Panarama

I said goodbye to my turtle friends and once more took to the road with only my trusty backpack for company. A short bus ride later, and I found myself at the border of Panama where I scrambled across a rickety, wooden bridge and into a whole new country. From there a jet boat took me to the island paradise of Bocas del Toras, navigating its way through a muddy river before bursting out onto the open sea.

Bocas is a small tourist town on an island archipelagos just off the north coast of Panama. The place is dotted with unspoilt tropical islands, each one covered in lush green rainforests. The town exists purely for tourism with all the usual infrastructure that comes with that (including your friendly, local drug dealers). Tourists come to Bocas for the laid back culture, the pristine beaches and the stunning natural scenery. It was the ideal place to spend a few days recovering after my hard-working weeks with the turtles.

The crowd at Bocas is the usual pot-smoking, Rastafarian, dread-locked, hippy crowd that loves to peace out in places like this (I imagine my Mum here, telling them all to get haircuts and handing out bars of soap). While I do feel a certain kindred to these free-spirited people and their idealistic passion, it never feels quite real to me. Perhaps I’m just not idealistic enough (or perhaps I’m too idealistic) to really get what all the fuss is about? Maybe I need dreadlocks and uncomfortably placed piercings before I can truly understand and embrace the Mother Goddess of the Earth.

I feel as much a tourist among these people as I do among any foreign culture. These lovably tragic, bohemian backpackers are so proud of their narrow escape from the trappings of materialistic goods. I wonder, uncharitably perhaps, how unmaterialistic they would be if someone tried to take away their favourite piercings, or worse, their stash of gange. Proudly and loudly they toast to their individuality and their freedom from all conformity, oblivious to the fact that they all look (and smell) the same.

Still, who am I to question the path of another? It works for them, and so I let them be with their shared non-conformity and their communal disdain for soap. A curious tourist in a foreign land, I observe and sometimes partake in their strange customs, but always as an outsider with my metaphorical Hawaiian shirt and Polaroid camera.

As any good tourist must, I booked myself on a local tour. Generally I avoid tours as most are over-priced stage shows, allowing a lazy tourist to tick off the requisite sites and experience the local ´culture´ at a suitably safe distance. Risking hypocrisy I convinced myself that this tour, being a nature tour rather than a cultural one, met with my stringent standards. Besides I was feeling lazy.

It was in fact a very worthwhile little adventure. A flat-bottomed jet boat, shared with ten other tourists, took us through the islands of this beautifully unspoilt archipelagos. Our first port of call was Dolphin Bay and true to its name a pod of beautiful grey dolphins skipped playfully through the water, glistening in the morning sun.

I wondered whether our outboard motor would scare off these graceful creatures. Our Captain, a stocky little Panamanian with dark skin and a pearly-white smile dismissed any concerns when he threw the engine into full throttle and starting doing some circle work. Sleek, grey shadows fell into line behind us and began surfing our wake. Playfully they tossed their slender bodies into the air, clearly showing off for the crowd and loving the attention.

It was a fantastic sight and I snapped my camera at them to capture the moment. They were too quick and too unpredictable for me though and I now have some fifty photos of the back of a boat and an unimpressive wave. The keen eye can probably make out the occasional fin, or the tip of a tail disappearing into the waves but not one shot captured the full acrobatics of these playful fish.

When the Dolphins bored of us we moved on (I wondered whether some enterprising dolphin ran a small shop under the surface with a sign reading ¨Come swim with the humans! Guaranteed wave ride with every tour!¨). Our next stop was lunch and our small boat pulled into a floating restaurant, built on a wharf jutting out from a deserted, tree-covered island. Although far over-priced (competition was not a concern for this establishment), the fresh fish was a taste sensation.

While waiting for our meals we donned snorkels and explored the pristine waters around the restaurant. The water was crystal clear and fish swam idly by with little concern given to our presence. The coral was a little sparse as the restaurant, in fairness, could not have been built on top of a full blown reef. The coral that we did see was vibrant with colour and alien enough to hold our attention before our appetites lured us back to the deck.

Our stomachs suitably sated, our boat set off once again. Our next destination was Red Frog Island. Here we walked among the rain forest in search of the rare and poisonous red arrow frogs that inhabit only this tiny speck on the globe. Our prey was not hard to find, being brilliant red in colour and hopping along the side of the path without fear of being eaten by larger animals (being poisonous has its advantages, though I image dating can be a problem). Apart from their vibrant colour, the most startling thing about these frogs is their size. Tiny, yet perfectly formed, they are no bigger than the tip of my finger.

After our exhausting hike in search of the frogs (all of a few hundred meters) we needed to relax. We laid out our towels on the soft white sand under the shade of the palm trees. There we slept for another hour, occasionally dragging ourselves down to the shore to cool our bodies in the gently lapping waves.

Our final stop was another snorkelling site. Here the coral was impressive (though it still rates below what I saw at the Cahuita reef). The small reef dropped sharply into the ocean causing an underwater cliff that disappeared into the cool, murky depths below. Swimming on the surface with the smaller fish it was easy for the mind to imagine larger darker shadows slowly patrolling the waters beneath us, adding a certain excitement to the otherwise relaxing swim.

Our captain dropped us off back at the dock. All of us were just a little tired and more than a little sunburnt, but definitely well satisfied. It would be dangerously easy to get used to this life as a lazy tourist, and my current travel plans place no demands on me. I have no place I need to be and no time that I have to be there by. Even for me this is a strange feeling, always in the past there has been some impetuous to my life, some timeline that had to be met, some goal that had to be achieved, some step that had to be taken. Here there is real possiblity of sitting fdown and doing nothing until the end of my days.

I decided it was time to move on. As appealing as a life of uncomplicated lethargy is, I prefer a bit more contrast in my life (how can you appreciate the slow without the fast, the lazy without the hectic). The next morning I found myself onboard a small twin-propeller plane heading for Panama city. The domestic airline in Panama is definitely impressive and for $60 I flew from one end of the country to the other.

My flight provided me with a glorious view, both of the scattered islands and of the stark high rises of Panama City, surrounded by dense green forest. As the plane banked for landing I was presented with a perfect view of the famous canal that cuts the land, and connects the Pacific to the Caribbean, leading out to the Atlantic. Great tankers queue at each end for their turn through the narrow waterway. It is an impressive sight, though I wonder if the 22,000 people that died trying to build it (mostly of yellow fever) would feel that the blood price was justified.

Panama City is a big city and although a bustling and interesting place it holds little appeal for me. I´m itching to get down to the Southern continent, to the cloud forests of the Amazon and the moutain kingdoms of the Incas. A message from Sasha, one of the girls from my turtle project, arrived just in time: she has booked passage on a ship touring the Galapagos and has room for one more. Fully aware that my usual planning skills could well result in me missing the Galapagos altogether, I happily sign up for the trip.

Tomorrow I fly to Quito in Ecuador and the following day I meet up with Sasha and hopefully a cruise ship. I know little about these islands apart from the fact that the nature there has evolved with minimal interaction with humans and so is some of the most unspoilt and open wildlife on this planet. It was in fact here that Darwin came up with the finer points of theory of evolution. This will probably be my last post until after my ship pulls back into port.