HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM PANAMA!
As Ole went back to Sovereign on January 3,
and Emma Jo will be staying in Bocas del Toro for the next
several months, we’ll just make a monthly page until we start
cruising again.
January 3
It was impossible for Ole to get a flight
out of Bocas to Panama City to catch his flight back to the
ship, so we booked him a flight out of David, a city across the
mountains from here. That meant we were up at dawn’s crack, and
over the water via lancha to the town of Almirante about 30
minutes away. From the boat dock, it was a taxi ride to a wide
spot in the road to wait for a bus to David, two hours away.
The bus finally came – a small affair with stuff packed on top
and people shoehorned in. Ole reported that for most of the way
he had an indigenous girl of 15 sitting on his lap, so he
couldn’t really say how the scenery was. Once he got to the bus
station in David, he had to get a taxi to the airport in time
for his flight to Panama City – and all this with limited
Spanish.
After I waved goodbye, I retraced the cab
ride back to the water taxi through Almirante. I learned a new
word in Spanish – una porqueria – which pretty much
describes Almirante. The setting is beautiful It’s up the head
of a bay studded with islands and little homes on stilts. But
the town is a dump, with floating trash, open sewers, and
scrawny dogs and chickens everywhere. A good place to be
leaving!
January 15
Kathy went off to spend a long weekend with
her sisters, so Neil and I are “batchin’” it together. Today we
caught the lancha to Changuinola to get our visas renewed. It
was a beautiful 45-minute ride across Almirante Bay and up a
very shallow canal dug by United Fruit nearly 100 years ago
between the ocean and the banana fields of Changuinola. The
canal is maybe 50 yards wide, and probably no more than 5 feet
at the deepest, and passes through farms, fields, and the odd
village. In some places it is choked with water hyacinth –
which makes it nearly impassable if it’s been raining heavily.
From the lancha landing, it’s about a 5-minute taxi ride through
banana processing areas to the heart of town. It was slightly
reminiscent of Fronteras – dusty, crowded – but we found a good
place to eat, interesting markets to wander through, and a
couple of large grocery stores, in addition to finding the bonus
that we didn’t need to renew our visas. Panama is going through
lurching changes in its visa and immigration laws, which seem to
change weekly. So we’re good for 90 days instead of the 30 we
thought. We had to wait about an hour and a half at the lancha
landing, and caught a pick-up baseball game in a vacant lot
with maybe a dozen clean, well-behaved kids who could have been
anywhere in the world. (Click to make the pictures
bigger.)
This is the typical mode of transportation between Bocas del
Toro and anywhere else.
 This
is a view along the way to Changuinola through an old United
Fruit Company canal, dug around the turn of the century.
 A
view from the boat terminal in Changuinola.
January 21
Can it be that it’s been exactly one year
since we left Miami? Definitely lots of water under the keel
(about 1600 nautical miles) and experience under the belt. No
doubt about it, this boat has been very very good to us – and we
have been good to each other.
January 28
I decided to take advantage of a language
school here –
Spanish by the Sea – run by a Dutch woman and her
Costa Rican husband. It’s not bad -- $130 a week for four hours
of instruction five days a week in a class of three. I’ll be
going in the afternoons from 1:00 to 5:00, and interestingly,
they’ve placed me in an upper-intermediate level exactly where I
was when I stopped studying Spanish at the University of
Washington 35 years ago. Just goes to show you the brain
retains. Compound verbs here I come…
On the marina front, several of the boats
that were here when we arrived have left – some for the other
marina, some to anchor out, and some to continue their journeys
toward Colon and the Canal.
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