It's All About the Journey

Five o'clock in the morning is definitely not my best hour.... especially without coffee....ugh. But we have to get dressed and grab our backpacks and get that all-important 6:30 AM express bus to Panama. One wonders what exactly the term "express bus" means in Central America, a land where timetables are suspect once you leave the airport.

For a whopping $10 per person you can take a 6-hour ride to the Costa Rica/Panamanian border. I'm anticipating a third-world experience of a patchwork painted rusted old school bus stuffed with locals, tourists, and livestock. I'm doomed to disappointment as the bus turns out to be modern, clean, air conditioned, and the only locals are ex-pat gringos.

The bus station is clean. Well, except for the dead rat in the middle of the food court floor. I inform one of the vendors and he says "Of course it's a dead rat." clearly dismissing my concerns and returns to making eggs and coffee. For all I know the rat is still there. Gosh, almost felt like I was back in Penn Station! As we make our way there, we meet the locals who are heading out on their commute and the tourists heading to ... Bocas del Toro. It's going to be a crowded bunch of islands.

We meet Dan, the ex pat gringo who started the tree house association. Dan used to live in a tree house in Northern California and now does holistic healing ("Bury yourself in the dark sand in Puerto Vieja. It's magnetic and will cleanse your spirit.") OK whatever. California hasn't completely gotten to this NYC gal.

The mountains surrounding San Jose are beautiful. Razor sharp edges (I picture the NYTimes headline: Bus plunge kills 85; Tourists from US, NZ, etc....) leading to deep, wooded, big bouldered chasms. Beautiful and only scary on the turns when our bus is passing the semis and the oncoming traffic decides to speed up.

The ride is pleasant and uneventful with great little rest stops. When we make it out of the mountains and to the edge of the Caribbean, the weather turns hot and humid, of course. Time has stopped in this beautiful section of the world. Roofs are still made of tin, homes (shacks?) in various stages of disrepair tilt on stilts in case of tidal floods. The water is shades of emerald green and turquoise. Sadly for my surfer man, it's also flat as a pancake. Oh well, at least the snorkeling will be good!

How to cross the border from Costa Rica into Panama? It's easy, sort of. The bus dumps you off in the middle of a dusty road and cab drivers, whose accents are a mixture of Caribe sing-song and pure outer-borough nasal, surround you and try to sell you overpriced rides in the back of rickety trucks. You can walk, but it's hot, sticky, and about a mile away to the check point. So you bargain and get the price you should pay anyway - $1 per person stuffed into the back of a rusty, dusty truck with no springs. They all have friends who will drive you to different ports that will take us to Isla Colon, where Bocas Town is, but the prices are outrageous. We get to the Customs shed, which is perched on the edge of a cliff next to a disused rail road bridge (that we must walk across with packs and luggage...), pay our $5 each to leave the country and toddle off with our new friends.

We've met a couple who have emigrated from the US to Costa Rica and opened a B&B in Alujela, right by SJO airport. They are getting their Costa Rican citizenship and must leave for 72 hours and go to the Changuanola consulate to get their papers in order. We hope in a mini van that is painted with turtles, dolphins, coral, and tropical fish and find that many from our bus are already stuffed in. Stuffed being the operative word as it doesn't have a luggage area, so we are packed into our seats and our stuff is packed in around us. For $5 US we are taken through to the Changuanola water taxi station.

It's a fascinating trip as we wend our way through the now-Chiquita banana plantations. I've never really thought about how bananas get to us. We see rusty cables strung over metal loops in the ground and later see that these are conveyor belts for the bananas to come out of the deeper parts of the plantations to the road where they're trucked to the sorting and cleaning sheds. Nothing is modern - the roads are tan dirt filled with potholes. I expect to see donkeys coming out of the jungle carrying sacks and find out later that they are still used. But the workers wave and smile as we go by. We will find that everyone in Panama is unfailingly nice and warm and friendly and helpful.

The boat ride to Bocas del Toro island is another $5 per person and please show your passport - again. We find we're tracked on pieces of paper everywhere we go and somehow this information, from notebooks and notepads, follows us everywhere. they are more efficient without computers than we are here in the States with every technological advance. There's a moral in here somewhere, and when I stop sweating in the heat, I'll get around to figuring it out.

Our taxi ride is in a 30 foot motor boat that takes us through the mangrove forest on the inside of the reef. We see wood and thatch huts in various states of tumble-down and people sitting in lawn chairs, children playing at the edges of the mangroves (yes Virginia, there are crocs, so watch out!), and hear the hum of cicadas over the sound of the engine.

The journey takes about 40 minutes and we pull into a wharf and shed that is the "main terminal" of Bocas town. We're surrounded by 'guides' who would love nothing more than to take us to the most perfect hotel, where they will of course receive the 'propia' or tip for bringing us in. But Kiwi Dundee does not work that way! He brushes them off and now to find a hotel.....With my Albatross in charge, we find the pay phone and he starts making phone calls. He identifies a few places and we hail a cab on the main street (where prices range from $65 for a street view room to $160 for a modern suite without a view). Since all the houses are build out on the water, we would like the view because, like Venice, all the action really happens on that side. After getting a taxi and checking out several hotels that range in price and cleanliness, we end up at the Bocas Inn, run by Ancon Eco Tours. It's a beautiful, Caribbean, Key West style green painted hotel with a palm garden street side and dark wood decks and chairs on the water side. It's now almost 13 hours of traveling and we're hot and sweaty. And I want a beer!

Thankfully, both the beer (Panama, not bad) and the swim happen within minutes. On an interesting note, none of the piers that go over the water have railings on the ends. That's because the taxis and delivery boats drop everyone and everything off at all hours. So we jump in and snorkel over to a sandbar to check out the fish and fauna. Lots of both, and I finally relax and cool down.

Hint - the tropics in late April are humid, which just intensifies the heat. No wonder the DEET didn't work - it just slid right off!

Our upstairs room has a view, hammocks on the veranda, and Adirondack chairs. Oh bliss and ours for 2 nights! Real estate looking and island exploring to come!