imagine. 

Some days we throw ourselves madly into a great experience which totally exhausts us for the next day. Then we get up and do it all over again. 

Today is Thursday, Jueves.  Monday we walked all over town visiting Panama Viejo. Fairly exhausted on Tuesday, we worked out at the gym and spent the rest of the day planning what we might do later in the week and how to do it.  We thought having a better idea of the lay of the land might help us.  We Googled, e-Googled, and reviewed TripAdvisor and blogs. We set a plan for the next ventures. On Wednesday having not been on the metro system yet we rode the two lines from to start to finish. Panama City’s Metro system is a little like MARTA in that one line goes in one direction and the other crisscrosses it, with the apparent objective of getting people from outer neighborhoods to the city for work and to and from the airport. 

Launched in 2014, Panama City’s metro system is clean!!!   Modern!!  And fast!  Its riders are quiet, courteous and keep their cars and stations pristine clean. One line goes from far southwest to northern and eastern parts of the city.  The other line links east to west.  We got to see some new territory, make eyes at a couple of babies and saw parts of the city most visitors never see.  We cannot even imagine how many high rise apartment buildings there are in all of the metro Panama City area, but the number must be huge.  Beijing is the only other city we’ve visited with more high rise apartment buildings – but its population in 6 times greater than all of Panama. Individual houses do exist.  Some are very nice, built in Latin American style and painted in bright colors but are very nice casas.  Some are horrendous-looking.  Low-slung and made of decaying concrete or stucco these hovels have nothing filling windows or doors.  Once painted a happy blue, green or pink houses in these crowded neighborhoods are now dirty and faded to almost no color at all.  They sit very close the next little house in similar condition and most are home to multiple people. Worse are the five or six story buildings that also appear to be crumbling.  Again, there is no glass or shutters for the windows and doors hang open.  If the building happens to have an awning for the first or second floor, it is latterly laden with trash thrown from windows above.  It must be cost-prohibitive to have garbage pick-up for many people here.  Quite often streets are purely littered with trash and if a vacant lot is found, it is amassed with others’ garbage and discards.  Laundry drying on a line on a balcony is a frequent sight. 

Then again, yes, there are plenty of nice neighborhoods and grand houses too.  Many have small gardens and tile roofs but the typical roof is made of tin.  I have a feeling these houses are much more accommodating on the inside than they appear on the outside.  The weather with its heat and humidity seem to take a toll on even newer buildings.  For example, our apartment building sits in a very affluent part of the city but as we gaze from our balcony on the 12^th floor, tall apartment buildings across the way appear dirty, in need of a good power-wash and a fresh coat of paint.  Below, from the street level, these same buildings look rich and inviting.

Panama City like nearly all great cities across the globe has three distinct economic classes – the rich, those just getting by and the very poor.  When you add the many homeless to the mix, I guess there are actually four segments.

On our metro ride we passed several huge shopping malls.  And unlike malls at home, stores and food courts in the malls we have visited so far are bursting with people who appear to be thoroughly enjoying their outings.  By the way we found Panama City’s mate to Home Depot, the Auto Mac at McDonalds and plenty of Popeyes and Taco Bell’s.  Funny, we met a young man from Mexico the other day.  He said in his language, they pronounced Popeyes as Pop-e-a-yas.  Later as he picked up English he learned it was a proper name, Pop-eyes.

In our planning we tagged today as date for a trip to Gamboa.  Gamboa is a small community that sits along the Panama Canal and the Chagres River and is the entrance to the Soberania National Park.   The Panama Rainforest Discovery Center and several good but moderately rated nature trails, such as the Pipeline Road Trail, are in the park.  Our planning research indicated a visit there is one our must-do’s and could be reached by bus from Albrook Station.  (Get used to this name because virtually any destination we choose via public transportation starts from Albrook).  We got out of the apartment by 7 am and bussed to Albrook. By the time we found the location for the bus to Gamboa, we missed it by only minutes.

No problem, another would come in one hour.  Nope, not today!  Today is another national holiday.  Next bus?  2 pm and there is no bus in Gamboa today for the return.  Bad news!   Having made up our minds to hike Soberania today, we Uber’d.   What would have cost us $.10 – yes, ten cents via the bus, cost $25 with UBER.  We did not care.  Gamboa was our plan for today.  We went.  As we rode closer and closer to the park, the roads became more and more pot-holed.  I was afraid our driver might stop and tell us to get out – risking damage to his car would not be worth his earnings for the trip.  The drive was a long one.  Just imagine our wonder when we got dropped off about a mile from the nearest community in the middle of nowhere with the park entrance still a half mile down the first trail.  . . . How in the world would we ever find a way to make the return trip home?? We decide to think about that later. 

First, we ate our packed sandwiches for breakfast/early lunch, sipped some water and began our first hike along the Panama Canal.  The canal was active with tug boats and huge cargo laden ships heading toward the Caribbean.  As a shortcut we walked the railroad track back toward the entrance of the park.  We moved on to the park’s Pipeline Trail hiking along a fairy well maintained gravel path through the jungle.  We saw our first animal, the organ-grinder monkey, a capuchin, as he crossed the trail while we were paying the park fee.  Interesting fact:  Non-Panamanians pay a premium to visit parks and museums here.  Had we been residents, our fee to enter the Panama Rain Forest Discovery Center would be $5 each.  Nonresidents pay $30 each.  Yikes!  We paid the fee.  As the song goes, “we may never pass this way again.”  Get over it! 

Later we caught brief sights of other fast moving monkeys in the tree tops.  Hearing thrashing in the trees, we looked up to see a monkey jumping from limb to limb. Just a glimpse is all we got as the animal quickly fell into camouflage.  Dang, though!  We actually saw monkeys in the wild — and on no tour or encampment.  The experience is a little like unexpectedly getting sight of fox or a possum on a hike at home.  We climbed the 178 step to the top of the lookout tower.  We were hoping to see a sloth hanging in a tree but they were hidden away sleeping their daily 16 hours.  We did hear a howler monkey with its haunting roar.  Bats hanging silently from the undersides of the tower slept while we took photos of their small, black folded bodies.  We sat on stools at the visitor center and watched Jacobin and Violet-Bellied hummingbirds vie for food from the feeders set up on the porch rail.  As they zipped about we could hear the buzz of their tiny wings.  Marching leaf cutter ants worked in organized lines all day carrying their load of leaf bits.  Throughout the jungle big brown ant nests hung from trees with pointy-side-down entrances so that rain would not dampen its interior and dark brown termite nests rested in trees at the end of long mud tunnels.  Incidentally, termites do not damage live trees; they only nest there and eat only dead wood.  We heard pretty birds’ calls but could not see well enough in the trees to identify them.  It is possible to see Toucans and other exotic birds in the Soberania but during our midday trek, we found or heard none.  And as final sighting a nutria (think giant rat) sat just across the road from us as we waited for our ride home.  Jaguars also live in the park and are noted to be one of the most deadly creatures in Panama, second only to man.  Thankfully they too are nocturnal.  We encountered no big cats.  We saw no snakes either but sure kept a sharp lookout for them.  The jungle is just that.  Green, exotic, tropical, dense and appearing so well nourished that leaves grow like enormous platters and some produce sweet blossoms.  Bromeliads often babied and carefully nurtured at home grow naturally and freely in tall trees.  Lush ferns bunch under the canopy on the ground.

I must say we truly were not sure how we were going to return to the city this afternoon.  Today is yet ANOTHER Panamanian holiday, the third this week.  Few people work.  And we remembered, the lady at the station said there would be no buses making the return trip to Albrook today.  Maybe we’d find a taxi?  Maybe we might ask a nice-looking family to share  a ride?  Would an UBER driver make the long trip to Gamboa just to pick us up?  Where would we find a cell signal?  After 8 miles of hiking we decided to pretty much take anything.  We began our walk from the park to the little cluster of buildings in Gamboa down the road.  Hallelujah!  A cell signal was picked up near the entrance to the Smithsonian Research Institute in Gamboa!  A UBER driver was found.  The app said he was 24 minutes away.  Dear Lord, were we ever thankful when he showed up?!!  We tipped him a little extra for making the long trip to reach us.

I simply cannot overstate the amount of water we drank today and how much fluids we sweated out of our bodies.  It was hot.  We hiked a long, long way.  Our clothes were soaked and as they dried in the a/c in the UBER car, my skin began to feel as if had been coated with the Bell System’s rubber cement.   Sticky!

But what an incredible day!!!  And there was no rain!

NOTE: Next morning, it’s Friday.  How disturbing!!!!!  A little green parakeet has flown onto our balcony and does not know what to do.  The balcony is surrounded by a half wall of glazed glass.  He cannot see out.  We put out water and a pinch of bread.  I put up a sign in the lobby and left our address and number.  I contacted the building manager through our apartment management.  He’s still here.  We don’t want to leave him alone and we surely cannot let him inside although he looks in the window as if he wants to come in.  He’s obviously domesticated. It’s such a dilemma.  Please pray with me that someone will see my note and come get this pretty boy.

. . . No one has called. He hopped up on the flowers, Stan moved him to the table and some shade. Owner, please call.

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