(Panama)...The Naso indians, a few of which live in Costa Rica, but the majority in Panama wedged against the Costarricense border, inhabit 11 small villages along the Río Teribe, a swift-moving river. It took 90 minutes to reach the first village, Wekso, going upstream, but approximately 20 going down. (One must be in a different area of Latin America for Ws and Ks to be predominate in nouns.)
To reach the area I took a small plane from Panama City’s second airport, Albrook, to Bocas del Toro (a pretty cool set of African-Caribbean islands off the Panama mainland that already is fairly full of Europeans and Americans), before staying on the same plane back to the mainland town of Changuinola. This basically is a banana plantation. The plane was so small that there was no—I was told when I, the only tourist, got off the plane in Changuinola—room for any luggage. I did have a backpack with me, so could cope.
One needs very little if the truth be known. When I did get my stuff back, in Bocas del Toro, several things were missing. My Spanish is so-so but good enough to be understood, but that did not help, and such is travel. From Changuinola I jumped on a small bus that went 10 kilometres to a small hamlet on the Río Teribe called El Silencio. It contains a convenience shack, two dogs and a sharp slope leading to the river. This is where the Naso picked me up in a wooden dugout canoe. Soon the boat journeys between steep wooded slopes and over shallow, rocky sandbars. Green Amazon kingfishers darted from sentry branches. Wekso is fascinating.
The Naso (www.odesen.org/ingles/weckso.html) now use it for the occasional tourist. It comprises four accommodations blocks, and also has a rudimentary shower, an open deck and a kitchen. Its former use was as a paramilitary training camp set up by former Panamanian dictator and CIA agent Manuel Noriega, who now is rotting in a Miami jail. From the river, one can hardly see the entrance to the place, it consisting of a thin rocky strand leading to steps cut in the hill side. Camouflage-coloured paint adorns a wall, on which is written some bad poetry extolling the attributes of the Motherland. Snakes, sharp daggers and rifles also have been drawn. Wekso stands on the top of a bluff. To the far side of its small area is a very steep path that leads to former training area. I found some military ordnance and also saw an animal called a grisón. It is uncommon to see, being secretive, and the Naso were very excited that I saw one. One afternoon we continued up river to visit Sieyik, which is the capital of the Naso territory, which still does not have official designation as an autonomous governing area, status enjoyed by all other tribes in Panama. The Naso is the only people in the entire Americas, from the top of Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, with a recognised king.
His emblem, a crown below an arch of 11 stars (one for each village) is badly painted on the badly constructed town hall. An open area of grass is in the middle of numerous shacks and rutted pathways. The main item of attire here is the Wellington boot. The village, also on a bluff, was dry when I was there. Lunch, including a whole pod of guava, was eaten at one of these shacks, after which I walked down hill for a dancing display by the villagers.
One young boy was wearing an ocelot skin. I bought some Naso arrows in a quiver, which I have, and I like, but which two minutes after my purchase I wondered how I was to get it back to the States. Back at Wekso I watched a woman wade across the river along a route known to all the villagers. At one spot, it came up to her chest. She cooked me chicken, and I chatted to one of the Naso. His story was fascinating. His father escaped the drug wars and repercussions of Colombia, skipping from town to town, island to island, to the San Blas Islands off of Panama.
These are run by the Kuna indians in a totally autonomous manner, and I have been there for the most gorgeous islands and scuba diving of my life. This he had felt was too close to Colombia, so he skipped again and ended up in Changuinola. Then he somehow made his way up the Río Teribe to the Naso, where he married and settled. My friend was the result. He matter of factly told me of how he had been disturbed by a panther and managed to kill it (the alternative truly had been to be killed).
We sat late into the night, which was totally still. In the morning I watched some Golden-hooded tanagers and a magnificent Long-tailed tyrant and sat by the river waving at the passengers of the river taxis. This was one time I felt the world’s only tourist, and I like to fool myself into thinking that once in a while. A small water taxi takes people from a small river north of Changuinola across the Bahía de Almirante to Bocas del Toro. It is a wonderful way to reach the islands, and I saw the small island (I first saw it two years before) that is the only breeding site of the Red-billed tropicbird in the distance.

(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.