Isla Bayoneta, Las Perlas, Panamá.

Since we are planning on a canal transit with the Time Machine, we decided to volunteer as crew/line handlers on someone else’s boat first. We were referred to a boat we never met called Adagio (a 38-foot Morgan) by some other people we never met and took the bus to Colon to meet up with Dimitri and Meri. Also crewing was a Caribbean sailor named Ray.

The intrepid captains of Adagio and our hosts for the canal transit, Caribbean to Pacific. We arrived about five hours too early and so did a little wandering around Colon before heading out to the boat. We pulled anchor and picked up the canal pilot at around 4pm.

Heading into the canal, where they got them big ships, for the Gatun Locks.

Carlos, our pilot, was an incredibly nice guy who explained all about how the canal works for us line-handling virgins.

The sun set just as we arrived at the locks and we met up with the two other sailboats we were to tie up with. Annapurna was a 48-foot Hans Christian that was built like an old-fashioned bathtub and weighed probably a billion pounds. The French Boat was another 37-ish footer and was built of aluminum. The two smaller boats tied up on either side of Annapurna, who amusingly had about 20 people on deck—all experienced line handlers—and they had nothing to do but stand around offering “advice” to us outer boats.

We had to wait for the Baltic Reefer to go ahead of us. These things are BIG.

By the time we entered the locks, it was totally dark. The outer boats were responsible for the line handling, much to the chagrin of Annapurna’s weathered crew, and we made the lines fast as the doors closed us into the first lock.

We were to be raised, 44 feet at a time, to the level of lake Gatun and once everyone was situated in the locks, millions of gallons of water started gushing in from below. The effect on our flotilla suspended by ropes in the middle was alarming and we started to lumber around in the locks, first pulling all the weight of the three boats on one corner line (attached to one little cleat) and then another. Meanwhile, we had to take in the slack as the boat rose. Ray and I were on bow detail and we watched nervously as the line tightened on our forward cleat, making loud popping noises, then loosened and we had to quickly take in slack before it tightened again.

When we got to the top of the first lock, the lock line handlers tied light lines to our thick ropes and tossed them back down to us, walking with the lines to the next lock as Annapurna was finally called into action to motor us forward.

We repeated the process three times to get to the level of the lake and while the bow cleat held, the aft cleat bent to the side by about an inch from the stress. We exited the locks, untied ourselves from the other sailboats, and motored over to the moorings to tie up for the night.

The next morning the pilot boats came by with new pilots for the day. We got a guy named Pat who was incredibly hung over after playing poker the night before.

The lake is something like 25 miles long and we had four hours to motor to the other side to the Pedro Miguel and Miraflores locks; if you hold up the show, you get charged the big bucks. Most boats lie and say that they can motor at 8 knots even if this is an impossible hull speed; Dimitri was able to keep us at a comfortable 6.1 knots the entire way with no problems.

Ray.

Master motorers, Adagio passed The French Boat midway through.

They are widening the canal and building a new set of locks. There was lots of construction in the cut.

Passing under Puente de Centenario; we are almost to the Pedro Miguel locks.

Did I mention that these ships are really big? In the narrower sections of the cut you pass very close.

Arriving at last to the locks. Pat is looking a little less green and we reunite with Annapurna and The French Boat for the trip down.

Since Ray did all the work on the way up, I get to do the work on the way down. Here I am looking like a dork rough and ready.

DAMN those things are big.

Entering the locks. Going down is way way easier than going up. The movement of the flotilla was imperceptible and I just played out line when necessary.

The mule dudes giving us the thumbs-up.

We’re done! We are SO OVER those locks.

Crocodile on the beach. Might be stuffed.

Welcome to the Pacific! (Bridge of the Americas)

Casco Viejo, Panama City, Panamá.

Sadly, the Boquete lesson of Booking A Hotel In Advance was lost on us and by the time we got to the beach towns west of Panama City, it was late and we needed a hotel. And it was Saturday. Once again, we spent over an hour driving around from hotel to hotel, banging on gates and waking up night clerks to discover repeatedly that everything was full and no, they didn’t know where we might find a room. By the time we headed into San Carlos, we were all sufficiently tired and cranky that the shabby-looking hotel over a Chinese restaurant on the main road looked downright inviting.

After inquiring at the restaurant, we were sent down an alley/parking lot to the back of the building where there was a very dilapidated yet happening bar raging behind some scrappy partitions among other things, such as our hotel entry, and we banged on the large metal gate until a intensely bored-looking girl let us in. Yes she had rooms and they were every bit as unspectacular as we had expected with peeling paint of sickening colors on the walls and geriatric air conditioners that drained via once-transparent tubing back into the shower of each room where it had stained a brown cascade down the wall. However, after a cursory glance over for cockroaches, we shrugged and checked in.

The stress and irritation of trying to find a hotel at 11pm lifted from our shoulders, we were suddenly feeling like we needed a beer. From the hotel, we peeked through the crack between a cinder block wall and the corrugated tin roofing at the mayhem below; people were shouting and laughing and there was much shuffling and music down there. There was also an occasional rooster crow and this is because the place was actually a Gallera, a cock fighting bar. We asked the hotel lady what kind of scene it was—would it be tranquilo for three gringos and some Panama City boy to just waltz in, get a beer, and check out the chickens? She shrugged to let us know she really couldn’t care less where we got a beer and we headed down, figuring we could always just leave if we didn’t get bodily thrown out first.

A quick assessment of the interior of the gallera confirmed that there were in fact females present in the bar—if only one or two of them—and we strode (cough) confidently inside. If there was no cliché silence as people stopped what they were doing to stare at us, it was only because a fight was going on in the basement arena and the reggaeton was at top volume. We walked through a large room with tables, chairs, a pool table, chicken cages, and various cock-fighting accoutrements to a smaller stuffy room where the actual beer was kept. We casually lined up at the far end of the bar and ordered beers before tentatively looking around. We were being stared at in a huge way but from what we could tell without making eye contact (disastrous!), it was more of a curious what-the-hell stare rather than a you-are-SO-chicken-feed stare. Tito and Joshua wandered over to the patterned cinderblock wall so they could peek down to where the current cockfight was underway and immediately an insanely drunk guy sidled up to Rachel to propose marriage.

The drunk guy’s name was Flavio and he introduced himself to the four of us and then to Rachel and myself once more; with a drunken flick of his wrist and slight stagger, he ordered a round of beers for us all even though it was evident that we had barely dented the ones we just ordered ourselves and he was holding a full beer himself. The female waitress (there were in fact three of them and we weren’t feeling quite so awkward now) lined five open Balboas on the bar as Flavio continued to attempt communication with Rachel (“Beautiful,” he said, “Panamá!” “Um…” said Rachel); she shrugged and gave us a little sympathetic smile.

[Cock-weighing chute.]

We carried all the beers out to one of the tables and sat down. Flavio seized this opportunity to introduce himself again to the four of us and we were shortly joined by another very drunk guy in a red shirt. He immediately ordered another round of beers and started telling Joshua some story, of which Joshua was able to follow very little even though he put on a good show of ‘si’s and ‘verdad’s. I made the mistake of making eye contact with the group of guys sitting at the table next to ours when I was surveying the room. Immediately they started to talk to me: “Hi, where are you from, what are you doing here, where are you staying, you are very beautiful, etc.”, all of which I initially started answering but when it looked like I might get yet another beer out of the deal, I told them I didn’t speak Spanish. Flavio was sitting between Joshua and Tito and nudging him, “Presenteme a sus mujeres!” (present me to the women!) and once again, Tito explained the connections: wife, cousin, and cousin’s wife. Flavio extended his hand, “Beautiful. Panamá!”

Tiring of all the attention and constant introductions, Rachel decided to make things more interesting and morphed into her drunken-situation alter-ego, “Susan from Canada” and introduced herself thusly to all subsequent drunks who began gathering around our table. The cockfight had just ended with a loud roar/cheer and a shocking number of men poured out of the basement arena. A guy named Manuel joined our table who was actually somewhat lucid; he sat down and ordered another round of drinks even though roughly two-thirds of the bottles still hadn’t been touched and within minutes there was a daunting array of Balboas vying for space on the table.

The scene was indeed strange but it was clear that although we were very much a spectacle rivaling the cockfight itself, we were not unwelcome in the least. The waitress rolled her eyes as each new guy who joined us ordered a new round. The red shirted guy had finally released Joshua from his slurred conversation and started in on Rachel/Susan and me. Except that every time I looked at him he’d stop whatever he was saying and make some gestures and comments about how our eyes were blue like the sky and some other stuff so I pretty much had to totally ignore him to keep him on track with whatever it was he was talking about. Not that it really made any difference because I couldn’t hear much of anything he said around all those beer bottles.

After the fight, money was changing hands and the cock handlers (or whatever) started getting their roosters out to prepare for the next fight. The roosters themselves seemed average enough, they were not especially large but they were plucked in an odd way: all the feathers were plucked from the legs and chest and possibly the around the long tail feathers so that the tails hung in a particularly prominent arc. The handlers held them fast around the middle and in this manner the roosters stayed very calm even while they were being passed around among different people, being weighed in the cock-scale, and fitted with fighting spikes. The spike fitter occupied the table next to ours. A fresh rooster was brought to him and from a jar of different sized curved spikes attached to the ends of little cones, he searched until he found a cone the right size to fit over the nub above and behind the rooster’s toes. Once he had a pair matched, he began winding surgical tape around the leg above and below the nub. Then he heated the cone at the back of the spike and dipped it in what looked like sealing wax to glue it over the nub; more tape was wrapped around the leg and when finished, the rooster had a pair of two-inch curved metal claws jutting out of the back of his legs.

[Fitting the cock spike.]

A new fight was about to begin and Manuel invited Joshua down to watch; entrance to the arena below for the evening was $2 (down from $5 which is what someone told us when we first arrived) and, overwhelmed with curiosity, Joshua headed downstairs with the majority of the bar. Aside from ourselves and the bar girls, there were only a couple of guys playing pool left; there was a uniformed cop supposedly guarding the rooster cages and he stood in the doorway to the basement so he could watch the action. Flavio excused himself as well but red-shirt stayed upstairs and continued regaling Rachel with exclamations of his appreciation of her exotic blue-eyed gringa beauty.

Another round of beers was ordered the moment the fight finished when Manuel, Flavio, and Joshua returned; Manuel had won his bet and was feeling flush with cash. The waitress looked highly skeptical as she tilted and peeked into one of the many undrunk and sweating beers already on the table; Rachel and I tried to pantomine that no, don’t bring us any more but a few minutes later, she returned with a tray of open Balboas for everyone. Flavio had forgotten who we were and required fresh introductions; Rachel glared at Tito as he introduced her as Rachel and not Susan but the discrepancy went unnoticed.

Again, roosters were paraded around by their owners who held and stroked them from head to tail and the new fighters were weighed and fitted with spikes. By the time the next fight rolled around and the place emptied, Tito wandered over to the doorway to peek in on the scene. Left alone with the dude in the red shirt, the scene quickly degenerated. Red shirt had already told us no less than a thousand times how beautiful our faces and blue eyes were and now he began making a very curious gesture in his lap. “Grande,” he said. Oh brother, we thought; we’re outta here. Then he started explaining to Rachel that he had a friend who spoke beautiful English and it was a shame that he was not here. But sadly, this friend was afflicted with a “hernia muy grande” (again the gesture, which was like hefting a football at the side of his lap). If this wasn’t bizarre enough, he went on to say that even more tragically, this hernia made his English-speaking friend piss himself. At this point, we couldn’t help ourselves and were nearly crying from laughter but Red Shirt assured us that this was a grave situation indeed. We tried to look serious and sympathetic as he repeated a few more times the football-hefting motion, the hernia grande, and the pissing himself part but it was hard to keep a straight face. Finally he cut to the chase and began asking us what our feelings were about Latin men. To make sure we understood, he described what Latin men meant (he, for example, was a Latin man) and we pretty much took that opportunity to split.

Rachel turned to me as we picked two fresh beers out from the pack and said, “You are going to put this on your website aren’t you? And then my family will read it and be scandalized that we took you to a gallera during your stay in Panamá!” “Um…” I said.

The fight had been going on some minutes already and the place was almost empty outside the fighting arena so we wandered over to the doorway to see if we could catch a glimpse—we didn’t want to pay $2 to participate in the serious spectating but after hanging out there for hours, we were curious as to what the hell went on below. The door guards saw us and enthusiastically made space for us so we could see into the arena.

The arena walls were about waist high and the inner circle guys crouched around, hanging over the edges of the walls. People stood behind them and on one side were I think there were some benches to stand up on. People were betting across the arena and the inner circle guys were shouting and gesturing. They made sucking/kissing noises or clapped loudly at the roosters during the fight. I could see Joshua off to one side taking photos (he asked if it was weird if he took photos but Manuel said it was fine—nobody cared). Next to Joshua swayed Flavio who apparently had continued to pester Joshua to be presented to the women. Joshua said that at one point near the beginning of the fight, he had called a bet of 50 pesos ($25) out to the crowd in general. When someone finally took him up on the bet, Flavio pulled out a damp wad of ones and change and when it was clear that he had maybe $10 at most, the guy walked off totally disgusted.

When we entered, there were two roosters in the ring fighting, one light and one dark, and they were flapping around making pecking stabs at one another. Joshua said that almost the moment the handlers let go of them in the ring, they start in at each other without stopping until one finally doesn’t get up. For the most part, the pecking didn’t seem a particularly efficient way of dispatching the other chicken but this was the strategy of choice (and why the fights often lasted so long—it takes a really long time to peck another chicken to death, or at least to the point of exhaustion). Every so often, one rooster would pin the other beneath it and peck some more. I didn’t see it but Joshua said that they do in fact use the spikes in an odd maneuver where they hop at the opponent with claws out, stabbing down with their heels where the spike is affixed. This maneuver is a real crowd pleaser. When not actively pecking, the roosters flare the feathers on the head and neck out and circle each other testily. The lighter rooster clearly had the upper hand and was doing all the pecking and pinning down of the other rooster, who was continually on the defensive and not making any aggressive moves at all. The shouting, clapping, and whistling was getting louder every time the darker chicken was pinned.

Suddenly something strange happened; it was like a light switch was turned: the lighter (offensive) rooster just relaxed his neck feathers and walked away from the darker chicken. The crown went absolutely berserk; the inner ring guys stood up and everyone was moving around and shouting. The two handlers climbed into the ring (there were a lot of people half-climbing into the ring at this point) and seized their roosters. They held them around the middle and pointed them menacingly at each other in the middle of the ring, and let go. Before the handlers even had a chance to climb out of the ring, the lighter rooster again took off in the opposite direction from the darker one and jumped out of the ring. Mayhem! Bets were flying and people were yelling and gesturing wildly. Once more the handlers faced their roosters off in the middle of the ring and once again the lighter rooster wanted none of it. That was the end of the fight. I seriously thought there was going to be a riot. The place exploded and everyone jumped into the ring, the handlers scooped up their roosters (the lighter one was surely destined for chicken soup); the darker rooster had just won by default. Rachel and I got the hell out of the way of the door as the mass of gesticulating drunk cockfight spectators came roaring out of the room below.

By now it was well after 2am and I had seen enough. Joshua and Tito stayed to hang out with Manuel and Flavio and the rest but Rachel and I bade farewell (“Beautiful, said Flavio “Panamá!”) and headed back up to the rooms to crash. The fight we had seen was the last fight for the night and it turned out that Manuel had won the pot for fastest fight of the evening (he had three birds himself). Joshua and Tito reported that Red Shirt had passed out only about five minutes after our departure and sat slumped in his chair the remainder of the evening. Flavio continued to contribute little to the conversation other than “Panamá!” and required a few more introductions. Sober friends of Manuel’s arrived and another tableful of beers were ordered to get them up to speed; Joshua and Tito had to fight to pay for any of them. Joshua didn’t get back until maybe 4:30 or so and the next morning Rachel said that around 3, Tito had come up to the room to use the bathroom but when she asked if he was in for the night, he said, “there are still beers on the table and Joshua is still down there; I have to go back.”

[Manuel’s cock.]

All of us were feeling sort of crappy if not still drunk the next morning but we bravely ate a low-key breakfast before pressing on back to the city. On the way out of town, we passed one of the gallera dudes passed out in the ditch at the side of the road.

Every year, the town of Boquete has a Feria de las Flores y el Café and thus kicks off a season’s worth of non-stop festivals and drunken disco-blaring parties all across Panama. We headed out with the Panamian cousins (Tito and Rachel) on a road trip for the Boquete one.

First order of business on a road trip: snacks. And beer. The road trip snacks of choice were empanadas from the roadside quesa place and something called ‘choripan.’ We had to shun the previous favorite roadside queso place because a recent expose revealed that they carelessly dumped their cheesy byproducts in the stream behind the building and now it was a fetid mess of evil-smelling vileness. They were to be shut down soon if they didn’t shape up. We stopped instead at the rival queso place for the empanadas and then headed on for the choripan. The choripan place had a startlingly disturbing logo.

Choripan came in two styles, Spanish and Argentinean, and were hot doggish in strategy with a piquant sausage lodged in a bun and drizzled with salsa brava if you went Spanish, Chimichurri if you went Argentinean.

We stopped at a different roadside cantina at one point to do a little Panamanian Cantina Bathroom research (verdict: it had possibly never been cleaned since it was constructed, the toilet had clearly not been flushed in a long, long time—no water—and relied on gravity to keep at an appropriate level, there was a collection of dead beetles the size of kumquats in one corner, but by god there was toilet paper—I still used my own). While drinking a beer we chatted for a bit with one of the two guys at the bar. He was fluent in advice for hotel staying, Boquete, and general traveling in the region. “Dangerous road between David and Boquete, you have to be careful,” he told us. “Why, is it curvy?” “No,” and he looked after Tito who had just headed off for the bathroom, “JOVENES!” he whispered. (Youths!) We all glanced suspiciously about us while waiting for Tito. After promising to be careful, we bade farewell.

Any hotel-booking optimism we may have had was quickly and painfully shot down once we arrived in Boquete after dark and hostel after pension after hotelito was either full or absurdly expensive. Or else the door was answered by a jumpy shotgun-weilding parolee type, kids crying in the background, and the room already rented anyway, which you know was really a shame.

In the end we stayed in a nice place and paid a bit more than we had planned but we were happy not to have to drive back down the hill to David. We headed out to the festival, and being used to American-style fairs where the food and booze are always marked up in price by 2000% or so, we were sure to stop by the minisuper for a flask of rum to smuggle inside.

Naturally, we needn’t have bothered since only in the US are captive-audience prices outrageous; food prices were pretty much normal. Food selection was irritatingly homogeneous though: hamburguesas, chicken with yucca, skewers, patacones (fried green plantains, smashed flat), and spirally hot dog things.

Here is a grainy photo of some mafia types actually eating the spiral dogs. Note Whitejacket here looks like he is about to spike his soda with some smuggled-in homebrew.

Here’s a food stall. Note the mouth-watering display of tinned fruit cocktail or whatever. The stall is mostly staffed with no-nonsense food booth types but if you order beer, they defer to the ‘sexy’ beer girl in the skimpy skirt busting out of her metallic halter top who is standing around freezing her ass off (we’re in the mountains where the temperature reaches down to the sixties sometimes). I ordered a beer from one of the no-nonsense types but she sort of waved me off like maybe the bottles in the fridge behind here were only for show, then took about ten seconds getting the attention of the Sexy Beer Chica, who then retrieved one of the bottles and instead of handing it over the counter to me, walked it out to my table (me following behind all confused). Service with a clenched-teeth smile.

The remainder of the flower and coffee fair (night-time) was fairly boring. Mostly it was a lot of people-watching action; the actual flowers were nice but not exotic for someone who comes from a more temperate climate (e.g., large plots of petunias and zinnias). Duran Coffee sponsored the coffee part of the festival and so that was the only variety available and it was dispensed, quaintly, into styrofoam cups from large industrial metal spigot jugs (like in the above photo on the left). As far as the smuggled booze goes, turns out that they sell bottles inside, which was convenient since it took us all of ten minutes to empty the first one.

Here’s us the next morning, still on boat time, we got up at the crack of dawn and spent a few hours wandering around town before Tito and Rachel got out of bed. Note that we are wearing JACKETS. There’s nip in the air, by god.

Here’s a photo of some Panamanian Mountain Butts participating in some vegetable provisioning.

We found a sign indicating a narrow rutted road saying “Vulcan Baru 12 km” so we decided to head there for the day. Along the way we passed coffee plantations and the locals who worked on them. The women wear brightly colored voluminous muumuu-like dresses accented with contrasting wavy ribbon (I forget the name of this stuff).

At the top of the 12-kilometer dirt road was a small booth with a sign that told us that the volcano was in fact an additional 13 kilometers farther and the road situation deteriorated drastically. It also said you had to pay to enter by car or to park if you walked in but since there was nobody around, we parked and walked in for free.

The road was steep and difficult to even walk upon it was so rutted. Up about a kilometer, we could see all the way down to the river delta to the ocean. The sky was intensely blue here and the clouds, bright white.

We headed back down after a small picnic stopping to chat briefly to a gaggle of little kids who mobbed the car with cries of “Galleta! Galleta!” (cookies/crackers!) We drove down to the last tienda we had seen and picked up some galletas, then headed back up to the kids where we dispensed the cookies, some dulce de leche candies we had, and some small sandwiches we made with the remainder of our picnic supplies. Farther down the road, we ran across one more little girl who also wanted galletas but we were cleaned out of food except for a couple of anchovy olives (which we let her have). She tasted it with the tip of her tongue (clearly NOT a galleta) and then looked strangely at us. As we headed on, we saw from the rearview mirror her brother come out and take the olive away from her but he also didn’t know what to think about it.

We got back to town and headed back towards Panama City with the plan of stopping for the night at one of the beach towns. Once again, we arrived well after dark and all hotels were full so we ended up driving all over the place asking here and there to find a place to sleep. It was after 11pm when we finally find a dour little hotel that just happened to be attached to a large cockfighting gallery/bar so once we got settled, we went out to check out the local testosterone [more on this in another post].

Next day we dragged out of the hotel (exhausted and still feeling like we had beer in us after the night before, which we did) to see some beach before heading on to Gorgona, where we visited Tito’s family staying in a beach hotel (which they booked in advance). The hotel scene was centered around a large shallow swimming pool overflowing with children that had about ten-inch visibility. We politely declined a dip.

We got back to Panama City that afternoon with just enough time to get ourselves back to the boat and cleaned up before heading back out to meet Tito and Rachel for Rachel’s going-back-to-work party. Thankfully it was a low-key evening because I think I am actually getting tired of beer.