Panama Trip
On Monday morning, the 23rd, we woke up and relished our last morning here, taking in the incredible view. It was brightly sunny, despite the rain the night before, and, as it had been every day, quite warm, of course.
Breakfast was coconut bread with guava jelly and peanut butter again, pineapple, and eggs with tomatoes and onions and pancakes if you wanted them. Samantha happily ate a pancake and informed everyone that she was eating one. The French mother managed to remain immune to Samantha’s charms. Samantha seemed to think there was something wrong with the woman when she didn’t reply to “Hi! I eating my pancake!” in a cheerful voice, so she leaned over and waved deliberately and said “Hi! HI! HI!” increasing in volume, trying to catch the woman’s eye. Eventually the woman said “Hi” and moved along, and Samantha gave up hoping for a better response.
We played on the beach again and then took a boat ride to Coral Cay to snorkel, just the four of us and the captain this time. I of course was not planning to snorkel at all, regardless of the conditions, but Marcus was excited about it and so was Robert. None of us had realized, though, that this mean snorkeling from the boat, as opposed to from a beach, and when the boat stopped and tied up to a buoy in water that ranged from 8-20’, I think it was all a bit beyond Marcus’s comfort zone.
He paddled around clinging to Robert for a little while, and then he was done. Samantha, still, even after three days of this, was not a fan of these boat rides, constantly yelling “We have to go very slowly! It’s too bumpy! Just baby bumps—not too quickly!” over and over, in case anyone was listening. Marcus thought it was all a great adventure, though, and did at least see one fish through the snorkel mask, so it was a success. Samantha insisted on wearing his goggles whenever he wore the snorkel, and when we got back to the hotel she repeatedly told people. “I go in the boat and I go norkeling. I love norkel! These my goggles.”
Back at the island we got washed up and packed up our things and enjoyed our last meal—excellent tomato and cheese quesadillas made with handmade tortillas, served with black beans, sour cream, and a nice fresh salsa, plus the lemonade and passion fruit (marucuya) juice, and a green salad. Marcus at two and a half quesadillas, and Samantha dipped the coconut bread into the sour cream and black beans.
We made some fun but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to fly a kite after lunch, changed one last diaper, and then played some final rounds of ping pong and said goodbye to our New Haven friends.
Everyone who was leaving that day then headed back in the boat to Bocas. In the front row of our boat was a Mexican guy and his Hungarian girlfriend, college-aged (they met while she was an exchange student in Mexico in the fall, and sadly she was going back to Europe to finish her degree after this trip); in the middle was us, parents and two little kids; and in the back of the boat was the Colombian family with their teenage children. It struck both Robert and me how neat this was, how ordered and how generational and continuous, really, and also how if you told the college student pair in the front that this was them in fifteen years they simply wouldn’t believe it. We watched the Colombian parents sitting affectionately close to their kids—high-school-aged daughter, college-aged son—and thought how strangely time passes, and how lucky we are.
To make this final boat ride even more blissful, the thumping waves held off, the ocean was calm, and Samantha fell asleep cuddled on Robert’s shoulder.
In Bocastown, we left our luggage at the hotel’s dockside office and set off to explore the town a bit since we had over an hour before we needed to be at the airport for our flight. We found a dilapidated park with a seven-year-old girl and a soccer ball, and Samantha immediately made a friend and started playing. I saw a man with a promising-looking cart across the street and sent Robert over to investigate, and he came back with a bag full of mango slices, from two nice-sized fruits, with salt, chili, and lime juice for fifty cents.
I was pretty happy, but we kept walking to another park which turned out to be bigger, albeit muddier, and mildly less dilapidated, and also next door to an ice cream place. We found more kids and another ball and Marcus and Samantha ate ice cream cones while Robert ran back to the office to get our bags and come back with a cab to pick us all up for the airport.
As it happened, the airport was less than two blocks away from the second park, but it was actually good we took the cab and hurried because our flight had been moved up by half an hour, and no one had told us (not that, with no phone or internet access on the island, we would have been able to find out anyway). By the time we checked in and took Marcus to the bathroom, we had to race onto the plane. Security was incredibly laid back at this airport, as you might imagine, and the seating was open, so we had another nice quick flight. Samantha has loved having her own seat on all four flights we’d taken so far on this trip—she sits upright and buckles up proudly for take-off and landing, and all of our airplane happiness levels have increased as a result.
We landed in Panama City and took an overpriced ($20—we later figured out it should have been $10, but when no cabs use meters, you really need to have some sense of relative values to tell when you’re being overcharged) cab ride to our final hotel. We were staying for two nights at the Country Inn and Suites Amador Causeway, which is not actually that far from the Albrook airport, but there was a lot of traffic getting there. We checked in and then took a cab ($10 this time) to Mi Ranchito restaurant out on the end of the causeway, quite close by.
It was a nice friendly, casual place with lots of families and an open dining room spilling onto a patio, right by the water, and good food. We had fried baby octopus and mixed ceviche to start, then a plate of beef rib eye encebollado and a batido de mango with Marcus’s favorite of the evening, a lovely red snapper (corvina) fillet with garlic sauce, served with crispy fried plantains and fried yuca strips. Samantha ate everything, from the yuca on up, and Marcus did too, but he ate more than half of the corvina and looked like he could have put away more. It was delicious, and came to $46 for everything with a tip.
After dinner we walked down the causeway a bit and investigated a bike rental place, which Samantha loved so much she never wanted to leave, then hailed a cab back to the hotel (at $6, we were progressively getting closer to what a cab ride of this distance should actually cost, it seemed), all in bed by 9:30.
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Created: 12/27/13. Last Modified: 12/27/13.