Panama Trip
Disclaimer... this is really long probably won't interest most of you... if you just are wondering how I'm doing, read the post I made about ten minutes ago.
So...I left San Luis on a bus with the students, and Geovanny actually came with us to San Jose (the big city). We dropped off a few of the students at the airport, then the rest of us went to a pretty nice and cheap hostel in San Jose. That night we all went to the Costa Rica vs. New Zealand soccer game, which was a lot of fun, but surprisingly cold. Costa Rica won - of course. The next morning we all went our separate ways, and Geovanny went back to San Luis. A group of five of the students and myself went on to Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, which is a town on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica, very close to the Panamanian border.
Puerto Viejo was a cool place… a little strange because at least half of the people there were tourists or ex-patriots. Rastafarian culture reined supreme, and things went very slow. We slept in a “hammock hotel” for five dollars per night. They were the biggest most comfortable hammocks on the planet. I want one. It was a fun hostel which was right on a coral reef beach and a ten-minute walk from a great surfing/swimming beach, depending on the day. There was a really good restaurant/bar, a communal kitchen, nightly bonfires and sing-alongs (guitars could be checked out for free), and you could rent bikes or schedule all sorts of tours. We met people from all over the world. It was a lot of fun. I did eventually get sick of living out of a locker, though... and I'm sure I could count on one hand the number of times I saw the owner without a joint hanging out of his mouth. One day we rented bikes and rode on a beautiful road to a National Park that goes to the border. It was amazingly beautiful forest and beach. Also, the town had some great food and ice cream… mmm.
Eventually we did leave, despite the advice of many European hippies we encountered in our adventures. However, it was the exact day that I had to leave to get my passport stamped. So, Jessica (the student with whom I probably spent the most time during their course) and I hopped on a bus for the border, which goes past ocean and mountains, Rasta folk and the Bribi tribe’s reserve, and ends at a frightening bridge over the Sixaola river, which you must cross on foot - all this in under two hours! It’s a really fun for scenery and talking to the natives. Before crossing the scary bridge, I got my passport stamped sin problema, and then Jessica, I, and a Spanish girl we had met in our hostel survived the bridge and the Panamanian scam artists and made it to beautiful Bocas del Toro.
To get to the archipelago, you have to go by water taxi through beautiful canals for almost an hour… oh darn. And once you get there… wow. It’s such a neat place. People either get around by bike or water taxi. I had been to Bocas before, so this time I tried to do some of the things that I didn’t get around to last time. Also, I had forgotten just how cool the town is… and everything is pretty cheap. One day we went on this amazing snorkeling/beach tour that was from 9:30 till 4:30, including gear, and was $17. We went to three islands. The snorkeling was awesome, and we went to Dolphin Bay and saw dolphins really close. They played in the wake of the boat. It was really cute. Also, we went to what might have possibly been the most beautiful beach I have ever seen. Rainforest goes up until the sand, then there were awesome volcanic rock formations, and the water was as clear as a swimming pool. We also ate at an a couple of AMAZING restaurants, and we had a great time going out two nights. Once it was a power-hour, complete with sixty-second clips of classics from the eighties and early nineties at a really fun sister-hostel of the one we were staying in. The second night we started at that hostel’s bar again, but we moved to this place called El Barco Hundido (The Sunken Ship). Probably the coolest club-ish place I’ve ever been to. It was all outside, although most of it had a roof. There were two bars - the front had a cave-like section and the rest was was all tropical plants and rocks and a stream with rope bridges over it. The back, which was HUGE, was a dock over the water. In one part there was a giant hole in the deck, and the water beneath had a bunch of lights, which made it look like a swimming pool. On the ocean floor there is, as the name of the place would suggest, a sunken ship. It is always steaming hot in Bocas, and sometimes when it got overwhelming, people (locals included) would jump into the ocean “swimming pool,” splash around, then get out and dance some more. It was a really neat mixing of locals and tourists, mostly locals, and there was a great music - merengue, salsa, and reggaeton. And most of the guys could really dance. I think we danced till three-thirty in the morning… and then we managed to actually get to the airport on time for out flight to Panama City.
The drive from Bocas to Panama City is twelve hours, and a flight is one hour. Domestic flights are pretty cheap in Panama, so we flew, especially since in a couple of days we knew that we were going to be in a bus for twenty hours on our return trip to San Jose. The plane from Bocas to PC actually sat thirty people and was fairly nice. It was really cloudy, so I slept for most of the hour.
Panama City… where do I start? It is such a cosmopolitan city. Because of all the people from all over the world who came to work on the canal, there is a lot of blending of cultures. There are ruins from the original city from the 1500s when it was sacked by English pirates. There is a beautiful colonial city center that looks like the pictures that I’ve seen of Havana, and the rest of it is very modern. There are sky-scrapers… which San Jose doesn’t really have. The bus system is great, cheap, and fun. The buses are pimped-out school buses from the US. They are spray-painted crazy colors and sometimes have shag carpet inside and rock music. The museums are really nice, and of course, the canal is really interesting. It is much narrower than I expected. Seeing the huge ships pass through was wild. Sometimes the American influence was a bit overwhelming. The dollar is the official currency, although they call it the Balboa (the Spanish explorer who first crossed the isthmus). Some of the coins are different, but the bills are the exact same. There is fast food, and there are many U.S. businesses and branches of U.S. universities. While I was there I went and met some people from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and saw the main campus. It was really cool. The professor that I am trying to work with was very nice and down-to-Earth - not the crazy scientist type, and his research coordinator was also very cool. It was a great trip.
The bus ride back was an adventure in itself. We had to take two buses because all of the direct buses were full due to Holy Week. The first one left PC at midnight and got to David, Panama at 6 AM… it was a nice bus, and we were on the upper level, which was fun, but it was freezing cold. I think I was blue, so I didn’t really sleep. I had been wearing Capri pants and tank tops for a week, so the idea of bringing a jacket didn’t occur to me. I didn’t think the bus would have AC… what a luxury. Anyway, at David, we waited for two hours and got on another bus that would take us to San Jose. The one-hour ride to the border was fine. It also was a nice bus, and not nearly as cold. Standing in line at the two sets of immigration and customs offices (we had to go through Panamanian customs and Costa Rican customs! Weird…) took over two hours, and then when we got back on the bus, the company had sold eight seats twice, and there was a lot of chaos and standing up and angry people until they got it resolved through all sorts of questionable methods an hour and a half later. It’s a very long ride to have to stand up the whole way… especially after spending the night before traveling. Anyway, we went through some pretty country since the Pan-American highway goes up to 10,000 ft there, and it was quite cold… elevation is crazy like that. We finally got to San Jose at 8:00 PM, and then we ate, went to our trusty hostel, met up with another student from Jessica’s program, used the free internet, and eventually slept. I caught the 6:30 A.M. bus to Monteverde, and they went on to Tortuguero. I was travel-weary, and ready to come back. It was a great trip though.
So...I left San Luis on a bus with the students, and Geovanny actually came with us to San Jose (the big city). We dropped off a few of the students at the airport, then the rest of us went to a pretty nice and cheap hostel in San Jose. That night we all went to the Costa Rica vs. New Zealand soccer game, which was a lot of fun, but surprisingly cold. Costa Rica won - of course. The next morning we all went our separate ways, and Geovanny went back to San Luis. A group of five of the students and myself went on to Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, which is a town on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica, very close to the Panamanian border.
Puerto Viejo was a cool place… a little strange because at least half of the people there were tourists or ex-patriots. Rastafarian culture reined supreme, and things went very slow. We slept in a “hammock hotel” for five dollars per night. They were the biggest most comfortable hammocks on the planet. I want one. It was a fun hostel which was right on a coral reef beach and a ten-minute walk from a great surfing/swimming beach, depending on the day. There was a really good restaurant/bar, a communal kitchen, nightly bonfires and sing-alongs (guitars could be checked out for free), and you could rent bikes or schedule all sorts of tours. We met people from all over the world. It was a lot of fun. I did eventually get sick of living out of a locker, though... and I'm sure I could count on one hand the number of times I saw the owner without a joint hanging out of his mouth. One day we rented bikes and rode on a beautiful road to a National Park that goes to the border. It was amazingly beautiful forest and beach. Also, the town had some great food and ice cream… mmm.
Eventually we did leave, despite the advice of many European hippies we encountered in our adventures. However, it was the exact day that I had to leave to get my passport stamped. So, Jessica (the student with whom I probably spent the most time during their course) and I hopped on a bus for the border, which goes past ocean and mountains, Rasta folk and the Bribi tribe’s reserve, and ends at a frightening bridge over the Sixaola river, which you must cross on foot - all this in under two hours! It’s a really fun for scenery and talking to the natives. Before crossing the scary bridge, I got my passport stamped sin problema, and then Jessica, I, and a Spanish girl we had met in our hostel survived the bridge and the Panamanian scam artists and made it to beautiful Bocas del Toro.
To get to the archipelago, you have to go by water taxi through beautiful canals for almost an hour… oh darn. And once you get there… wow. It’s such a neat place. People either get around by bike or water taxi. I had been to Bocas before, so this time I tried to do some of the things that I didn’t get around to last time. Also, I had forgotten just how cool the town is… and everything is pretty cheap. One day we went on this amazing snorkeling/beach tour that was from 9:30 till 4:30, including gear, and was $17. We went to three islands. The snorkeling was awesome, and we went to Dolphin Bay and saw dolphins really close. They played in the wake of the boat. It was really cute. Also, we went to what might have possibly been the most beautiful beach I have ever seen. Rainforest goes up until the sand, then there were awesome volcanic rock formations, and the water was as clear as a swimming pool. We also ate at an a couple of AMAZING restaurants, and we had a great time going out two nights. Once it was a power-hour, complete with sixty-second clips of classics from the eighties and early nineties at a really fun sister-hostel of the one we were staying in. The second night we started at that hostel’s bar again, but we moved to this place called El Barco Hundido (The Sunken Ship). Probably the coolest club-ish place I’ve ever been to. It was all outside, although most of it had a roof. There were two bars - the front had a cave-like section and the rest was was all tropical plants and rocks and a stream with rope bridges over it. The back, which was HUGE, was a dock over the water. In one part there was a giant hole in the deck, and the water beneath had a bunch of lights, which made it look like a swimming pool. On the ocean floor there is, as the name of the place would suggest, a sunken ship. It is always steaming hot in Bocas, and sometimes when it got overwhelming, people (locals included) would jump into the ocean “swimming pool,” splash around, then get out and dance some more. It was a really neat mixing of locals and tourists, mostly locals, and there was a great music - merengue, salsa, and reggaeton. And most of the guys could really dance. I think we danced till three-thirty in the morning… and then we managed to actually get to the airport on time for out flight to Panama City.
The drive from Bocas to Panama City is twelve hours, and a flight is one hour. Domestic flights are pretty cheap in Panama, so we flew, especially since in a couple of days we knew that we were going to be in a bus for twenty hours on our return trip to San Jose. The plane from Bocas to PC actually sat thirty people and was fairly nice. It was really cloudy, so I slept for most of the hour.
Panama City… where do I start? It is such a cosmopolitan city. Because of all the people from all over the world who came to work on the canal, there is a lot of blending of cultures. There are ruins from the original city from the 1500s when it was sacked by English pirates. There is a beautiful colonial city center that looks like the pictures that I’ve seen of Havana, and the rest of it is very modern. There are sky-scrapers… which San Jose doesn’t really have. The bus system is great, cheap, and fun. The buses are pimped-out school buses from the US. They are spray-painted crazy colors and sometimes have shag carpet inside and rock music. The museums are really nice, and of course, the canal is really interesting. It is much narrower than I expected. Seeing the huge ships pass through was wild. Sometimes the American influence was a bit overwhelming. The dollar is the official currency, although they call it the Balboa (the Spanish explorer who first crossed the isthmus). Some of the coins are different, but the bills are the exact same. There is fast food, and there are many U.S. businesses and branches of U.S. universities. While I was there I went and met some people from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and saw the main campus. It was really cool. The professor that I am trying to work with was very nice and down-to-Earth - not the crazy scientist type, and his research coordinator was also very cool. It was a great trip.
The bus ride back was an adventure in itself. We had to take two buses because all of the direct buses were full due to Holy Week. The first one left PC at midnight and got to David, Panama at 6 AM… it was a nice bus, and we were on the upper level, which was fun, but it was freezing cold. I think I was blue, so I didn’t really sleep. I had been wearing Capri pants and tank tops for a week, so the idea of bringing a jacket didn’t occur to me. I didn’t think the bus would have AC… what a luxury. Anyway, at David, we waited for two hours and got on another bus that would take us to San Jose. The one-hour ride to the border was fine. It also was a nice bus, and not nearly as cold. Standing in line at the two sets of immigration and customs offices (we had to go through Panamanian customs and Costa Rican customs! Weird…) took over two hours, and then when we got back on the bus, the company had sold eight seats twice, and there was a lot of chaos and standing up and angry people until they got it resolved through all sorts of questionable methods an hour and a half later. It’s a very long ride to have to stand up the whole way… especially after spending the night before traveling. Anyway, we went through some pretty country since the Pan-American highway goes up to 10,000 ft there, and it was quite cold… elevation is crazy like that. We finally got to San Jose at 8:00 PM, and then we ate, went to our trusty hostel, met up with another student from Jessica’s program, used the free internet, and eventually slept. I caught the 6:30 A.M. bus to Monteverde, and they went on to Tortuguero. I was travel-weary, and ready to come back. It was a great trip though.