It seems like we get into a lot of trouble on our trip and we were really just hoping that one of the days would be free from drama. Well, it wasn't Monday for sure.
We stopped by this little breakfast nook called the Shalom Bakery for a bite to eat. A full breakfast is only $4, which is filling and tasty. That's what I got. One of my friends decided to just get eggs and was told eggs were 50 cents. Such a deal. We waited, got our food, and were full and all was good except when it was time to leave. Only then did the owner say that we still owed $3.50 on the second meal because she doesn't serve just eggs alone. In fact, she didn't even tell us this until we were halfway to the car. What kind of dumb logic is that. You can get about 3 dozen eggs in the grocery store for about that much and she is running to the car to find us because she still wants $3.50 for food that we didn't even eat. My advice is don't eat at Shalom.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Our crazy fourth of July
After getting up way too early, we headed to the local airport to catch our short 1 hour flight to David. It wasn't any problem to reschedule our flight because they seem to run often enough and never are full. I don't know how the high season is though.
David is in a pretty central location for people getting to places around the northwest of Panama. We got our Thrifty rental car and high tailed it up the mountain to Boquete where we checked in to the pension and got some Panamanian food at this restaurant which we would frequent at lease 4 times during the next 3 days. Yes, I am writing this blog in retrospect.
While trying to book some activities, we met up with Jimmy at an outdoor adventures place. Jimmy has been snatching up land in the area since 2003 and now has a nice home and a business and spends most of his days white water rafting and kayaking.
Jim gave us some ideas that the guide book failed to do and our plan was to go to some natural Caldera hot springs and then meet up with a bunch of gringos later that evening to celebrate the 4th.
Finding the springs with directions like go for 5 minutes and then turn left at the big cell phone tower all in a torrential downpour was pretty crappy and then having to hike down a poorly marked rocky road where nobody seemed to be was interesting and slightly discouraging, but we got to the hot springs eventually and really enjoyed it.
The hot springs are the most rustic ones I have been to. While most others are surrounded by swimming pools and man-made waterfalls, this one just had some piled rocks around the entrances of the pools. There were 3 pools of varying temperatures and they were cooled off that day from the rain flood that had just occurred. We relaxed for a couple hours and then talked to the guy who lived on the property about riding some horses back to the car. This guy promised us 3 horses for the ride and delivered 2 horses and a water buffalo. He also was a chatter box and wanted to show us his pet spider monkey named Cheetah. I'll admit that Cheetah was pretty darn cute and we played with him for a while. We also played with the buffalo too and all of us took pictures while sitting on his head. Jen got to ride the buffalo back to the car while Vahbiz and I were on the horses. Jen said that the buffalo was quite sturdy.
When we got to the car, our adventure turned bad. While fumbling with paying the guy for the horses, we ended up locking the keys in the trunk. Here we are, out in the middle of nowhere, and we had no access to the car and the only person around was the dude with a water buffalo.
I got this great idea of jimmying the car door open and it just so happened that the guy had a 2 foot long machete under one of the horses. I worked on machete-ing the car for about a half hour and didn't get very far at all. The guy offered to call a friend for us but he didn't have a phone so he was going to go down the road a bit and find someone who could call. For another hour, I tried to get into the car to no avail. When things looked really bad and it was pretty much pitch dark, we started walking back and our friendly farmer appeared. He chatted our ear off for a half hour more and then some random friends showed up who offered us a ride home. We left the car and headed back but we stopped at the restaurant where the gringos were to see if they could help us. No dice. We got a range of suggestions from pulling the trunk lever inside the car (how clever) to calling Thrifty in the morning. Eventually, a couple of them ended up taking us back to the pension. We were cold and wet and didn't have any money.
We had to knock on the owner's door to ask for more towels because all our stuff was in the car. Someone came out and wanted to get the towels we had locked in the car or charge us money because we lost them. She did part with the towels finally and we went to our room. Just when things seemed to be at their worst, Axel, the owner of the pension knocked at our door, presumably to talk to us about the towels, and wanted to meet us. I told him our sob story, and he was very pleasant and helpful. He said he "knew a guy" and would make a phone call. I wasn't following the whole plan but I was along for the ride. Axel ended up hooking us up with 2 guys that said they would drive us back out to the boonies and get into the car. They were mechanics and had 12 years of experience working on cars. So, all 3 of us were back on the road again and we finally made it to the car after the 2 dudes checked their tools a some gas station. It took about 20 minutes for them to set up the light, pry open the door slightly with 2 screw drivers and a towel, and finagle a coat hanger into a position where they could snag the door lock and pull it open.
All of us cheered with joy when it was done and we were finally able to get out of there. The whole ordeal was painful but didn't last more than 5 hours or cost too much. So much for the fourth of July though.
David is in a pretty central location for people getting to places around the northwest of Panama. We got our Thrifty rental car and high tailed it up the mountain to Boquete where we checked in to the pension and got some Panamanian food at this restaurant which we would frequent at lease 4 times during the next 3 days. Yes, I am writing this blog in retrospect.
While trying to book some activities, we met up with Jimmy at an outdoor adventures place. Jimmy has been snatching up land in the area since 2003 and now has a nice home and a business and spends most of his days white water rafting and kayaking.
Jim gave us some ideas that the guide book failed to do and our plan was to go to some natural Caldera hot springs and then meet up with a bunch of gringos later that evening to celebrate the 4th.
Finding the springs with directions like go for 5 minutes and then turn left at the big cell phone tower all in a torrential downpour was pretty crappy and then having to hike down a poorly marked rocky road where nobody seemed to be was interesting and slightly discouraging, but we got to the hot springs eventually and really enjoyed it.
The hot springs are the most rustic ones I have been to. While most others are surrounded by swimming pools and man-made waterfalls, this one just had some piled rocks around the entrances of the pools. There were 3 pools of varying temperatures and they were cooled off that day from the rain flood that had just occurred. We relaxed for a couple hours and then talked to the guy who lived on the property about riding some horses back to the car. This guy promised us 3 horses for the ride and delivered 2 horses and a water buffalo. He also was a chatter box and wanted to show us his pet spider monkey named Cheetah. I'll admit that Cheetah was pretty darn cute and we played with him for a while. We also played with the buffalo too and all of us took pictures while sitting on his head. Jen got to ride the buffalo back to the car while Vahbiz and I were on the horses. Jen said that the buffalo was quite sturdy.
When we got to the car, our adventure turned bad. While fumbling with paying the guy for the horses, we ended up locking the keys in the trunk. Here we are, out in the middle of nowhere, and we had no access to the car and the only person around was the dude with a water buffalo.
I got this great idea of jimmying the car door open and it just so happened that the guy had a 2 foot long machete under one of the horses. I worked on machete-ing the car for about a half hour and didn't get very far at all. The guy offered to call a friend for us but he didn't have a phone so he was going to go down the road a bit and find someone who could call. For another hour, I tried to get into the car to no avail. When things looked really bad and it was pretty much pitch dark, we started walking back and our friendly farmer appeared. He chatted our ear off for a half hour more and then some random friends showed up who offered us a ride home. We left the car and headed back but we stopped at the restaurant where the gringos were to see if they could help us. No dice. We got a range of suggestions from pulling the trunk lever inside the car (how clever) to calling Thrifty in the morning. Eventually, a couple of them ended up taking us back to the pension. We were cold and wet and didn't have any money.
We had to knock on the owner's door to ask for more towels because all our stuff was in the car. Someone came out and wanted to get the towels we had locked in the car or charge us money because we lost them. She did part with the towels finally and we went to our room. Just when things seemed to be at their worst, Axel, the owner of the pension knocked at our door, presumably to talk to us about the towels, and wanted to meet us. I told him our sob story, and he was very pleasant and helpful. He said he "knew a guy" and would make a phone call. I wasn't following the whole plan but I was along for the ride. Axel ended up hooking us up with 2 guys that said they would drive us back out to the boonies and get into the car. They were mechanics and had 12 years of experience working on cars. So, all 3 of us were back on the road again and we finally made it to the car after the 2 dudes checked their tools a some gas station. It took about 20 minutes for them to set up the light, pry open the door slightly with 2 screw drivers and a towel, and finagle a coat hanger into a position where they could snag the door lock and pull it open.
All of us cheered with joy when it was done and we were finally able to get out of there. The whole ordeal was painful but didn't last more than 5 hours or cost too much. So much for the fourth of July though.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
The Epic Journey To Panama City
Mexico City is not that fun of an airport, especially when you are in it for about 8 hours. They don't assign you a gate for your flight until right before it boards and then it doesn't appear that they do much to help you find out where or how to board. Not being familiar to the procedure is asking for trouble, which is what happened to us. We ended up getting to the gate about 10 minutes EARLY and they had closed the plane already and we had to rebook for a later flight, which caused us to miss the next flight.
Things worked out well in the end but we were stressed out for a while.
This evening we found a nice little restaurant in downtown Panama City and then hit up this place called The Red Gorilla for after dinner music and dancing... but very little dancing.
Panama City was surprisingly more built up than I expected. I guess that since all the business congregates around Panama City, it gets most of the money for buildings. It sort of reminds me of my time in Belo Horizonte. There are parts of the city that are really nice and then right next to them are slums. Getting around town seems pretty easy with cab rides being about 4 dollars.
Tomorrow, we are hoping to do some hiking after checking in to our hotel in Boquete and perhaps see a coffee plantation.
Things worked out well in the end but we were stressed out for a while.
This evening we found a nice little restaurant in downtown Panama City and then hit up this place called The Red Gorilla for after dinner music and dancing... but very little dancing.
Panama City was surprisingly more built up than I expected. I guess that since all the business congregates around Panama City, it gets most of the money for buildings. It sort of reminds me of my time in Belo Horizonte. There are parts of the city that are really nice and then right next to them are slums. Getting around town seems pretty easy with cab rides being about 4 dollars.
Tomorrow, we are hoping to do some hiking after checking in to our hotel in Boquete and perhaps see a coffee plantation.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Starting with a red eye
The Panama adventure begins tomorrow and I am excited. My 4 day July 4th holiday weekend turned into a 9 day adventure to central America. My last excursion to this area was Costa Rica over 5 years ago, so I think that I know what to expect. Panama and Costa Rica are so close together that I believe that the ecologies are very similar.
We are starting with a red eye flight to get the most out of the weekend and the most out of work. It's about 12 hours down to Panama and then we have to figure out how to go from the main Panama City airport to the commuter airport. Our first destination is Boquete, which is a city in a mountainous region in the north west of the country. We are going to spend 3-4 days there and then fly to Bocas del Toros for a little beach and island scenery. Then it's back to Panama City for the canal and then home.
I am looking forward to it.
We are starting with a red eye flight to get the most out of the weekend and the most out of work. It's about 12 hours down to Panama and then we have to figure out how to go from the main Panama City airport to the commuter airport. Our first destination is Boquete, which is a city in a mountainous region in the north west of the country. We are going to spend 3-4 days there and then fly to Bocas del Toros for a little beach and island scenery. Then it's back to Panama City for the canal and then home.
I am looking forward to it.
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