Panama Trip

The next day, Saturday the 21st, we went down for our final breakfast at Gamboa, by now thoroughly enjoying the corn tortillas, fritters (very much like Navajo fry bread), sausage, and, of course, the oatmeal.

After breakfast we went out with a larger group from the hotel this time, around 15 people or so, to hike down to the Chagres River. The Chagres is the river which feeds the canal and which became, when the canal was built, the only river in the world to feed into two oceans. At the banks of the river the tour guide explained that this is the spot where the US astronauts, when preparing to go to the moon, trained with some local indigenous peoples, in order to prepare for jungle survival skills in case of a crash-landing somewhere in the equatorial zone. In exchange for their help training the astronauts, the people were given an island in the Chagres to live on, protected from general Panamanian society.

I used my Crocodile-brand all-natural insect repellant for the first time--combined with long pants, I really think it worked, as I only got one tiny mosquito bite on the jungle hike. After the hike we spent another hour and a half at the pool and then checked out and went to lunch, where we finally relaxed, now that we felt we'd mastered the buffet, but bizarrely we were charged $11 each for the hot food instead of the $14 we expected.

Robert then took the kids down to see the capybaras behind the pool one last time while I settled up our bill and refilled water bottles and collected our luggage from the bell desk, and we hopped in our cab ($30) to the Albrook (domestic) airport for our flight to Bocas del Toro (or just Bocas, as everyone calls it, typically swallowing even that final "s").

The airport was small, and so was our plane, two seats on either side of the aisle and maybe twenty rows. Marcus had never seen a plane with propellers like these before, and he was very interested in them. Forty minutes later, including take-off and landing, and picking up our bags (even with that typically Panamanian final after-flight x-ray for all the checked luggage), we were in Bocastown, met by a representative of our next hotel, the Al Natural Resort.

She took us outside and "put" us on a "bus" that took us a few blocks away to the hotel office and dock. Really, we were crammed onto a twelve-seater passenger van with what seemed to be two dozen people inside, and at least as many suitcases piled on the roof rack, with a guy or two riding up there as well and either clinging onto the suitcases for dear life or else making sure they stayed put. There weren't quite chickens in cages, but that was the effect of it. Robert was jammed into the front and Marcus plus a large man onto a small jumpseat behind the front seat, facing me, with Samantha on my lap. Samantha was clearly disturbed by this experience and started shrieking, but there was nowhere to go and nothing to do until we go to the dock and unpiled ourselves. Then we paid the woman in cash for the remainder of our hotel bill, up front, for the next few days, and got into a tiny little motorboat with peeling paint, piloted by a short but smiling man and his wife. Robert thought all of this was sketchy in the extreme, and while he wasn't shrieking, he was almost as disturbed as Samantha had been. "You don't take credit cards?" he said incredulously. "You know you can get a thing that attaches to your iPhone to take credit cards that way. . ."

Once we got in the boat, Samantha realized the bus had in fact been better. The water was rough, and with every wave, every two seconds like clockwork, the boat was smacked hard right in the middle. "Too bumpy!" she yelled. "I a little scary! We have to go more slowly!" She clutched Robert like a tiny baby sloth and looked sad.

I clutched Marcus, both so he wouldn't fly overboard with each bump and so I would feel stronger and braver. It barely worked, on both fronts. The ride from Bocas--small island off the coast of Panama--to Bastimentos--even smaller island off the coast of Bocas--where our hotel was took about 45 minutes. At one point we slowed and then stopped at what seemed to be a tiny hovel. I was terrified, as it looked nothing like the pictures of the hotel online, but it turned out we were only buying gas there for the rest of the ride back. We survived.

At the hotel itself, thrilled to be standing on actual land (sand), I realized it did in fact look more beautiful than the pictures I'd seen before we got there. There are no roads on the island, no way in or out except by boat. No internet, no real phone service though I think someone had cellphone service somehow (not us). There was electricity with solar generators and gas to cook on and running water in the bathrooms, even hot water for showers. The place is run by a Belgian couple with a French chef, and at the moment there were two French families with kids there--one with a twelve-year-old boy and ten-year-old girl and one with a six-year-old girl. They were the only other children on the island at the time.

Immediately my head started spinning, and I had to stop thinking back to my (significantly worse than in high school) Spanish and change gears into French. What happened in practice was that I just answered everybody in English, regardless of who they were or what language was spoke to me, because sorting out Spanish from French was driving me nuts.

We were shown to our "bungalow," which everyone on the island kept forgetting to call bungalows and kept calling cabins or huts. These are about 30' back from the shore, on stilts over the sand with a lovely thatched roof and wood walls on three sides, the front side open to the beach. There's a hammock, a king-sized bed, and a twin bed, with a fan and mosquito nets over the beds. A nice bathroom with a shower and sink was right in our hut, behind the wall behind the beds, and then attached to the hut, if you walk down few smooth wood stairs, you find the outhouse--an actual toilet, in a little wood outhouse hut, one per cabin. You leave your shoes off and walk around barefoot--everything is sand, after all--and then just dip your feet in a little basin of water before climbing up the wooden steps into one of the huts, to keep the sand out.

All we had time to do was put down our bags in our hut and take off our shoes before it was 7:00, time to feed children and monkeys.

There's a little platform near the main dining hut where some friendly tamarin monkeys congregate every evening at 7:00, knowing that people tend to feed them then, and all the kids and any interested adults gather to feed them soft bananas. Marcus clearly wanted to be eating the banana more than he wanted to feed it to the monkeys. He was very reluctant, and would only give them tiny little bites, a little bit at a time. Samantha loved the idea of feeding the monkeys ("I feed a monkey banna!" she'd happily tell people after the fact), but she was more cautious. She'd hold out the whole banana and sort of jab it at a monkey like a foil, and the monkey would have to leap forward to try to grab it. Robert, who really got into the entire monkey-feeding ritual on our couple nights there, pet a monkey, but the kids chose not to.

Also at 7:00 is dinner for the children, at a small table off to the side in the main dining hut. All meals are included, at this place, and all are presented at set times. Adults eat dinner at 8:00, but the kids eat, earlier and separately, a smaller-portioned and less-highly-seasoned version of what we'd eat an hour later. Clearly this is very much a European model, and not particularly one we're used to. It seemed actually to create a problem rather than solve one, as after eating one then has to figure out what to do with the kids while the adults eat, since they clearly weren't welcome at the main table.

Additionally, the French children who were there at that time happened to be truly obnoxious. They announced in French that Marcus was too young to play darts with them, and that no one under six was allowed to play. The older two French kids spoke English well, but they only used it to play tricks on Marcus. After they ate, when they went up to the second-floor game room of the hut, they'd try to get Marcus to go away and leave them alone by telling him in English that there were big tables full of candy downstairs. He'd come down the stairs sort of quietly and suspiciously, and they'd stay upstairs and giggle about him, and then I'd tell him gently that no, there were no big tables of candy, and he could choose to sit in the hammock down here and look at a book quietly or go back upstairs to play near the other kids. They did this to him three times, and the third time I told him, desperately, "Look, Marcus, they're not telling you the truth. I promise you there's no candy here. I know what they said, but they're just not being nice." He had a dejected expression on his face, but I didn't know what else to do--poor little kid! He was of course no worse at darts than the six-year-old girl, but there you go.

The French parents were obnoxious too, making it perfectly clear that our children, even Samantha sitting quietly and charmingly in the hammock, weren't welcome at the grown up dinner. Eventually Robert and I took turns staying upstairs with the kids, playing with Samantha and guarding Marcus from the evils of the older children, who clearly had been conjured up straight out of Lord of the Flies.

When it was Robert's turn to sit down and eat part of his dinner at the long communal adult table, he chatted blithely to the French and Belgians, but when it was my turn no one said a word to me except once, condescendingly, "Oh, it is too hard for you with the little ones." I seethed at their misplaced pity, when it was their whole system that had set us up this way for the night. "Actually it's not too hard at all!" I said brightly. "Normally we just eat with the kids. They sit right with us and eat with us, even the baby, who eats off our plates and is perfectly happy!" My scorn clearly showed under my falsely bright tone, and for a fraction of a second they stared at me with a raised eyebrow, but then they immediately lost interest in anything that wasn't themselves. That was the last word I exchanged with any of the Europeans pretty much the entire trip.

At one point after dinner, when the kids had moved over to the ping pong table at the hut next door, the twelve-year-old boy tried to take a paddle away from Samantha. There were plenty of paddles for an active game of ping pong plus a two-year-old standing over on the side watching and holding one, but he wanted the one she had, so he went over and tried to grab it from her. She yelled "no" and held it closer, and the boy's mother came over to intervene. . . to better take the paddle away from Samantha. What kind of parent helps their big kid grab something away from a two-year-old? Apparently this mother.

The father is in the French navy. When we were introduced, before dinner, and I didn't yet know they'd all be horrible, I said pleasantly enough that we had just arrived, and I thought I'd survived the boat ride over remarkably well. "The ocean is very calm today," he told me.

Dinner itself was quite good--shrimp and pineapple ceviche, then red snapper fried with an herb sauce, mashed potatoes, a Moroccan-flavored carrot saute and then pineapple slices dressed with honey and lime juice. We escaped from the dining tent as soon as possible after dessert was served, and went to bed in our little hut very happily.

Falling asleep there, hearing the ocean over the fan, and seeing it, dimly, beyond the hammock at the foot of the bed, Marcus in his little bed beside us and Sam cuddled between us, was pretty amazing, and almost made up for the awful French.

Sunday morning the 22nd dawned beautiful and sunny. We'd all had a wonderful night's sleep and I was feeling like I could really get into this deluxe Gilligan's Island experience. Robert and Marcus took a pre-breakfast walk and came across a coconut. Robert was holding it and pondering how to open it when he saw one of the staff members, Junior, coming out of his shower hut just dressed in a towel and going into his own hut. "Boy, these are hard to open, aren't they?" Robert said in a friendly way. Thirty seconds later, he said, Junior reappeared beside him fully dressed and with a machete to open the coconut shell and even chop a piece off the inside coconut so Robert could get at the insides (we tipped Junior nicely when we left--he and all the staff, from the boat driver to Junior's wife who straightened our rooms and put out flowers, were wonderful, kind and friendly. Also, they were not French).

They brought the coconut back to our room and we drank the coconut water and then started eating the crunchy meat--both kids loved it, and I think Samantha could have eaten fresh coconut all day long, actually.

When we went over to breakfast, there was more fresh coconut, and coconut bread with guava jelly and peanut butter, and some nice pineapple. Robert had eggs as well, but I was happy with the fruit and bread and jelly. After breakfast we played on he beach in front of the hotel, Samantha on the sand and Marcus in the shallows. Marcus had been talking about snorkeling for awhile at home, even using Robert's old snorkel in the bath tub, and here he latched onto a snorkel mask and mouthpiece, wearing that from the moment we were done with breakfast. He also put on a lifejacket and wore that, as well, and usually the flippers that accompany the snorkel, and in this get-up he'd play in the water and on the beach for much of the day, oblivious to everything else.

I chatted with a nice couple from New Haven, a psychologist husband and neuro-psych professor wife. I had a definitely female-friend crush on her, and really enjoyed talking to her as she is smart, funny, and (she's Israeli originally) extremely direct, which I love. When she went back to her cabin to do some work, we set off on a family walk to another area of beach on the other side of the island. The directions the Belgian owners had given us for a "path" led us to a dead end, though, and while Robert deliberated what to do, I was swarmed by  mosquitos. We hastily retraced our steps to our cabin, where I liberally applied my mosquito repellant again (I hadn't used it this morning), and then took the shore path rather than the jungle path to the other beach--a bit bigger than the one in front of our hotel, but not large, with a stronger current, but more private. We built sand castles and played together until it was time for lunch.

Lunch was family style, with a perfectly dressed green salad, a tuna salad, and a warm potato salad with egg wedges in three giant bowls, plus lemonade and passionfruit juice, and more coconut bread. I loved lunch--Robert wanted something more substantial.

With a Columbian family with two teenage children, the French family with the six-year-old girl (thankfully the other French family had left this morning), and the New Haven couple, we then took a boat ride over to Zapatillos island for another, larger stretch of beach. Marcus took one look at the view from this beach and boasted that he was going to "swim all the way to Coconut Island!" We loved that he'd named the tiny island off the coast, even though the water was too rough for anyone to swim to it at all. Robert took Samantha out for awhile and she was almost swimming on her own. (He thinks she'd be swimming on her own for sure "if she were fatter.")

The other French father and the New Haven man together opened up a coconut, much less elegantly than Junior had opened our coconut this morning, but effectively nonetheless, and the spectacle of their opening it--using shells, rocks, and driftwood, as well as dealing with a half-dozen backseat coconut-openers giving advice--occupied us for much of the time on the beach. The coconut ended up so sandy, once opened, that they had to wash it off in the water, which then resulted in salty coconut flesh. Our kids didn't mind, and devoured it anyway.

After a couple hours we all piled back in the boat and went back to the hotel, where we washed up and did some more sitting in hammocks, and soon found ourselves once again feeding the monkeys on the platform at 7:00.

Tonight I felt more mentally prepared for the whole "kids eat first" thing, and it worked out much better--both are lots of rice and a nice soft sauteed red snapper, and then we rewarded Marcus with a real banana of his own (after he'd jealously watched the monkeys eating theirs) and offered him the chance to go to bed early in our cabin if he wanted. I tucked him up in bed under the fan and netting and went back to the dining hut. It's a strange feeling, leaving your child in a hotel room (which isn't even really a room at all, if by room you mean it has walls, after all) alone while you go eat dinner 200 feet away, but there you have it, and it actually worked out nicely. He got a good night's sleep, and Samantha immediately tucked herself up in the sling and fell asleep on me as dinner was being served for the adults. We ate coconut rice with red snapper and veggies in a Thai-style curry sauce, and then slices of melon in a passionfruit sauce, and we sat with the New Haven couple again and talked more with them. Both nights there was wine with dinner, but neither of us took advantage of that.

In bed that night, we woke to the sounds of heavy rain a couple of different times, but we were snug and dry and the perfect temperature in our cabin, enjoying the breeze. In the morning we saw many fallen leaves and pitted sand, again feeling lucky to be together in such a beautiful place.

More. . .

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Created: 12/27/13. Last Modified: 12/27/13.