RovingMind: Passage To Panama, Part III

Our unofficial prison at the edge of the Darien

With Yours Truly stranded on foreign shores, however temporarily, it seems a good time to resurrect that pesky question often put to me, "Jim, whyfore do you travel so?"

Sometimes it takes a while to get to, but generally I answer with my tried and true statement: "The mission," I explain, "is to explore other peoples and other cultures."

This, then, is what I set out to do that first full morning in Puerto Olbadia, to explore and to experience the culture there. And it is unique -- maybe not the most exciting, especially to adventure-seeking turistas, maybe not the tidiest, but unique nonetheless.

One reason that I set off along this coast in the first place was to visit the San Blas Islands, which are farther up along the Darien Coast. Here live the bulk of the Kuna Tribespeople -- tribus or tribals as they call them here. In fact, this whole stretch is sometimes called the "Kuna Coast."

Puerto Obladia, as it turned out, was home to several families of Kunas, and I got to see and learn some about them close up. This was not a Kuna village per se, you understand; more like a few were sprinkled into the local population.

They didn't want their pictures taken, at least close up. So check the Internet for a good look. Kuna women, in particular, are walking bazaars of color. Among the most colorful people I've ever seen. Their philosophy seems to be that no patch of skin will be left unadorned. Even the stretch between the ankles and knees is encircled with sheaths of eye-popping bead work.

They speak their own language, with a little Spanish thrown in. So I was not able to communicate with them. I decided to be more like a voyeur. Or as Yogi Berra would say, you can observe a lot about people just by watching them. As it turned out, I had lots and lots of time to do just that.

A "coaster" coming to call

One of the big events in P.O. was the arrival of "coasters" or local freighters. You could tell when one got there as the locals would scurry toward the waterfront. This was almost opposed to their usual gait, which was kind of a flip-flop shuffle, usually with gaze cast downward.

As beat up as I was, these craft aroused something in me, I will admit...something beyond my usual penchant for boat rides. It seems that the Darien itself had been working my mind. Like a siren doing a seductive dance of danger and intrigue, it had cast a spell over me and was drawing me farther and farther...of which coasters were a means to that end.

For what it´s worth, when I mentioned this to Juan Pablo and Santiago, they thought I was coming down with something.

Almost everything comes in via the water here, from clothes to electronics to most of the food. Which was a surprise -- you would think that such a place would be fairly brimming with tropical fruits and vegetables. But this was not the case in P.O.

I saw a few scraggly tomato plants here and there, a few papayas, but that was about it. I never did find out why, as the soil seemed fertile enough to grow all kinds of things.

Our hang-out was next to door to Pension Cande, a place called Restaurante Las Tres Ls. Its owner and chief-cook-and-bottle-washer was a lady named Lorenca. I took a can of tuna into her once, thinking such an establishment surely would have a can opener. To my surprise, she whipped out a bright and shining butcher knife. With teeth clenched, she ripped it around and open with that big thing as nice as could be.

She spat out words in Spanish like a machine gun, which I figured was a plot so I wouldn´t know what I was ordering. And no wonder. The first night she served deep-fried pig´s tail. That was it. No second choices. Her main course was served with rice, beans, maybe a few slices of carrots, and called plato del día in Spanish, plate of the day.

The second day it was deep-fried cow´s intestine, sliced up into strips. The third was deep-dried spam...spam, deep fried, I say. The plates pooled with so much oil you could lubricate a crankshaft.

Juan Pablo and Santiago preparing to depart

Two things I´ll remember about her place: First, walking in there before the power came on for the evening with diners sitting around woofing her plato del dia by candles. Every table was a little island of light, including in the kitchen where she was serving. Which was kind of romantic, until you saw the place with the lights on.

And second, finally seeing one place where the food overall was worse than the American diet. And from the size and number of bubble butts (and bubble guts) waddling around, it appeared that Lorenca´s fare was typical for P.O.

The third day was marked by the appearance of the mysterious Mad Russian. How he got there, no one knew. He was walking the streets, hands clasped before him, mumbling like some sort of de-ranged Byzantine holy man. He´d approach some one, babble a few words, and then dart away...Kind of a hard fella to get to know.

Our team was divided on him: Juan Pablo thought that he was another Dostoyevsky, the great Russian writer. Santiago had him as an Argentian poet/philospher of renown. For my part, I thought he was just another nut-job from Eastern Europe.

His name was Vladimir, we did find out. He had an interest in tribal cultures and earlier in life had worked at the famous Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. He somehow wangled his name in front of ours on the passenger list with Air Panama, which didn´t go over well, as long as we had been waiting. When we protested, he exclaimed, "I am reserved, I am reserved!" and slunk away.

In general, we found it best to steer clear of the Mad Russian. Like most of the residents of P.O., they tolerated us and we tolerated them, both parties knowing that we wouldn´t be there long. But the Russian did provide some entertainment as our time there finally, mercifully was coming to an end.

If there's a moral or whatever out of the whole thing, it probably has to do with patience. Waiting, fortified with patience, is so much of the daily routine here. The locals always seem to be practicing it -- waiting out the rain, waiting for the catch of the day to come in, waiting for a plane. This would drive most hurry-and-do-it Caucasians crazy, as it almost did us, but in P.O. it's just life.

Airport waiting lounge -- Puerto Obladia

A few footnotes:

Flying out toward Panama City, miles high over the Darien, you can see why the government has concerns. The green-clad hills and valleys go on and on, broken only by looping rivers and swelling lakes of brown water, where the lowlands were flooding from all the rain. It`s still a wild and untamed land. To expect Panama, very much a Banana Republic, to exert control down there would be asking something that possibly not even the U.S. could manage.

Upon landing in Panama City, the whole planeload of us (18) was declared "passengers of interest" by the govt. and our passports seized as we disembarked. We were put into a hot, stuffy room...no food, no water, the restrooms locked, with armed guards nearby. One by one we were grilled by security officials -- what were we doing down there, where had we come from, who did we know there, etc. P.O. had seen an upsurge of insurgents of late and the govt. feared that some might have gotten onto the plane. Only when our passports were handed back four hours later, were we finally free to go.

With two weeks gone by now, it appears that I may have escaped contracting malaria, despite all the mosquito bites. Santiago, however, the youngest of our trio at 26 and who only received a few bites, has been displaying symptoms -- waves of fever and chills, muscle aches, nausea and so on -- and has had to seek medical attention. As a result, he has had to cut short his epic journey up the length of the Americas and head back to Argentina.