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Tuesday 23 July - Monday 29 July
Panama City
We departed San Jose at 11pm on the last of our Ticabus legs. The bus pulled up to the Costa Rican border at 3:45am, everyone off the bus to form an orderly queue at the office, whilst bus drives off to the Panama side. After some lastminute border crossing research, we were prepared that we'd have to wait around until 6am for the office to open. 2 hours 15 minutes later the standing contest was declared a draw between D&G and two others in front of us - no post match handshakes or niceties here as the sight of customs officials arriving for duty ignited the sleepy spectators.
Successfully stamped out of Costa Rica, we still had a bag search to endure on the Panama side. After standing around for about 3 and a half hours now, everyone having cleared immigration and taken their bags off the bus, we are herded into a tiny room and left to wonder "What next?" whilst the powers that be continued faffing. Lecture time (in Spanish) - 10 minutes later we'd received some sort of telling-off. Now I may be wrong, because I have no idea what was said, but I had a slightly nostalgic high school field trip feeling, where someone wasn't owning up to trouble making and we were all about to get it. This was followed by roll call, then selectively separating people and then ushering in the uniformed heavies. It all ended in an anti-climax as they whizzed past our bags without even checking them and the rest of the bus was searched in 10 minutes flat.....all 60+ of us. After a 4 hour border epic, we were finally in Panama.
Allbrook bus terminal in Panama City is large, fairly well organized and needless to say very busy. The metro bus dropped us near the centre of the old town which was not how we'd imagined Panama City at all. Really run down, poor and dirty - shanty even. A quite nervy place to get dropped off with all your baggage. We soon found our bearings and Avenida Central....our path to the safety of Casco Viejo and our hostel, the Pan Americano. Now Casco Viejo is how we imagined Panama. Although under a lot of reconstruction work, this area of the old town smacks of charm. With it's cozy restaurants and small tienda's surrounding quaint little squares with balconied homes and businesses to restored cathedrals, theatres and the presidential residence, nothing looks out of place in this low rise, colonial showpiece right on the water's edge. This is not all Panama City has to offer though, in the distance looms the glistening skyscrapers of the newer areas of PC which is reminiscent of the Dubai skyline.
Our first night was spent eating the juiciest burgers in town at a small hole in the wall American joint next to our hostel called 'Mojitos sin Mojitos' (and No, they unfortunately didn't serve Mojitos), listening to local expats tell stories of their encounters with stray bullets shot through their car windows and living rooms in the area. Hmmm
In the morning we wandered the cobbled streets of Casco Viejo in search of that perfect picture and had a delicious fish wrap from a food truck called the 'Fish Market' set up in an old abandoned building...an excellent use of temporarily unwanted space.
After that it was off to Miraflores Locks to catch the large container ships squirt through the Panama Canal. The tour starts with a wander through the 4-storey museum to gain an understanding of the scale of the task the French undertook back in 1881, but was ultimately finished by the Americans in 1914, followed by a 3D movie. Its 100 years old next year! Then up to the already packed viewing deck in time to catch 'Hanjin Dusseldorf' and 'Hanjin Shanghai' being hauled side by side into the locks by powerful locomotive mules to drop 54 feet and swim to the freedom of the Pacific. One of the ships was so big, that it had less than 50cm clear on each side when moving through the lock - it managed to only bump the side once, leaving a nasty graze behind and sending a spray of concrete into the water. I'm sure the $440,000 they paid in cash to pass through the canal, more than covered it.
The rest of our time in Panama was spent partying in a nightclub adjoined to our new hostel with locals until 5am in the morning (If you cant beat 'em - ie sleep - join 'em!), and then making our way across the country to Puerto Lindo where we were going to board a boat to Colombia. We met the sweetest local lady who spoke english on the bus from Panama City to Colon (the most dangerous city in Panama), who took us under her wing and helped keep us safe from aggressive vagrants begging at the dodgy bus station and even got the bus driver to drop us off right outside the front door of Hostel Wunderbar in Puerto Lindo. She was indeed an angel looking over us. We spent one restless night in a traditional Kuna hut at Hostel Wunderbar, where Gary didn't sleep a wink due to thinking someone was sneaking around outside our room, ready to break in and steal the $1000 in cash we had on us to pay for the boat.Worse though, was when in the morning we realised it must've been a snake crawling around in the palm leaves of the roof, not a thief. Dunno which I would've preferred had I been awake? Luckily we were off to find the boat and set sail for Colombia.
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