Christmas in Panama (Retrospective: December 2019)

Click here for a Google Map of our Panama trip

Guillestre, September 22

Life here in Guillestre has settled into a comfortable routine of cycling, hiking, eating well and reading.  We are in a bit of a holding pattern as we wait to see whether my New Zealand visa will come through, or whether we will be able to head to Africa to resume Stanley's Travels.  In the meantime, my thoughts are drifting back to those long-ago days when international travel was simple and we all took it for granted.  I realize that I never wrote up my Christmas 2019 trip to Panama with Terri to meet up with my mother, and with my sister Saakje and her partner Henkka, so here is an attempt to remedy that situation.

The Plan 

My mother turned 80 this summer, and we 4 kids decided that we should make an effort to get everyone together for a big celebration.  The plan was to rent a cottage on a Canadian lake in late July, and once we had decided that, we also thought that we should plan a Christmas get-together as well.  The original idea was to fly to the Cape Verde islands, and initially flights looked pretty reasonable, but prices soon rocketed up and it looked like a long, miserable connection for my mom coming from Canada.  We quickly pivoted and decided to fly to Panama instead, since it's an easy connection from Canada, not too expensive from Europe, has great nature, and none of us had been there.  Not everyone in the family could make it; my sister Audie and my brother Evan both had bail out, but we still had my mother, Saakje, Henkka, Terri and I.  My mom insisted on renting a comfortable beach house, and we settled on a house on Bastimentos Island, in Bocas del Toro province, for a week.  Terri and I would fly in first for five days of exploring on our own before we rendezvoused with the others.  Once we'd bought tickets and guidebooks, we were more or less set.

Panama City and Santa Fe

Ruined Dominican church, Casco Viejo

Terri and I took a very roundabout route to get from Tbilisi to Panama, flying Qatar Airways to Doha and on to Miami before hopping across to Panama.  It took a long time (two nights) but it saved us a few hundred dollars.  It also allowed Terri to buy a new mobile phone in Doha airport before we grabbed a few hours of interrupted sleep on our air mattresses in the terminal, and then to catch up with my friend Rob for dinner in Miami before a few more hours of catnapping in Miami airport.  We were pretty bleary-eyed by the time we got to Panama mid-morning on Sunday, December 15th.  We caught a bus into town and, sleepy as we were, we hopped onto the wrong bus, one of the brightly-painted Diablo Rojos local buses that took the scenic route into town.  We alighted in the centre and walked half an hour into the Casco Viejo neighbourhood where our AirBnB was located.  The contrast between the crowded, slightly dingy area around the bus terminal and the charming upmarket gentrification of the old colonial Casco Viejo neighbourhood was striking.  Our room was just what we needed, and we passed out for a few hours of much-needed sleep.  

Colonial architecture, Casco Viejo

We woke up in time for a dinner date.  One of Terri's former teaching colleagues in Switzerland had subsequently joined the US State Department and was working at the American embassy.  We met up with him, his Colombian wife and their two children at a seafood restaurant, Finca del Mar, right on the waterfront three blocks from our accommodation.  We had a good evening of stories and reminiscences and ideas before our eyelids grew heavy and we had to wander back for our first sound night's sleep in three days.

Swimming hole, Santa Fe

We didn't have to be in Bocas del Toro for until Friday, so Terri and decided to head west to the town of Santa Fe in the interim, as it sounded like an interesting town in the highlands.  A couple of buses got us to Santa Fe by mid-afternoon, where we took a room in an almost-empty hotel just downhill of town (the Hotel Santa Fe).  We had time for a walk before it got dark, so we wandered along to a swimming hole just east of town.  It felt good to stretch our legs after too many days spent crammed inside airplanes and buses, and there were plenty of wildflowers and butterflies and birds to attract our attention along the way.  It felt good to swim, although the air was surprisingly cool and we were almost chilly.

Cerro Tute

Terri atop Cerro Tute

The next day we set off on a hike up to the summit of Cerro Tute.  It was a long way up under a pretty fierce sun, but the views from the top were worth the effort of getting there.  The landscape sloped away to the south towards the distant Pacific Ocean; it was a bit disconcerting to realize how much of the native forest had been cleared for farming and ranching.  The villages we walked through had tidy-looking homes surrounded by fruit orchards (the oranges were in season, and we scrounged a couple of fallen oranges from the ground before being invited to pick some from the tree by the owner.    We had a picnic lunch on top of the granite boulders at the top before trudging back down, a bit footsore, to have another swim at a different swimming hole (this time we were warm enough to appreciate the cooling waters.)

Alto de Piedra

Our hike the next day was another long, sweaty affair, this time up to the waterfalls of Alto de Piedra.  Sadly our trail was mostly along a paved road, but the views were fine and the waterfalls were really quite pretty.  We swam in a couple of them, trying out Terri's new GoPro.  The trudge back to town was a bit unappealing, so we ended up flagging down a passing pickup truck to shorten the walk and save our knees.

Alto de Piedra

Alto de Piedra

We spent much of Thursday on the bus to Bocas del Toro.  Crossing the central spine of Panama from the well-populated Pacific slope to the much wilder Caribbean slope take quite some time.  We had to retreat from Santa Fe south to the Panamerican Highway at Santiago, trundle along the Panamerican to the town of David, and then catch a third bus up and over the watershed to Bocas.  It ended up taking most of the day as we dozed in our seats listening to podcasts and nodding off.  The road across the mountains was chilly and foggy and quite dramatic, before we dropped into the lowlands.  It was noticeably less affluent on this side of the country, and the villages we passed through looked much scruffier.  We arrived in the banana port of Almirante (dominated by a Chiquita banana processing plant) just too late for the last commercial ferry across to the island of Bocas del Toro, but we managed to catch a lift with a small water taxi that was taking a few other stragglers back to the island.  It was slightly disconcerting to make the crossing largely in the dark, but we arrived without incident in the main town of Bocas del Toro, found a small, inexpensive hostel for the night, had a delicious seafood dinner and fell into bed tired out.

Bastimentos Daze

In the harbour

We spent the next seven days on the island of Bastimentos, in a big beach house called Casa Shorebreak.  Terri and I stocked up on groceries in town before meeting up with the property manager and catching a boat across to Bastimentos.  While Bocas del Toro was sizeable, full of restaurants and shops and people, Bastimentos was small and far less populated.  We lugged our grocery bags and backpacks into the house, met the caretaker (a rotund local man who stayed in a small room underneath the house as a nightwatchman), got settled in, then went back to the main island to wait for Saakje and my mother to arrive at the tiny airport.  We ordered lots of Indian food from a restaurant run by a Canadian expat (Bocas is full of expatriate Americans, Canadians and assorted Europeans, then walked over to the airport to meet my mom (whom I hadn't seen in over a year) and Saakje.  We ambled across, picked up our food and caught a water taxi back to Bastimentos to settle in for food, rum and catching up. 

Sundowners during a rare sunny patch

Bocas del Toro feels very distinct from the rest of Panama.  As in Costa Rica and Honduras, the Caribbean coast of Panama has a definite English Caribbean feel.  More people speak an English-based pidgin than speak Spanish, and the sound is pure Jamaican.  Many of the people are either black or indigenous, rather than the mestizos who prevail numerically on the Pacific slope of the country.  It really feels like a different country, and for me and Terri it was our first-ever taste of the Caribbean.  

Terri paddling into the mangroves

Saakje, my mother, myself and Henkka

Sadly, it was an exceedingly wet taste.  December is part of the rainy season on the Caribbean coast of Panama, and this week was exceptionally rainy.  We were glad to have a solid roof over our heads, and also glad that the house was built up off the ground on concrete pilings, as the yard turned into a flooded swimming pool around us.  Luckily it didn't rain all day every day, and we did manage to get out and see the local sights, but it was generally very soggy.  

Our days passed with lots of good food cooked by whoever was seized by inspiration at the moment.  We ate well, and drank lots of pina coladas.  Henkka arrived from France the day after Saakje and my mother and the five of us played cards, told stories, read books and generally relaxed entirely.  It was precisely the sort of vacation gathering that my mother had had in mind.

Trying to do stand-up paddleboarding

We did manage to get out to explore, although our first expedition, hiking with my mother to Red Frog Beach, had to be abandoned as the path turned into a treacherous mudhole that eventually defeated my mother.  A more successful expedition was taking a water taxi out to Sloth Island to take photos of the iconic animals.  Our first trip gave us 2 sloths to photograph, but a later trip yielded 7 or 8 individuals.  We also took a water taxi out to Starfish Beach one day to snorkel; there wasn't much to see, other than the multitudinous starfish, but it was great to have calm water for swimming.  Casa Shorebreak had some pretty sizeable waves pounding in from the open Caribbean and was not a place for a peaceful paddle.

My mother adopting the island lifestyle

The owners of the house were surfers, and there were surfboards and a standup paddleboard stored in the rafters.  We took the paddleboards out a couple of times on the calmer inland side of the island and rented kayaks to go along with them.  We explored some of the mangrove swamps leading inland, and saw lots of interesting birds.  We also tried surfing the waves one day, but it was not enormously successful, as we were on quite short boards suitable for experts, which we were not.  It was fun but frustrating.

One day we dolled ourselves up and wandered along the beach to the Firefly restaurant, a Bastimentos institution run by a couple of Americans.  The food was great (if a bit pricey) but the highlight was a live musician who played a mix of calypso and reggae, including a few of his own original songs, while bantering good-naturedly with us.  

Sloth island inhabitant

And then, suddenly and all too soon, our week was up and it was time to take the water taxi back across to Bocas del Toro town, walk my mother to the airport and say goodbye.  It had been a fun week, and we were already looking forward to the summer's full-scale reprise.  We had a couple of hours before our bus to Boquete left, so Henkka, Saakje, Terri and I rented bicycles and explored the main island in a rare patch of sunshine.  We realized that beyond the somewhat seedy main town, there were dozens of beautiful beach houses looking out onto surf beaches that we hadn't seen at all during our brief visits to the main town.  Maybe, if we ever come back to Panama, we can explore that part of the archipelago.

Bicycle expedition on the main island

Boquete Hiking and Mariato Surfing

On the Sendero de los Quetzales

With my mother on her way back to Ottawa, the rest of us decided to head away from the rain into the central highlands, to the town of Boquete, well-known for coffee plantations and retirement communities for gringos.  It was a longish afternoon on a somewhat overpriced tourist bus to get back over the central cordillera to David and then onto a smaller road leading north again into the highlands.  We had rented a small house on AirBnB that proved perfect for our needs, with a couple of bedrooms and a well-equipped kitchen that we put to good use.  

Our two full days in Boquete, a town with a very cool hippy traveller vibe, were devoted to hiking.  The first morning we caught a taxi up to the end of the road above town to access the Sendero de  los Quetzales (the Quetzal Trail), a famous hike.  Many gringo tourists get talked into taking a guide (at considerable expense) to walk the trail, but we figured that it was pretty well marked and couldn't be that fearsome, so we went by ourselves.  It was a lovely day of walking, leaving behind the coffee plantations cleared from the native bush and entering some fairly undisturbed cloudforest.  We never spotted any of the resplendant quetzals for which the trail is named, but we did hear several of them calling, leading to long minutes squinting through the dark canopy for birds that had no interest in being seen.  The walk was pleasant but by no means challenging, and we returned to town happy with a relaxed day in nature.

Saakje and Henkka were keen to climb Volcan Baru, the highest peak in Panama, the next day, which meant leaving at midnight to catch clear skies at the summit at sunrise.  Terri and I were less interested, so we waved them goodbye and went to bed.  Instead we slept late and welcomed back the conquering summitteers that morning before heading out for a much easier walk, up to the Lost Waterfalls.  It was a fun but very muddy hike leading to a series of spectacular cascades fountaining down out of the mountains.  As we got back to town, we arranged to meet up with Saakje and Henkka at the Boquete Brewing Company, a fabulous  brewpub, for a farewell to the town.

One of the Lost Waterfalls

A Lost Waterfall

Although we had enjoyed our time in Boquete, Saakje and Henkka were keen both to see more of the Pacific coast and to try their hands again at surfing, so we decided to make our next stop somewhere on the Pacific coast on the way back to Panama City.  It was approaching New Year, and so we were competing with all of middle-class Panama for accommodation.  We were almost despairing of finding a place when we finally located a hotel with rooms available in the little town of Moriato.  It was a long series of buses (to David, then along the Panamerican to Santiago, and finally a crowded local line to Moriato), but we got there in the end and decided that we had made the right decision.  Our little hotel (curiously empty given the season) was just inland of a beautiful natural beach with waves breaking all along it, and with an estuary full of seabirds at the far end.

Another Lost Waterfall

Playa Reina

Brown pelican

Our three days on the beach passed in a bit of a blur.  We rented much longer boards than we had had on Bastimentos with much better flotation, and it made all the difference.  We were much more able to paddle fast enough to catch waves and started to stand up on them.  Saakje proved herself to be the fastest learner, while Henkka wasn't far behind.  I was the least gifted of the three of us; Terri elected to watch from the beach.  We surfed as much as waves and tide allowed, and the rest of the time we wandered the beach and the estuary in search of bird life, or walked into the town centre of Moriato in search of pizza and fruit juice.  It was a relaxing time, punctuated by chats with the other guest in the hotel (an American guy on a motorcyle trip around Panama), card games in the evening and yoga sessions to loosen up muscles that were tight after the unusual activity of paddling a surfboard.

Cool toad from our hotel restaurant

Ibis and cormorants

Panama City, Pipeline Road and the Canal

Crimson-backed tanager

Crimson-crowned woodpecker

Our days in Panama were rapidly running out, and so regretfully we bade farewell to the coast and caught a bus into the city.  Terri and I booked a room in the same place as before in Casco Viejo while Saakje and Henkka stayed in a sister property a couple of blocks away.  Terri and I raced off to the Parque Metropolitano, the magnificent patch of rainforest in the middle of the city, and had a fun speed hike around the park before it closed, spotting lots of turtles and various birds (including a dramatically coloured crimson-crowned woodpecker, Campephilus melanoleucos), but none of the giant anteaters that Henkka had seen a couple of weeks before on his way through the city. An agouti (a large and rather endearing rodent) had to serve as a consolation prize.  We dined together with Henkka and Saakje in Finca del Mar, then arranged to rendezvous early the next morning for a day of birdwatching in the Canal Zone.

Black-striped woodcreeper (by Henkka)

Chestnut-mandibled toucan (by Henkka)

An Uber drove us inland from the capital along the main road through the Canal Zone, and we were soon deposited just past the town of Gamboa, at the start of a dirt road with the rather prosaic name of Pipeline Road.  This is known as the best birdwatching spot in Panama and one of the best in the world, so it seemed like a good place for Terri and I to spend our last full day in the country.  As soon as we stepped out of the car, we were already surrounded by wading birds in a marsh beside the road.  After spending a while photographing them and trying to identify them (our favourite was the rufescent tiger heron, Tigrisoma lineatum), we ventured into the embrace of the forest.  There were birds galore to be seen, including Central American specialties like antbirds, motmots, antwrens and caciques.  Since this is such a famous birding spot, there were a number of parties of serious twitchers, some with local guides, and we shamelessly parasited off their knowledge and their tips.  

Hideous facial deformity on baby howler monkey

Perhaps the most memorable encounter of the day was also the loudest.  We passed underneath a party of black howler monkeys and while we were watching them and trying to get a decent photograph, they began their howling.  For ten minutes, the forest was filled with their deafening calls until they ran out of interest and returned to eating leaves.  We managed to get a few monkeys to pose in small patches of sunshine, including a mother with a youngster on her back.  It wasn't until a couple of weeks later, looking at the photo more closely, that Saakje realized that the baby had hideous facial deformities, probably due to papillomaviruses.  I hadn't noticed them at the time through my binoculars or my telephoto lens, but once I'd seen them, I couldn't forget their nightmarish appearance.

Female slaty-backed trogon (by Henkka)

Juvenile rufescent tiger-heron

Terri looking pleased with herself at Miraflores Locks

In addition to birds, there were leafcutter ants wearing paths through the undergrowth, spectacular butterflies and big dragonflies to admire, and sooner than we would have liked it was 1:30 pm and we were hungry, thirsty and tired.  We trudged out back to town and raided a convenience store for overpriced snacks and cold drinks which we ate in a nearby city park that was itself full of bird species.  Henkka and Saakje were staying in Panama after we left, so they had booked a room in Gamboa so that they could return to Pipeline Road the next day.  (They had spectacular birding luck the next day, leaving us quite envious and keen to return one day.)  Terri and I headed back to Panama City, but with a stopoff at the Miraflores Locks of the Panama Canal.  Terri was keener than me to see them, but I ended up glad that we had stopped in and paid the 15 US dollar admission price.  We spent a good couple of hours sitting in the bleachers watching huge freighters make their way through the locks (and even bigger super-Panamax container ships passing through the expanded second set of parallel locks), and wandering contentedly through the excellent museum.  Terri's father had been fascinated by the Panama Canal and had taken a round-the-world cruise largely to experience the Canal, and he had passed this fascination onto his daughter.  We both really enjoyed the experience and were wowed by the engineering feat of building the Canal.

Sloth crossing Pipeline Road (by Henkka)

And then it was all over.  We returned to the city, had a delicious final meal at a Chinese restaurant, and the next morning caught a flight to Miami and on to Doha, where we splurged on a hotel room and found time to explore the Museum of Islamic Art just before closing time, and had a memorable Indian meal.  Six hours of sleep, and we were back at the airport, checking in for our Tbilisi flight, our Christmas holidays enjoyably spent. 

Little did we imagine that within two months, the world of international travel would be completely changed by covid-19, and that this would be our last trip in the world of the BC era (Before Coronavirus).  We have yet to do a real trip in the AD era (After the Disease), but Panama was a good spot to do our last trip for a while.  If I were to go back, I think I would want to have a vehicle (or a bicycle) to explore a bit further off the beaten track, and I would spend more time in the rainforests and cloudforests looking for birds and other wild creatures, as that's what I found most spectacular about the country.

 

Museum of Islamic Art, Doha