Pana-manic

The past few days have been a rollercoaster since leaving Lima, Charlie covers the main issues in her posts.

Panama is as hot as we expected, but more expensive, the taxi driver we got lumbered with at the airport was having a bad day, he made everything hard work, even making a huge meal of having to pay a toll to get out of the airport area - as if it was the very first time he’d ever had to pay on that road.

we got to our hostel at a reasonable time, checked into our very spacious room, had a cold but very appreciated shower and went and had a local meal. Beer was 60 cents in the hostel, which looks pretty standard for a bottle of local brew in Panama.

We were a bit stumped initially when the cash point didn’t give us the normal US dollar or local currency options, having read that Panama uses the Balboa we were expecting some suitably garish notes to be gracing our wallets.

Turns out that in Panama you use US dollar notes and the coinage is interchangeable between standard US nickels, dimes etc. and Panamanian equivalents which are identical in shape and colour but sport spanish writing and designs.

Once we knew this we were able to jump onto the crazily modified ex-US-School buses for 25 cents a ride and get around the city. I pity anyone who went to school in America on one of these buses, they are uncomfortable and very noisy.

Next to the bus station at Albrook there’s the biggest shopping centre I’ve ever seen, so we wandered around for a couple of hours and got some food from one of the 30 fast food options available, browsed Casio-Landia for my next watch, and I impulse bought a Volcom dice set/key-ring for far too much money.

In the bus station the locals queue for hundreds of metres in single file to get their school-bus home, and we discovered that they only do overnight buses to Bocas Del Toro, our next coastal destination, so we bailed on our next nights accomodation in Panama City and got on a bus instead.

After a sleepless night in the freezing coach - A/C on max (as I’d read about in surf guides but hadn’t quite believed) makes it cold through-out the night. I watched the stars and lightening while Charlie tried to grab some sleep and we arrived shattered in Bocas bus stop at 05:30 am.

Some friendly bloke suggested we get in his taxi/truck, an offer which we were too tired not to take up, which turned out to be a good move as we cruised to the water taxi in no time for 1$.

The water taxi goes for the world water-speed record all the way to the main island in Bocas Del Toro, then we get dumped there only to be helped out by another friendly local who points us in the right direction for the water taxi to the smaller island which houses our hostel.

At this point it’s 06:20 and we are the only ones awake at the hostel, I need to make a phone call and am about to bankrupt myself by using my mobile when the owner rocks up and I’m able to get a nice wi-fi connection and make a Skype call for next to nothing whilst the other guests slowly rise for brekkie.

After making my call and dumping our stuff in the dorm’, “be quiet, people are still sleeping”, we headed for the nearest surf break.

Walking along the beach is a cool experience with lots of beachfront luxury homes to gawk at and nice palm tree lined paths to follow, no roads on this island.

I saw a few poeple surfing a small reef so paddled out, they turned out to be 3 US girls, talking amongst themselves about boys and cheerleading between token efforts to not paddle into waves.

Another 100 yards past them was a peak with no-one on it which looked a lot better, so I paddled over and got some fun little waves, trying out a bit of DK with some success.

Got out after a while and returned to the hostel for some brekkie, pancakes and toast, then chilled out and tried to read my new book ($15 in Miami airport!) “City of Thieves” whilst the hostel played UK indy music far too loudly.

The hostel is inhabited entirely by American college kids, not the best company when you haven’t slept for 36 hours, so Charlie and I have retreated to have a nap and catch up on internet stuff like this.

Hopefully going to check out the bigger island for some surf, swimming and shopping tomorrow, after I try and get the camera out for the early.