true life planet

I arrived in Panama City on Wednesday night, then took a taxi to the bus terminal.
While in the taxi, I got a glimpse of the city: It´s huge, modern, and extremely multicultural.
There was tons of traffic, literally bumper to bumper, but the mood was relaxed-no one really honked ahorn or yelled. Pedestrians seemed to take their lives into their hands when trying to cross the streets, though!

I made it to the bus terminal, and was looking for aplace to keep all of my bags..although up til now, I had only been traveling with a single daypack, I had extra bags this time. I was told that I should bring alot of supplies with me to my next destination, the town of Soloy.

A security guard came up to me and offered to take all of my bags as the bag check was closed. As I walked with her to the office, we were joined by five other guards. I told them I had come to Panama to work with the Ngobe people in Soloy, and that I still needed to buy a few more supplies, as Soloy is rather isolated. This group of security guards then took me under their wing, and insisted on accompanying me everywhere for the next several hours. Real Panamian hospitality!

I had to wait in the terminal for Sarah, a woman who had been volunteering with the Ngobe in Soloy, and who was supposed to give me an orientation about the organization. When I finally met her and her Estonian boyfriend, they were very helpful and sweet, giving me a better sense of the place I was about to go live in for the next few months. Some of the most interesting tidbits about their culture: they are always late; they swim fully clothed;and they are one of the least empowered groups of indigenous people in Panama.

After the orientation, we struggled to find the guards, who had locked my bags in their office and left. We finally tracked them down, I got my bags, and boarded the midnight bus for David.

Buses in Panama are ALOT different than in Guatemala! For one thing, everyone is extremely polite. By that I mean, there is no loud music, people apologize for talking on their cell phones, people don´t really eat on the bus.

I was exhausted, and tried to take a nap..a little difficult, as the seat in front of me was on my lap! There was alot more leg room on Guatemalan buses..It was also hard to sleep because armed soldiers and so on kept boarding the bus, checking everyones photo id and passports. Several times, people had to get off the bus because they did not have correct id, and often they were left stranded in the middle of nowhere.

I woke up at four am, my shoulders being shaken by the driver. Apparently, I was the only person who wanted to go to David, so they had decided to have me take a different bus, while they were going to proceed onward towards the border of Costa Rica.

I got off the bus, and walked towards the median of the busy dark highway, where a second bus was waiting for me. I turned around and asked the first bus driver about my bags-and he assured me they were already in the second bus. There was no time to check if this was the case, they wanted me to leave NOW! So, exhausted and somewhat stressed , I boarded bus number two.

Several hours later, bus number two let me off at the bus terminal in David. Looking around for my bags(which they had unloaded as I got off), I saw four bags on the sidewalk. They looked like my bags..but they weren´t my bags-they were someone elses!

I grabbed ataxi, and we sped off after bus number two, hoping to catch it and switch my bags out. When we finally caught up to it and it stopped, I boarded it and…it wasn´t the bus I had been on.

I walked back to the taxi in tears.all I had was my passport, my credit cards, my camera and the clothes I was wearing. The taxi driver tried to convince me that my things were long gone at this point, and that I should give up.

I decided to lose taxi driver number one, and boarded taxi number two. Taxi Number two was driven by Marcos, who turned out to be acutely sensitive to my plight. Not only that, he was alarmed when I told him that I hated Panama!(This because the situation was a rather rocky start!). For the next 6 hours, Marcos helped me retrace the steps of both buses I had been on that previous night.

We finally tracked down my bags in Costa Rica, where they were apparently in the possession of a large Costa Rican family, who were apparently bewildered by my bags of canned goods and water bottles! We made the switch, then drove back to Panama…

But not without incident, as the Costa Rican border officials thought it strange that I would cross the border for only two hours, and insisted on searching Marcos and I for drugs! Not pleasant.

Cost of taxi for 6 hours, numerous phone calls, and two border crossings? Forty American dollars and a Big Mac at McDonalds for his little boy.

I love Panama!

gg

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