A police escort! (by Charlie)

charliesnooks:

Its only been a few days since my last entry but the story of getting from Lima to Panama is rather traumatic for me so I thought I would share!

We left the hostel at 8pm on the 14th in a private taxi to the airport, when booking it we thought it would just be the normal beaten up taxi but as it turns out the hostel have a friend who they use for airport pick-ups/drop-offs. He is a policeman! We got a police escort to the airport talk about making sure you leave. Anyway it turned out well  because no id needed to get in he just waved to security and dropped us off :)

The first pain happened when we checked in, we had our tickets and had checked our bags when the check-in man turned around and asked if we wanted to pay our tax?!?!?! apparently you have to pay $31 each to leave the Country, luckily Ben and I managed to produce the money together but the swearing from me that followed could not have been too fun for Ben :)

We boarded our flight to NY and all went well except that I couldn’t sleep, we finally got to NY 1/2 an hour late and were ushered to customs, just a note to comment if travelling through JFK on a connection don’t expect it to be a smooth process, customs took forever, we heard ‘final boarding call for Pascoe and Snooks’ at which point we had only just checked in our bags and got through security! We ran to the plane and got on but then it was suggested we might not get our bags in Panama!

Tired and hungry by this point I was very glad to land in Miami were we got off and managed to find something to each even though it was seriously overpriced, (American Airlines don’t give you food).

When we finally arrived in Panama tired and grumpy we went to find a taxi, turns out they are really expensive in Panama so it ended up costing us over $20 in a shared taxi?!

We got to our hostel and checked in decided to get some food and then sleep, we walked to the square and found this really nice local restaurant, it was a bit more than we have been paying but we had a nice local style dinner and then came back and went to bed.

I supposed we had to have at least 1 bad experience as everything else has been really amazing! But its all good fun, heading to Bocas Del Toro tomorrow which has a water trampoline so I am very excited about that one!

Love to you all

Charlie