This is my brain´s journey from San Jose, Costa Rica to Cartagena, Colombia. I´ve been on this totally Colon kick through the middle Americas, and things that seem important to write about are not important, and what´s really important is hard to write about. I feel like I need to justify my time by documenting every place I´ve been , like getting my passport stamped. But it´s keeping me from writing about the arcs of narrative that I´m living through. The idea, here, is to catch this blog up to real time.
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My furious rampage through Central America ended, mercifully, in San Jose, Costa Rica. I left Olga to fend for herself and found my way to TJ´s place. I know TJ from Peace Corps in Peru. He has the good fortune to continue working abroad, and to enjoy a quality of life different than the one we knew as Peace Corps Volunteers.Few things in the universe could have justified my decision to sleep at the terminal in Managua and then ride to San Jose without a seat. Tj´s apartment, however, made the rush worthwhile. I had my own room and enjoyed the view from his tower above the city. Mostly it was good to see an old friend and catch up.
I spent a day wandering about San Jose. It is light on museums and culture, but has good coffee and walking. I left San Jose two spend two days and a night in Jaco, a beach town on the Pacific Coast. These are basically the worst two days of the trip so far, but for the sake of balance, I´m going to write about them.
When I got to Jaco it was about 110 degrees, and balmy. I lurked around to find a hostal and everything seemed expensive. Being the reasonable person I am, I stopped to have a beer in the shade of palm trees. Even early in the day, the bar was packed with older American men and their prostitutes. Yuck yuck yuck. I found a hostal and went to check email during the hotest hours of the day. Email revealed some bad news from home, and for the first time since I left, I really didn´t feel like being abroad, in Costa Rica, at the beach, anywhere. I headed back to the expensive, gross hostel and tried to find comfort in the company of swiss sufers staying there.
After I fell asleep, an American who I had met earlier in the day, and felt wary of, awoke and suffered a psychotic break. He was in my dorm, moaning, talking into the outlets, and threatening to kill everyone. I´m guessing cocaine-induced psychoses, but who cares. It was terrifying. I constantly debate with myself whether to stay at cheap hotels and hostals and this was my first night at a hostal. It was miserable. I found a hammock outside and wrapped myself up in it, hoping not to get killed by a psychotic American. It seems like no matter how far you travel from the states, the drug-addled psychos follow you.
From Jaco I returned to San Jose for another night of Chillax with TJ and his girlfriend, Vicky. It was great to see them for another night before I continued on. From there, I caught the bus to the Carribean coast of Rica and stayed in a small town called Cahuita. I treated myself to a cabin directly on the sea. The sound of the waves were soothing. There wasn´t much swimming in town but there was a national park with an 8 km loop along beaches with trees full of monkeys and lizards and butterflies. After a night of listening to raggae at the bar in town, I flipflopped through the national park. Because of self-imposed rules that allow me only one night and one day in beautiful, dreamy paradises, I packed up and headed south to Bocas del Toro, Panama.
This is a small series of islands off of the Carribean coast, in the northern part of the country. I spent my first night on Isla Colon, the population center of the islands. I got in late and in the rain and again stayed in a cheap hotel, knowing that Saturday night in the hostal would not be fun. My room had cable and I got to see the Hawks-Magic on espn, totally enjoyable basketball game. The next morning I woke and walked along a washed out road through a couple of the islands pristine beaches. I got back to Colon and caught a taxi for Bastimentos, an even smaller island inhabited by afro-carribean folks. This place was incredible- a walk over the island´s ridge led me to a deserted, beautiful beach. I swam and read Huck Finn and felt mighty fine. Getting back to town that night, I found the small town´s residents drumming and dancing in the small plaza, getting ready for Carnaval. I ate some fried chicken, had a beer or two and dozed.
The next day I left bastimentos, had a solid meal in colon, and caught the boat back into to town. From Changuinola I made it to the city of David, the second largest in Panama, at about 5 pm. In David, I bought an overnight ticket to Panama City, checked my pack at the guardequipaje, and walked into town. David is chill. Apparently is has little in the way of sights, but it was exactly the kind of place I like to travel through- a nice plaza, options for food, and a movie theater. As it was hot as holy hell, I had some fried chicken and made for the air-conditioned theater. There, I saw this year´s Panamanian film, Chance. It was a violent comedy about maids in Panama City holding their patrones captive and assaulting them. The film made my stomach turn, but everyone in the theater laughed. Oh Panama.
After Chance, I played it cool and snuck into another theater, in order to kill the last hours before my bus, and saw this movie about Robert DeNiro travelling around the states on amtrak to visit his fuck-up children. It turns out that he loves them even if they aren´t perfect. Sometimes, when I´m travelling, bad movies resonate with me emotionally and I can connect with them. Up in the Air just did that for me, not that it was a bad movie. But this shit was awful. If anyone has seen the movie, please confirm for me how awful it is- i´m not missing something, right? It seems like a hollywood producer caught a feeling and got DeNiro to act it out for him. Yuck.
I got back on the bus in David and took the 6 hour ride to Panama City. This was the most brutal bus ride I´ve had so far, not because of the seats or the people or the roads, but because of the air-conditioning. I shivered through the night and didn´t sleep a wink. It was cool how the double decker buses travelled in a big fleet, and I enjoyed our 15 minute stop like none other because I got back out into the night´s heat. But I will never understand for whom that airconditioning was comfortable.
Panama city is charmed. I got in early, figured out the bus system and got myself to Casco Viejo. As old Panama has been washed over with shanties, this is the colonial center of Panama, and as yet, it has not been rebuilt. Some of the buildings are 300 years old in colonial style and are occupied by all different kinds of people. I loved this part of the city, and was happy to stay here for a couple days.
I spent most of my time in Panama City walking around, except for an excursion to the canal and to a zoo of sorts. The canal is cool to see- the panamaxes cramming themselves into narrow locks, dropping, and heading out to the pacific. It´s a little boring actually, but I thought a lot about my mom, who worked on the canal many years ago. I also had the chance to pass through Clayton and Paraiso, where canal workers lived. The houses, all former barracks, are occupied by the Panamanians who run the canal now.
I´m going to save some more thoughts on the canal for a future entry. It´s too massive a stroke of human marvel to fit in with this forced account of days and cities. Because I don´t have a guide and never know where buses will take me, I let the bus from the canal take me to this bizarre, contrived nature park further inland from the canal. It had several cages with animals, notably a Harpy Eagle and a Jaguar. I saw neither, which is fine. As I explored the park further, I found an empty looking cage that I suppose was used as some kind of event center. I put myself inside it and fluttered about as I imagined a Harpy Eagle would. This completed the experience for me and I headed back to Panama City.
Most of Panama City is not walkable but I walked it anyway, from Casco Viejo to Punta Pacifica to el Cangrejo and back. I walked because I felt like it, and because it helped me justify my constant consumption of street food.
And oh, was the street food along Avenida Central good. I discovered brochetas- brochettes of cheap beef with onions and pepppers and potatoes, basted in oil and spice and cooked slowly over charcoal. These were about $.50. I also bought mandarinas and bananas as I walked, and stopped for coca cola and assorted fruit sodas. It was a lovely break from the fried chicken I had been eating in Costa Rica. Also, late night I tried a sancocho- chicken soup with yuca.
I met some cool people in Panama and Costa Rica. The Swiss in Jaco were sweet- they were a little bit older, had jobs, and were calm and friendly, unlike some of the binge-drinking Americans that litter Costa Rica. On the bus to Cahuita I met Rain, an American from Ashland who was heading south toward Ecuador to teach for a semester. She and her girlfriend were sweet and oh so Oregon- they were planning to camp their way to Ecuador, which to me seems like way too much effort and risk. But I think they had a goodness about them that will serve them along the way.
I met Peter, a sun washed German who was all young and full of life and kept telling me he wished I spoke German so we could connect on some profound level about god knows what. I met Sara, a woman from Barcelona who had emigrated to Panama for work. She seemed cool and fun and if I could have stayed in Panama, I would have liked to hang out with her. Finally I met Amy, a stranded British girl who had been robbed in Peru two days earlier, had somehow exited Peru and made it as far as Panama, but who had no money and was waiting for resources to arrive from the UK. I have been robbed in Peru twice before, so I know the feeling. I´m also incredibly paranoid about being robbed on this trip. I´m certain it will happen, and as a hedge with Karma, I bought Amy a couple beers and gave her $10- enough, I hope, to get some protein in the three days before her card arrives.
I left Panama City, and in tribute to my mother, flew to Cartagena. I had explored all kinds of options for sketchy travel to cross the Darien Gap. There are cheep boats that ferry drugs and passengers between the countries. After reading enough about these in the Panamanian papers, I did some rough math that led me to believe that my life is worth more than $30,000- I´m not sure how I arrived at that number. But I did, and it helped me calculate that the $200 flight would be worth more than 3% chance of getting kidnapped or shot on a drug boat in the Carribean.
So here I am in Cartagena. It might be the most beautiful city in the world. It surrounded by walls constructed by the Spanish to keep invaders out in the 16th and 17th centuries. Within the walls are the yellow and pink and red colonial buildings from the postcards, and the arts and cafes that make Colombia Colombia. The city still feels like it´s trying to keep everyone out- I´m stumbling through the hangover of paranoia that my country wants me to feel here. But this feeling only adds to the beauty of walking along the walls. I´ve eaten more brochetas, chorizo and arepas, fish stew, beans in coconut water, mandarinas. I´ve had juice with pineapple and carrot and passionfruit and banana. This afternoon I´ll go to the modern art museum, then take a run along the walls of the city at sunset so that I´ve got room to eat arepas with queso for dinner and have a beer in the Plaza. That is where I´ll leave you for today.
It is an amazing feeling to flow South through the Americas at this pace, following the arc of Spanish colonialism. It makes me even more anxious to get to Peru, where the women grind pepper with rocks and smother it over the guinea pig that gets roasted on a spit. I´m hoping to write more about this particular story now that the facts are out of the way. O South America!
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