Panama: Day One
I spent all of last week in Panama on an employee training trip for work. We got to know some of our international colleagues, the myriad challenges they face, and the people and ecosystems they support. Rather than spending time waxing eloquent, I’m trying to get everything into writing while it’s still fresh. I’ll have to do a write up later for work purposes, and presumably they’ll want something well-written, so stay tuned.
Day One. 16 September 2007.
I flew into Tocumen International Airport on Sunday, September 16, arriving at nearly 9:00pm local time (which is, thankfully, also local time in Chicago) after a full day of travel. (You have to fly either through Miami or Houston to get to Panama—I went through Miami—and, with the requisite three-hour layover, my whole trip was a good nine hours.) I got my bag and walked downstairs, where a crush of people were all flooding into customs at once. It took nearly an hour to get through customs, and since I’d somehow forgotten to bring a pen with me (and they think I’m a writer!), I had to borrow one from the nice Swiss woman in front of me—three different times. There were customs forms, $5 tourist card applications, the works. But for all this, they didn’t care much when I walked through customs, and off I went. I met one of my colleagues who had arrived about an hour before me, and we split a prearranged shuttle to our hotel at the Gamboa Resort, about 45 minutes away. My colleague happened to speak quite good Spanish, so he kept up a conversation with Mari, our driver, about the local wildlife, about Noriega, about her family. I could catch bits and pieces of it, but it’s been a good 10 years since I used any Spanish whatsoever, so I couldn’t make too much sense out of it.
We arrived at Gamboa Resort, which is, frankly, a little over the top—Spanish colonial architecture rises from the jungle amidst a small neighborhood of historic homes, and although Gamboa promises to set you (comfortably, of course) right in the midst of nature, apparently they aren’t really all that eco-sensitive, even going as far as promoting their wildlife tours with pictures of animals that don’t actually live in Panama. Whoops?
The bellhop showed me to my room, which featured a sleeping porch. A sleeping porch! With a hammock! He suggested not using it because of the mosquitoes, but it was still a little tempting. But I decided I didn’t want to be eaten alive on my first night in Latin America, so I fell into a dead slumber inside on my bed, but not before setting my alarm for 5:45 the next morning. I was told upon arrival that our tour guide had arranged an optional bird watching tour for the early arrivers the following morning. I’ve never been birding before, and still find it awkward to use as a verb, but when I was younger, I always loved identifying the birds that came to my dad’s birdfeeders. The colleague with whom I shared the shuttle with highly recommended it, and I figured I didn’t have any other plans, so I decided to suffer another early morning in the name of birding.
to be continued…
Posted 25 September 2007
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Just come home from the Beautiful Panama Canal Vacation.. and its really nice going there again