Travels of the Bay family and the Yoda Van

Yesterday we had our 4th trip to the Emergency room on this trip.  We had just found a hotel room here in El Valle, dropped our stuff off in our room and were about to check out the town.  We walked by a bird cage that had a parrot inside.  William wanted to get a bit closer to talk to the parrot, tripped on a little ledge, fell and smacked his brow bone on a stone wall.  It was bleeding heavily and it appeared that it was a pretty bad cut.  A woman sitting there offered to drive us to the hospital right away.  When we got there they took him right away and he now has 5 stitches over his eyebrow.

William is doing really well though.  We got some pain medication and he hasn´t taken any of it.  He was back jumping around and playing not 30 minutes after leaving the hospital.  In Panama City we´ll have to find a doctor to remove the stitches, but our friends in Panama City should be able to help us with that.

While William was being treated Matthias stayed with him and I took Julian out into the waiting room.  There was a bulletin board with some public-health pamphlets on various pertinant topics for people in the community.  It was really interesting to read.  One was on nutrition and basically contained the same information we hear in the states: eat balanced meals, lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, minimize grease and fried foods, don´t drink or smoke, etc.  There was an interesting pamphlet on sexual relations and they stressed the importance that both men and women wash their hands and genitals thoroughly after engaging in sexual intercourse.  I guess no one ever taught me that, so I´m glad I read that.  But the most interesting one was how to prevent body odor.  The tips were straight forward: bathe regularly, change your clothes often, etc.  I just thought it was interesting that they would even need a pamphlet on this.  This level of hygiene is so commonplace in the United States.  Really most people in Panama don´t need this advice – they know what to do to stay clean and odor-free.  But there still are groups of people here that are quite poor and maybe do need this kind of information.  It is hard to imagine, but definitely interesting and eye-opening.

The last entry I wrote was from Boquete.  The morning we were leaving we were planning on going to the coast to Las Lajas with Berni and Trixi.  We were staying at different hotels and didn´t run into them in town.  We were dissapointed that we might not see them again and didn´t get to say goodbye, but the bus was leaving and we were ready to go.

Guess who gets on the bus about 4 stops later?  Berni and Trixi.  We were so happy to see them and all went on to the coast together.  Actually on the travellers circuit it is pretty common to run into people you´ve met along the way.  On the bus to Panama we were sitting in front of a nice couple from Seattle.  We ran into them twice in Boquete and at the David bus stop.  We were waiting for bus on Isla de Ometepe, Nicaragua when we ran into a girl we met in Antigua, Guatemala.  When Matthias and Cy were decending the volcano on Isla de Ometepe they ran into a guy we met in Xela.  It´s crazy how often that happens and it´s nice to see familiar faces when you are so far away from home.

We all got a bus to Las Lajas.  The beach is a ways from town, but the bus driver had called ahead and there was a taxi waiting for us when we got off the bus.  He drove us down to a bunch of cabins right on the beach with the Pacific at our doorstep.  They were extremely rustic, but extremely cool, too.  They were bamboo huts and all it contained was a wooden bed made out of bamboo and a thin plastic matress.  No sheets, no pillows, no blankets, no real windows and the door that didn´t really shut also didn´t have a lock.  The best part about it was that we were the only ones on the beach.  And at night you could see only 2 lights way down the beach.  We went swimming, played in the sand and drank lots of Panamanian beers.

The only complaint I have about the beers is that the bottles are so small.  Each bottle only has 285 ml.  On one hand that is good because if they were bigger they would get warm before you can finish the bottle.  On the other hand though, you end up drinking a lot more bottles of beer than you would if they are bigger.  In the end I know it all amounts to the same, but it is just a psychological problem I have that I´ll have to work through.  I think another week of sitting on the beach swimming and relaxing might help me get over it.

After two nights we left for another mountain town called El Valle, where we are now.  It is absolutely beautiful and has a real small town feel.  The weather is better than it was in Boquete and our hotel has 2 hammocks.  This morning we went to hot springs with William and Julian.  They have some sort of special mud that you smear all over your body, let dry and then jump into the pools.  I hope when we get to Panama City I can upload some pictures so you see what we look like covered in mud.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Panama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.