(Panama)...In April in Panama, I left for a walk away from the very pleasant hotel in which I was lodged during a hotel’s grand-opening celebrations (musician and actor Ruben Blades was there, as was the country’s president, Martin Torrijos, son of former president Omar, who brokered the deal with U.S. president Jimmy Carter to get Panamanian control over the Panama Canal; by the way, that’s two Martins in as many blog entries). I turned left up a path called the Sendero del Bosque (“Path of the Woods’) that rises quickly and stops first at the hotel’s water tank. The scenery got better. Up and down the path went, and I saw wonderful creations such as Geoffroy’s tamarin (a monkey) and Snowy-bellied hummingbird (quite obviously a bird). After 30 minutes, including one very steep ascent that someone had tried to make easier by placing concrete slabs as steps, although the ones at the top have long since tumbled down to dusty deaths, the path reaches a right angle next to some leftover U.S. army ordinance to become more and more inconclusive. Ants ran rampant. Just as it exited to a road, I saw one of the most amazing, if not the most amazing, birds in all my travels, a Lance-tailed manakin, with a black body, powder-blue back, scarlet head and two small, sticklike (well, lancelike) tail feathers. The Long-tailed manakin is exactly the same, but with a much longer tail, so perhaps it is more spectacular than my find, but I was impressed nonetheless with the way nature rarely gets it wrong.
The hotel's website— the inn I stayed at being the InterContinental Playa Bonita — is this: http://www.playabonitapanama.com. The road the path fell out onto is a busy one, with cars, buses and lorries spouting carbon monoxide as they make their way from Veracruz to Panama City. I walked to Veracruz, about four miles in distance.
The road travels through a treed area before dropping down to an attractive beach lined with tourist-season restaurants with outdoor eating areas. An island to my left could be reached at low tide. The Restaurante El Darién seemed interesting, as I have always wanted to go to the Darién Gap bordering Colombia. I tried to organise a visit on this trip, but the dates of excursions there did not gel with my schedule, and warnings of the dangers of travelling there alone — ne’er-do-wells, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia guerrillas, deadly poisonous snakes, etc. — have I think not been consistently documented just to waste time and ink. After 30 more minutes I met Eduardo, a dentist who spoke English and worked for many years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He warned me of the delights in store in Veracruz.
According to his conversation — he accompanied me on his morning, swimming-costumed walk along the beach before driving to Panama City where now he teaches dentistry at a university — Veracruz is not too far behind Darién in its general nastiness. When the United States bombed Panama in 1989 (Operation Just Cause was its wonderful name), he continued, it decided to concentrate its mighty arsenal on the very poor neighbourhood of El Chorrillo, hardly a place any of then-Panamanian president Manuel Noriega’s henchmen would be languishing. Many people were made homeless, and in the confusion, many people suddenly found themselves sprung from jail. Eduardo claimed that this fringe-living mix of life’s unfortunates was packed off to live where no one could see them and presumably the Panamanians could keep an eye on them, that is, Veracruz.
Eduardo also warned that it was the main portal of drugs entering the country. It seemed perfectly pleasant to me, but I was there at 10 a.m. Two Kuna indian women, from the Panamanian-Caribbean islands collectively called the San Blas, walked along the street, children played and an Irish woman who grew up in Tanzania warned me about the snobs now buying property in Boquete, in the west of the country, who were hated by the über-snobs who moved there 10 years before, who were hated by...All seemed to me to be excellent.
I stopped for an espresso and two empanadas at a dirty, roadside stop within which the El Salvadorean flag fluttered. Who could guess at all the myriad tales of all of these refugees? I walked up a side street and took a photo of an old, toothless man wearing orange who patted down his hair and shifted to the side of his door when I asked him if I could photograph him. (When I had the photo developed, I noticed the man’s address in the top lefthand corner of his door, so I sent him a copy; perhaps he got it.) He’s from England, this man told a passer-by, who shrugged his shoulders, not at all interested, which is just the way it should be.
The road travels through a treed area before dropping down to an attractive beach lined with tourist-season restaurants with outdoor eating areas. An island to my left could be reached at low tide. The Restaurante El Darién seemed interesting, as I have always wanted to go to the Darién Gap bordering Colombia. I tried to organise a visit on this trip, but the dates of excursions there did not gel with my schedule, and warnings of the dangers of travelling there alone — ne’er-do-wells, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia guerrillas, deadly poisonous snakes, etc. — have I think not been consistently documented just to waste time and ink. After 30 more minutes I met Eduardo, a dentist who spoke English and worked for many years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He warned me of the delights in store in Veracruz.
According to his conversation — he accompanied me on his morning, swimming-costumed walk along the beach before driving to Panama City where now he teaches dentistry at a university — Veracruz is not too far behind Darién in its general nastiness. When the United States bombed Panama in 1989 (Operation Just Cause was its wonderful name), he continued, it decided to concentrate its mighty arsenal on the very poor neighbourhood of El Chorrillo, hardly a place any of then-Panamanian president Manuel Noriega’s henchmen would be languishing. Many people were made homeless, and in the confusion, many people suddenly found themselves sprung from jail. Eduardo claimed that this fringe-living mix of life’s unfortunates was packed off to live where no one could see them and presumably the Panamanians could keep an eye on them, that is, Veracruz.
Eduardo also warned that it was the main portal of drugs entering the country. It seemed perfectly pleasant to me, but I was there at 10 a.m. Two Kuna indian women, from the Panamanian-Caribbean islands collectively called the San Blas, walked along the street, children played and an Irish woman who grew up in Tanzania warned me about the snobs now buying property in Boquete, in the west of the country, who were hated by the über-snobs who moved there 10 years before, who were hated by...All seemed to me to be excellent.
I stopped for an espresso and two empanadas at a dirty, roadside stop within which the El Salvadorean flag fluttered. Who could guess at all the myriad tales of all of these refugees? I walked up a side street and took a photo of an old, toothless man wearing orange who patted down his hair and shifted to the side of his door when I asked him if I could photograph him. (When I had the photo developed, I noticed the man’s address in the top lefthand corner of his door, so I sent him a copy; perhaps he got it.) He’s from England, this man told a passer-by, who shrugged his shoulders, not at all interested, which is just the way it should be.
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