But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley

I can’t say I’ve spent much of my life thinking about Panama; my knowledge of the place has generally been limited to the Canal, the Panama Papers and the Darién Gap. However, as the best-laid plans of mice and men are wont to do, mine went agley in the best ways possible. As a result, a quick trip across the border for some New Year’s partying became a two-month voyage from one end of the country and back, checking out just about every region of it on the way.

Panama? Completed it mate.

Bocas Nights ¶

But I’m getting ahead of myself. When we last left off, I had just set off from Costa Rica with a couple of Dutch girls in tow and a rough itinerary for making it to our destination in a single day (along with an unused Ticabus ticket to Panama City that would have required me to somehow get to the border for 4am). Our destination was Bocas del Toro, a Caribbean island chain renowned for both its party scene and the natural beauty of its smaller, less developed islands. After spending a wholesome Christmas naked in the jungle hosting film nights and group meals, I wanted to celebrate New Year’s with some debauchery.

At David one of the Dutch girls split off to head elsewhere, whilst Anne and I hopped on a bus (literally, our bags thrown from one bus to the other whilst both were still in motion) heading north, through the scenic Chiriquí mountain range and several indigenous Ngäbe villages, their stilt houses and the women’s traditional dresses instantly serving to differentiate Panama as a very different beast to Costa Rica.

Photo by the author

We arrived in Bocas and split up. Anne was smart enough to book a hostel in Bocas Town itself, whilst I booked one that turned out to be 5 km inland (and got scammed by the taxi there to boot). Not only that, but the hostel—Castillo Inspiración—turned out to be a very odd place indeed; the centerpiece was a castle built out of recycled plastic bottles, seemingly in the middle of a quarry, with our accommodation in a building called the Dungeon beside a pool complete with water slide made out of PVC piping. Not only that, but we got free arrival cocktails at the bar, and more the following day for the owner’s birthday.

We quickly formed a tight group of around 8—a mix of Québécoises, Dutch, American, German and even another Anglo—in no small part down to the shared inconvenience of our location. We also soon found a favourite haunt in town called Coco Fastronomy whose sandwiches (known as bapés) were delicious and whose rear deck views were to die for; at the peak of our addiction, on New Year’s Eve, we spent the entire day there drinking and eating bapés for every meal.

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The neatly-inebriated four of us then realised we had to get back to the castle to pre-drink and get ourselves ready to head back out to a NYE party at Aqua Lounge for which we all had tickets. It was at this point that we realised we were well past the end of the bus service for the day, but luck was on our side: after taking a chance knocking on a darkened bus window, we found a guy who was heading over to the other side of the island to sleep on the beach.¹ He said he could take us so we hopped in and… nothing happened. Slowly, Bocatoreños filled the bus (in varying stages of fiesta) whilst the driver did his grocery shopping and other chores. As we waited, several litres of rum and a stack of plastic cups were produced and shared around. All told, this 5 km ride in the party bus took us a grand total of 2 hours, with us arriving at the castle just in time to change clothes and head straight back out.

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Obviously, by this point, I was about a litre deep and so the remainder of the night is a blur that I largely pieced together from photographic evidence the following day. One thing I definitely do remember, however, was spending midnight leaping into the Caribbean sea fully-clothed and losing $40 that I very optimistically handed to a stranger for safekeeping and never saw again.

New Year’s Day was earmarked for recovering, but at midday the hostel owner and staff (i.e., her brother and nephew) disappeared off to a family get-together and left us the pool, so we did what anybody would do: called our friends from town over and threw a pool party. Then, for reasons I can’t quite recall, I had a third litre-of-rum kind of night on January 2^nd.

At this point the group started to go their separate ways, but after initially trying to rush to catch a bus, the American girl and I realised that rushing was a choice and that we could just stay another night instead. We spent the day recovering from our hangovers with a boat trip to Bastimentos island for snorkelling, before finally departing the following day.

Boquete ¶

Jenneva and I made our way down to Boquete, where we met up again with one of the Québécoise from the castle. For the first couple nights we stayed at Agartha Hostel, which Jen aptly described as having an anti-vax vibe; whilst I don’t know for sure how accurate that specific accusation is, we did run into another guest on the Waterfall Trail who pretty quickly launched into an anti-vax diatribe and there were more than the acceptable number of David Icke books in the hostel bookshelf (the acceptable number being 0).

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We also tackled the El Pianista Trail, whose reputation very much preceded it due to the mysterious deaths of two Dutch hikers in 2016, but which was in fact nothing too intense. It was long though, and we treated ourselves to a night of luxury at Bambuda Castle to recover.

The next night we shifted again to Blasina Beer Hostel, which had an unusual capsule hotel-like design. We also met a Canadian from the Québécoise’s hostel, with whom we ended up going on a last-minute horse-riding trip. The Canadian was a through-and-through horse girl whilst my saddle experience was a couple of polo lessons several years ago, but by the end of the session we were the only two who had managed to get the horses to gallop on command.

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When we got back, most of the others went to bed and I ended up in a bar with the Canadian and the much younger Dutch and Québécoise girls. Where she had been pleasant enough earlier in the day, in the presence of an credulous audience the Canadian started to channel some rather off-putting cokehead energy, regaling us unceasingly with stories about stumbling on drug labs in the Colombian jungle and suchlike that I’m sure are a postcode or two’s distance from anything that has actually happened.

She boasted about all the countries she had ticked off on her mobile app. designed for the purpose, and described her plans to travel to Africa for a year during which she would visit 45 Afrian countries. Some back-of-the-napkin maths suggests an average stay of 5 days in each country, some of which I’m sure take longer than that just to traverse, so I think there must be some sneakiness with tripoints and quadripoints. Regardless, that sounds like an absolutely hellish itinerary.

Alas, whilst our approach of booking the following night’s room the day before had granted us a varied tour of Boquete’s different accommodation options, it fell down when we hit Friday and everything was booked out, both within Boquete and without. Unbenownst to us, we had just hit a bank holiday weekend for Martyr’s Day and the Panamanians were coming out in force. In the end, we found ourselves driven (along with the Québécoise) all the way back down to David.

Stumbling into Santa Catalina ¶

Jen and I parted ways after a couple nights in David, which Wikivoyage describes thusly:

Although David is not particularly interesting, it is a convenient transport hub for destinations in the region

Before long, my plans found themselves scuppered once again. I had intended to head to Playa Venao next to volunteer in a Montessori pre-school, but a week before I was due to arrive they announced they had hired a new staff member and no longer needed me. Adrift, I decided to follow the Québécoise and a French girl we had met on El Pianista to Santa Catalina instead. On the bus ride, I suddenly remembered that I had been messaging a farm near there on Workaway prior to New Year’s and had never followed up with them. I dropped them another message, and by the end of the bus ride I had my next stay lined up.

First, though, I spent a couple nights in the town, during which I took my first surf lesson (and managed to stand up on the board!). When we got back to our hostel, I found I had a message on Workaway addressed hey surfers; I was now part of this elite group, and sent a message back.

Rebecca Olive

On my last day, the three of us rented a couple kayaks and paddled out to a nearby island. Unfortunately, a storm blew in and we had to make a split-second decision on whether to try and race back across the channel before we lost visibility of the other shore or whether to hunker down on the island and wait for it to pass. We ultimately went for racing across which, in retrospect, was probably a bad idea, but in this case luck was on our side and the storm blew back out the other way as we were crossing.

Then it was off to the finca (i.e., smallholding farm), to work for the next several weeks. The property itself was a former cattle farm that had been bought by the owners—a family from South Africa—a few years previously with the intention of allowing the original foliage to regrow in the hopes it would then attract wildlife currently absent from the area and they could rent out cabins to birdwatchers and the like. The progress made up until now was certainly impressive, particularly on the property boundaries when compared to the neighbouring fields:

There were several other Workawayers there: another wildland firefighter, this time from Canada; a Swiss schoolteacher; and a German girl who’d just spent the best part of a year at an animal sanctuary in Costa Rica. During the day we would water trees, whack weeds and whatever else needed doing, and then most afternoons we’d hitch a ride into the town proper to hang out on the beach. We had weekends off, but most of the time I would book myself into a beautiful cliffside hostel—Surfer’s Paradise—and spend the days working on my laptop with an absolutely incredible view.

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As much as I had fun in Santa Catalina, I can’t help but feel that it only has a few more years before it is unrecognisable to me. Whilst Wikivoyage describes the surf breaks as uncrowded, that information is clearly a few years old because when the surf was good there would barely be a clear spot along the whole break. Also, whilst the key surf beach is currently a 30-min walk from the centre of town down a largely featureless road, there are several developments of fancy condos (and a Selina hostel) currently being built along it and a dirt road that bypasses the main town entirely; my prediction is that within a few years, those condos will be completed, the dirt road will be developed into a proper road and the town itself will have the oxygen sucked out of it as tourists take the bypass road to their resorts, find all of their needs met there and no longer need to visit the town itself. But hopefully I’m wrong.

A Disastrous Excursion ¶

Concurrently to working on the farm, I had been in touch with the Workaway person who had messaged me earlier. She was trawling for volunteers to work at a surf camp on the next peninsula over, helping with maintenance and painting tasks. Free daily surf lessons were amongst the perks offered, and I reasoned that it would be a smart move since I could then a) practice surfing intensively to capitalise on my recent lesson and b) keep moving eastward towards my next scheduled Workaway in Darién. I asked why they had contacted me through Workaway but didn’t have a profile, and the girl told me that the owners had previously had an account but didn’t want to pay the membership fee any more; fair enough. I arranged a start date and let the Santa Catalina host know when I would be heading off. The day came, and I set off on a two-day journey to the remote village of Guanico Abajo, where the El Ranchito Surfcamp was located.

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I arrived and was shown to the spartan accommodation, which I was sharing with three Swiss and a German. I had really landed in a cluster of the German Extended Universe, with the other volunteers hailing from Austria, Germany, Switzerland and even Lichtenstein. We chatted, and I learned that the surf lessons took place around 7 am at the beach 5 km away, whilst our shifts started at 7:30; in other words, the free surf lessons existed only in theory. Disappointing, but I would still have a couple days off each week to take advantage of them.

The next morning, I showed up for my shift and was shown what I was to paint: a 10 ft wall, the top of which I could barely reach even at full extension and standing on the very top of the stepladder. Instead, I started with the roller on the centre, reasoning that somebody taller could come and do the perimeter later (plus, I was given no masking tape for the wooden ceiling beams and didn’t fancy being responsible for covering them in paint). Then one of the owners came over and told me I had to start with the outside, and complained that I hadn’t lined the paint tray with tin foil to make it easier to clean.²

I pointed out that I couldn’t reach the top with the stepladder provided, so she told me (now, not earlier, despite my height being pretty immediately apparent) that there was a taller stepladder. Unfortunately, there was only a small gap between the wall-to-be-painted and another knee-high one, and the taller stepladder wouldn’t fit in it lengthways. The owner suggested I put the ladder over the small wall, climb up the wall-facing side (i.e., away from the wall-to-be-painted) and then reach backward to paint. Feeling like this was obviously a terrible idea, but willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, I climbed up; it was exactly as awkward and ineffective as you may imagine. The owners told me to go sand the inside walls instead; one of the Swiss ended up doing the painting on a regular ladder leaning precariously against the wall, which my health insurance would definitely not have covered me for.

The sanding was not much more successful; depending on which of the two owners would come in to check, I would either be using too much pressure or not enough. Eventually, the day ended, and we headed back to the accommodation. I asked one of the Swiss girls (who was working as a nanny to the owners’ two young children) how her day had been. She replied that she had come down with something and asked to be excused due to not wanting to get the children ill, to which the owners responded only by telling her she would have to leave if she was off ill for more than a week; she quit on the spot.

We then headed off to the beach, where the girl who had initially recruited me took me aside. Apologetically, she told me that there had been some drama between the owners and volunteers in the week before I arrived (colour me unsurprised) and that the owners had just decided to get rid of everyone, including me. She said I could stay for a few more days whilst I worked out my plans, but that I would be expected to work. She left to surf and I told the other volunteers what had happened; they bought me a crate of beer and we commiserated, despite having only met the day previous, with the instant cameraderie that comes from shared hardship. We also plotted; within an hour or two, I had booked myself a hostel in Panama City.

The next morning, I awoke early. The owners had posted the evening before in a volunteer WhatsApp group (to which I hadn’t even been added yet) that I would be cleaning the swimming pool. Unfortunately for them, the first bus out of Guanico left at 6:30, so by the start of my shift I was halfway across the peninsula:

Photo by the author

I later reported the account of the girl who had recruited me, having realised that Workaway hosts don’t have to pay a membership fee and that the reason the surfcamp didn’t have a profile was almost certainly because they had been banned following poor feedback. The account was promptly suspended pending an investigation, although it does appear that this was only temporary.

A Charmless City ¶

I headed all the way to Panama City³ and Hostel Mamallena. The hostel was cheap and had good Wi-Fi, so I planned to just spend the two weeks before I was due in Darién here relaxing and catching up on work. The first red flag should have been when the receptionist thought the two-week booking had been a mistake, and advised that I probably wanted to only pay for part of it up-front. It turned out to be salient advice, though, as after my first day I knew was I unlikely to linger for long.

Having been in mostly rural areas for the past several months, I was unprepared for the miserable heat of a big city. As I looked online for things to do in Panama and plotted them on my map, I also came to realise that all of the touristy areas were located in small islands, separated by the areas of the city that one is advised to avoid both day and night.

Zipping from tourist haunt to tourist haunt by taxi didn’t sound like my kind of travelling, and I was longing to be back by the beach and nature, so after spending a few days in the weirdly antisocial hostel, I hopped on a bus back west; I was heading back to Santa Catalina.

Back to Santa Catalina ¶

The Canadian Workawayer was leaving the same day I returned (our buses passed one another on the road into town) so I missed her, but the Swiss guy and the German girl were still there; I had intentionally not told them I was coming back so as to surprise them when I showed up back in the accommodation. During my time away another German girl and a Uraguayana had joined the crew, and so I was soon back into the rhythm of watering, weeding and weekends by the sea.

Photo by the author

In long conversations with the owner (who was a fount of knowledge and rather prone to being sidetracked) we learnt about everything from the political situation in South Africa to the logistics of the drug trade in the area to the state of Panamanian infrastructure and building regulations. For example, getting planning permission requires so much time and money that the general approach of people in the country is apparently to extend their properties slowly enough to not attract attention—an extended wall one month, perhaps an awning the next—until eventually they have the desired extension as a fait accompli.

I started to notice this more and more, and came to appreciate the almost organic-looking architecture that resulted from the gradual accretion of extra structure. I also thought of Seeing Like a State and how this served a prime example of the innovations that can occur where life is less legible and the state therefore less powerful. I think there’s also an empowering element to this state of affairs; paying for architects and planning approvals is a prohibitively expensive upfront cost for most Panamanians, so this loophole allows them to develop their properties at a rate that is more flexible and affordable to them, or in other words to work all week to add a cinder block to their house.

Towards the end of this second stay, I had the opportunity to pick, wash and roast my own coffee beans; unfortunately, there was no grinder to be found, so they remain whole in my bag waiting for an opportunity to be tasted. We were also joined by another Canadian on the last couple days there, another wildland firefighter; they seem to be absolutely everywhere.

Carnevale ¶

Darién was looming, but before that came Carnevale weekend. Whilst Panama is not the country that first comes to mind when most people think Carnevale celebrations, there are several towns and cities dotted around with notable festvities. King amongst these is Las Tablas, normally a sleepy town of around 10,000 people that transforms for a long weekend into Panama’s premiere party destination. The day is spent dancing in the town centre whilst being dowsed with firehoses, whilst at night the town’s two rival queens (of Upper Street and Lower Street, respectively) compete to be crowned the Queen of Carnevale with competitive fireworks shows, dancing and huge parade floats.

In short, it sounded like it wasn’t to be missed. The other Workawayers were heading west, to Boquete and Bocas del Toro, but one of the German girls was coming east and finished at the farm only a week after I did. I headed off early and spent the week at Travellers Hostel in Chitré, mostly laying in a hammock and working on my laptop, until she came and joined me. Everything in Las Tablas was fully booked, but she had found a B&B in the nearby town of Guarare courtesy of some German travel blog.

It was easy enough to get between the two towns, so we went and partied and almost got crushed by several floats:

On the third night, we drank with a big group of Panamanians that were also staying with us, one of whom turned out to be some sort of celebrity chef. He got us all backstage entrance to a massive club, and we spent one of the drunkest nights of my life partying besides the DJ booth:

The following day I barely left the bed, and on the one after we went to the beach and I got singed rather badly. All in all, though, my second excursion to the Azuero peninsula had been markedly more successful than my first one. It was time to see if that luck could hold out.

Panama City, Take 2 ¶

The German and I headed to Panama City, this time staying in the old town of Casco Viejo. This is the main tourist area, and it really shows: the streets are pristine, the architecture cool, the cafes incredibly expensive and the police present on every street corner. However, in weird Panama City fashion, a wrong turn or going one or two blocks too far takes one straight into one of the most allegedly dangerous neighbourhoods of the cities, where there are no cops to be seen.

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As the German had Uber, we were much more mobile than I had been on my previous visit. We walked down the beautiful Amador Causeway, learning about the relationship between Panama and the US and the history of the Panama Canal, then ended with a visit to the (wildly pricey but fairly interesting) Biomuseo. We also went for breakfast at a cafe one morning and ended up in the middle of a large-ish protest march, which seemed to be something to do with a miners strike, but it wasn’t super clear.

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My second visit to Panama City was much more successful than the first one, but it really is a city where you can smell the Gini coefficient in the air.⁴ Panama as a whole is like that, with towering skyscrapers and the swish offices of multi-national banks trying to evade taxes surrounded by slums and not that far from rural villages without running water or electricity, all despite how much money the Canal brings in for the country.

After several days in Panama City, it was time for the German and I to finally part ways. I was heading to the final stop on my trans-Panamanian tour, and a place whose reputation very much preceded it: Darién.

There be Dragons ¶

Most people, be they tourists or Panamanians, would do a double take when I told them I was going to Darién. In Chitré, a Croatian guy tried to dissuade me from going by telling me it was one of the most dangerous places in the world, offered me a compass in case I got lost and gave me his number to call in case I needed help. The FCDO say to avoid the region, as does Wikivoyage, unless you have a very good reason to go. Even the people at Albrook bus terminal refused to believe that I wanted to go there, trying several times to direct me to the bus to the other Santa Fe in Veraguas province.

Part of this, I think, is the unfortunate conflation of the entire region with the Darién Gap, which by all accounts really is as dangerous as it’s made out to be. But Darién is a big place, and there’s plenty to the province before one reaches the National Park. I wonder too, particularly gauging from the reactions of the Panamanians, to what extent this is just the standard fear of a largely undeveloped region full of indigenous people that we can see expressed throughout history, from the Roman concept of the barbarians at the gate to the savage red man trope used to justify westward US expansion in the 19^th century.⁵ To hear the Panamanians tell it, Darién is a distant Mordor from which few return; pressed further, none of the people saying that had ever been.

Undeterred, I set off on the five-hour bus ride from Panama City. After crossing over several large lakes, their shores dotted by small wooden houses on stilts, the generally barren scenery of the rest of the Pan-American Highway started to give way to lush jungle. Then, all of a sudden, the colour would drain entirely and we would pass for a few minutes through a post-apocalyptic landscape of ash, the result of slash and burn agricultural practices common to the region:

Finally, after swapping for a small minibus for the final leg of the journey, I arrived in Puerto Lara, a small village populated by members of the Wounaan indigenous group. I was here to teach English, as some of the village leaders were hoping to develop the place for tourism and currently nobody spoke any. Me and the other volunteers—a German couple with their young baby, who is having a very cool childhood that he will remember nothing about—were housed in a huge recently-constructed house built in the traditional style, which doubled as a hostel for tourists.

Photo by the author

Photo by the author

Given that it was the dry season in Panama, running water was limited to a roughly 30-minute window every morning that would occur at a random time, generally between 6 and 8 am. Sometimes, there would be no water. As a result, someone would get up early and open a tap to serve as a warning; when the trickle of water was heard, we’d rush around the house to fill all of our receptacles before it cut off. We used the same water for bathing, cooking and drinking, although we boiled it before doing the latter. Behold my shower:

Photo by the author

Class times were set in theory, although it quickly became clear that the kids would just show up as and when to play and we would have to be flexible and just start teaching when there were enough present. As and when also proved to mean pretty much constantly, and the large house served as a combination nursery/playroom for much of the day. This was manageable when I could share the load with the Germans, but they left after I’d been there a week and I suddenly found myself trying to juggle a constant stream of children.

The kids were, to put it charitably, a handful. I’m unclear how responsible I would have been held if something had’ve happened to them, but I would routinely turn around to find them climbing on the outside of the building or launching each other out of hammocks directly beside the railings. One time I got back from the shops to find that they had chopped me up a papaya; it was only later that I realised I didn’t have any knives, and that there must have been a bunch of unsupervised 5–10 year olds playing around with my machete. However, lack of self-preservation and minute attention spans aside, the kids were adorable. I can’t say we made any real strides in English (which was always going to be an uphill struggle, as the kids hadn’t generally achieved literacy in Spanish until around 11 years old), but I did teach them how to tie a bunch of knots.

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The adults were more organised (as you might imagine) and several of them made excellent progress over the several weeks I was there. One kept asking me to translate odd phrases (e.g., I am offering free calls), so I asked why and learnt that she volunteered with the Panamanian Red Cross at a migrant reception centre by the Gap. I asked her if I would be able to join them the next time they went, but she said she’d have to ask her boss who’d have to ask his, and given the speed of Panamanian bureaucracy it was clear that nothing would be sorted by the time I left.

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Inbetween babysitting and teaching I worked, both on my site and on the mobile app. I am using to track my trip, and hiked the nearby trail a couple of times. My birthday came and went without much fanfare, although I did get some nice cakes from a van that would pass through the village every evening, and one of my students took me out to the local watering hole on my final night. Of all the Workaways I’ve done, I think this is the one that I most want to come back to in future to see how things have progressed; also, the arepas rellenas from the nearby Restaurante Arco Iris are to die for.

Back to Costa Rica ¶

My next destination was Nicaragua, but direct flights were ludicrously expensive (~£500 one-way for a 1h30 trip). Instead, I decided to travel by bus, which would double as a good excuse to explore some of the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. I hopped on the 5-hour bus back to Panama City with hostels booked in Panama City and David, but when I arrived at Albrook I found an overnight bus that would take me all the way to the border. I told my hostels not to wait up for me⁶ and settled in for the 12-hour ride to Changuinola, followed by a taxi to Guabito.

I was so early that I had to wait a few hours for the Panamanian immigration office to open so I could get my exit stamp. Then I walked across a bridge, pausing to appreciate the easiest and most picturesque border crossing I’ve ever encountered:

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From the moment I crossed the border, I was struck by just how verdant and lush the foliage was on the Costa Rican side. For the last two months, I had mostly been surrounded by the barren landscapes surrounding the Pan-American Highway, the bone-dry Azuero peninsula, the endless tracts of near-empty land used for cattle pasture and, to top it off, the ashen moonscape on the approach to Darién.

I remembered something that the South African guy had said, comparing Panama and Costa Rica. Decades ago, he said, both countries stood at a crossroads and had to decide how best to secure their futures. Panama had the Canal and all of the money that it brought in, and so decided that it didn’t need to do much at all (in what I suppose is an example of the Dutch disease). Costa Rica, on the other hand, recognised that its greatest asset was its own environment, and that protecting this would be a long-term project and require huge investment in education and environmental protection. Now, the results of Costa Rica’s phenomenal success and Panama’s short-sightedness are easily visible, despite the latter’s attempts to ape the former’s approaches in words if not in deed (e.g., illegal logging is rife in nominally protected areas like the island of Coiba).

I don’t necessarily know how accurate that all is, having only been in the country for a couple months, and obviously there are many other factors that differentiate the two countries (not least of all the six-year-long US-backed and then US-toppled Noriega dictatorship in Panama). But at least from my relatively brief experience, it seems to gel with what I’ve seen. Panama is naturally beautiful and incredibly varied, and the Panamanians generally seem to be pretty happy, but there is a lingering sense of precarity to that beauty and happiness. Just as Costa Rica apparently now exports seeds to Panama for plants that were originally endemic to the latter, I hope that some of its other positive examples can also spread to its eastern neighbour before the twin golden geese of the Canal and the worldwide tax evasion industry stop laying their shiny, shiny eggs.