A Not So Shitty City

It's not an enormous claim to fame, but having spent a bit of time in Guatemala City and Managua, Panama is, if not diamond in the rough, then at least a smooth bit.

I would have been astonished by Panama logic but for one experience. When I arrived at Panama City airport, I intended to be parsimonious and take the bus to the city, thereby saving myself precious balboas. Unfortunately, the Panamanians have recently invested in an 'Oyster'-style scheme of pre-pay cards. “You can't take a bus without a MetroBus card”, insisted the tourist information woman, a pov reinforced by the guy that sold me a Panama simcard for my phone.

“Where do I get one?” I ask?

Seductively sallow stamen with sweet scent of sewage

Downtown, was the answer.

“Hang on,” I ask. “They don't sell them here but you can't take a bus without one?”

That is so.

“I must say, that's quite the silliest thing I've ever heard”.

The only way to get downtown to buy the bus card that would get you cheaply from the airport is to take a taxi for $30.

But not to be too hard on the Panamanians, I do recall arriving in the US to find that their airport buses only took exact change, and that no-one in the airport would give you any. Someone, somewhere, has made it their life's work to make things difficult for new arrivals. Possibly someone from the Guild of Taxi Drivers.

Aesthetically, the Panama City that my overpriced conveyance revealed to me was a cross between Kuala Lumpur and Torremolinos. If Boris Johnson needs a warning about the visual impact of too many skyscrapers with too little design imperative he need only take a city break here. It's all very shiny and looks moderately impressive with the tall reflections plumbing the depths of the bay, but it has all the character of a Tom Cruise leading role. There's no danger of a crook in the neck – I stopped bothering to look up very quickly.

WALL-E interrupts the view across the bay to Casco Viejo

Casco Viejo, on the other hand, was unexpectedly delightful. Built in the 17^th Century as a more secure location to defend against (mostly English & Welsh) pirates, the Old Compound has pots of old world charm to rival somewhere like Granada, if a little more down at heel. Although the Panamanians have only recently cottoned on the tourist-trap potential of this little slice of colonial Spanish America, by some luck they didn't use that ignorance to demolish it and build hideous tower blocks on it. So instead it sits like pleasant foothills at the base of the mountains of the rest of the city, as it slowly gets reinforced and repainted to make sure it doesn't fall down on any passing Germans.

Casco is small enough to wander round easily, though not so small that it doesn't contain about 15 Panama Hat shops. Apart from a sticky moment trying to explain that I wanted to buy deodorant at the local store there weren't any great challenges to overcome.

Those challenges only really started with my determination to buy myself an elusive MetroBus card. I asked for directions to where I could buy one – apparently at the nearest bus station and not at local shops (given their scarcity, a bit like only being able to get an Oyster at mainline train stations). And, of course, en-route to the first station I manage to get lost, and by the time I realised this was so far off my original path that I just continued for a pleasant walk along the bay front, which looks very pretty with its curving shoreline, palm trees and multicoloured shrubs but occasionally smells like a backed up toilet. Eventually I restarted my quest, learned the Spanish for “Where can I buy a card for buses?”, practiced saying it properly a few times, and then deployed my killer Spanish skills on the locals. 

Dawn over the delightful shabbiness of Casco Viejo

Unfortunately, as is always my problem, I could ask the question but struggled to understand the reply. I was pointed generally in the same direction by each helpful person, but when trying to follow their instructions I ended up in an auto repair shop in the middle of a busy road intersection with not a bus in sight. Finally, a taxi driver I spoke to offered to drive me directly to the bus station for $2. Since I had just walked for several hours in a pair of sandals made of string this proved to be too good to resist. Minutes later I finally held my orange MetroBus card (after researching the words for “I would like to buy a new card”, and then failing to understand the follow up question which may have had something to do with how much money I wanted to put on it).

As it turned out, it was the most pointless of quests. The next day I decided to go and visit the Miraflores Lock of the Panama Canal. I tried to beep through to the bus with my lovely orange card, only to be told I actually needed a different kind of card, and only got on the bus because of the kindness of a German woman, who beeped me through with her card in return for half a Balboa.

So, Panama City. Not that bad, but a bit like the Crystal Maze. With that Tudor-Pole bloke and not Richard O'Brien, of course.

Misadventure on the High Seas Part I - The Hat Back Band

How many disaster stories have started with the words "It seemed like a good idea at the time"?

Well, how many?

You don't know? Fat lot of good you are.

Anyway. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The plan was this. Get to the east coat of Nicaragua, see the Pearl Cays and then travel directly to the Corn Islands, little known gems of the Caribbean (apparently). Most people fly to the Corns from the old pirate town of Bluefields (or, showing little regard for adventure, from Managua itself). Those with limited Cordobas can also take a six hour ferry ride from Bluefields to Great Corn, encountering (allegedly) big waves and vomit explosions along the way.

Reasoning that if we were going to lay out almost $200 dollars to get to Corn any way other than a ferry (and having spent enough hours on Nicaraguan buses to both save the necessary funds and earn the right to eschew another few hours of transport captivity) Michelle and I chose our ambitious path. We both wanted to see Pearl Cays, (mostly) uninhabited islets off the Nicaraguan mainland with the archetypal white sandy beaches and deliciously blue waters, for which we would likely be stung for $200+. Flights from Bluefields to Corn would cost around $150, so we thought anything around $400 for the full tour from Cays to Corn would make a certain amount of sense. That is, a certain amount of sense to a crazy old man with a mercury-poisoned brain who eats chips wrapped in the Fortean Times and licks frogs for fun. And me.

Monsieur Eiffel, eat your coeur out. 

It took two days to get from El Castillo on the Rio San Juan to Bluefields on the Caribbean Sea. It's not terribly far as the Snowy Egret flies,  but since most of the intervening landscape consists of rivers and rainforests, terrestrial bipeds must find another route via San Carlos, the most painful part of which was the evening spent in the awesomely dull environs of Juigalpa,  a rancher town at least illuminated (literally) by an enormous cut-out style statue of a cowboy.  Just getting there was quite an achievement given the tendency of the much rehearsed phrase "¿A qué hora sale el próximo autobús?" to produce about five different answers depending on whom you asked. Since the buses all appear to be run by different operators, all of whom want to both depart promptly but at the same time sell out not only every seat but every possible inch of floorspace, their agents on the ground are not given to helping each other out. Fortunately, this means that - almost uniquely in life - the one giving the you the answer you wanted to hear is probably the one telling you the truth. 'Edward' was selling tickets for the 10am, and despite the efforts of his rivals to persuade us that the 10am didn't exist, it was Edward's smiling visage that ushered us, on time, towards the tourist desert of Juigalpa. For a while we shared our packed bus with a 32-inch cathode ray TV, and when Michelle offered a Pringle to the lady sitting with it, she took the packet and didn't give it back. Broadly applicable moral - don't give crisps to Nicaraguan women carrying huge TVs on buses. 

Edward, who clearly enjoys hanging on to buses

We arrived in Juigalpa too late to find the famous Archeological Museum (famous, that is, to anyone other than the people we asked for directions) and the gallery of small cows with two heads, so the Readybrek Kid was the closest we came to cultural enlightenment during our brief stay.  On balance, the 9 hour bus journey we dodged by visiting Juigalpa would have only been slightly more tedious, but we weren't to know. From the startled stares of some of the locals, we were probably the only foreign tourists to come through town in at least a fortnight, so at least one party was able to enjoy some novelty.

From there on the journey gets a bit more exotic. Through strange dusty roadside townlets with radical preachers with voices like Davros, through mountains and forests, you eventually reach El Rama, where the bus cedes its crown to the boat as the King of Public Transport. The first novelty Rama gave us was the Caribbean-accented English suddenly on offer. Two tourists wandering up to the port with enormous backpacks is an invitation to swarms of friendly advice givers, and he who speaks the most English wins. Or would, if he didn't direct us to stand in a queue for what appeared to be some sort of Spanish-language Pinter production, with lots of people standing around glaring at each other and frequent long pauses. Eventually, a second Anglophone called us out of the audience of the mystery play, and directed us to another ticket office which, remarkably, sold tickets rather than avant-garde theatre experiences. 

Loaded onto our first panga, replete with obligatory crates of chirping chicks, we sheltered briefly from a tropical shower by hiding under a boat-sized piece of plastic, before launching off on the next stage of our journey. The river zipped away beneath us at startling speeds, though the speed wasn't as startling as the occasional salmon-like leap from the surface of the water and subsequent smack-down (something to which we would later become more than accustomed). We were in good hands, however, something demonstrated amply when a small child's pink baseball cap was snatched from her head by the whipping winds. Alerted by her cry of anguish, and also by the fact that the hat had just flow past his eyeballs at 50mph, the driver launched us into a sharp about turn. Most of the passengers, completely oblivious to this act of chivalry, looked briefly terrified,  but were soon helping pass back the dripping headgear to the delighted girl after it was fished from the waters.

As we reached Bluefields Bay, the waves were getting higher and the boat was flying out of the water more often.  For some reason, we didn't properly assess what this might mean for a panga ride on the open ocean, and continued our quest for the Cays and the Corns.

To be continued...

The world's most terrifying salesman: San Carlos bus station

An Unexpected Journey on the isthmus.

It was supposed to be a complicated trip. Our cheap flights were already rerouting us through two regional capitals, so in a sense we were only slightly inconvenienced by a transport meltdown that saw us driven through four countries, but that's putting an awfully positive spin on things.

The smoking cone of San Miguel: Destroyer of Travel Plans

Everything had been going as smoothly as these things ever go. We'd played runaround with the airport counters ("If you queue here it will take ages to drop your bags, you'd be better off waiting for some of the other desks to open at 5am" "Which ones?" "I don't know"), I'd enjoyed becoming a seat sandwich after it transpired that my seat didn't recline, but the one in front of me very much did, the Iberia flight attendants managed to make me feel that ordering a G&T was in some way deliciously naughty (slipping the Blue Sapphire bottle to me when no-one was looking) and watched the entirety of Cloud Atlas (I say the entirety, because we very nearly gave up at several points) on my iPad to avoid the airline entertainment: Elf, on loop for 12 hours, on a TV stapled to the ceiling.

Given that a kind stranger had allowed himself to be moved so that my Esteemed Travelling Companion Michelle and I could be rehoused in reclining seats, all was well until we approved Guatemala. It was a stopping flight, the same flight number intended to proceed to San Salvador. There was something in the frantic last minute instructions to collect our hold luggage, just as we were queuing up to exit the plane for a 90 minute break, that suggested that the aircrew were working with soe very last minute information. Unfortunately, they chose not to reveal what that was.

Being a monolingual anglophone (I do try, but my current Spanish-learning strategy is to use the fun but perhaps not entirely tourist-targeted "Cat Spanish" app, so I can ask where the fish is and say the dog is stupid, but can't ask "why am I standing with my luggage in the street when I should be on a plane?"), I feel slightly cosseted by the international convention of English as the lingua franca of the skies. However, like the Albatross, eventually one must land, and suddenly realise that one is poorly adapted for this new environment. Iberia may have many English speaking staff on their flight crews. Their ground reps, however, are just as linguistically limited as I am*.

It was some time, in which we learned that queuing as a concept does not really exist in Meso-America, before we realised that having collected our bags and cleared customs, that we were slowly being ushered out of the airport. Reassured slightly by the familiar faces of our fellow flyers, we milled out into the airport approach road. Helpful hispanophones managed to communicate to us that we needed to get a bus, but for all we knew it was going to take us to another terminal. Only after waiting so long that our scheduled departure was 20 minutes away did we realise something was up, and only when the bus arrived did we manage to work out - by patient studying of gestures - what was going on.

Volcan San Miguel, a 37-years quiescent cone in the east of El Salvador, had chosen that afternoon to wake up and vomitar ash several kilometres into the sky. It was a shortlived eruption, but enough to ground all flights from San Salvador. Our journey was, basically, a bit buggered.

Which is not to say that we truly understood the actions of Iberia. True, we had boarded their flight with the intention of reaching El Salvador, therefore being put on a bus and transported there was a way for the airline to fulfil their duties. However, that also meant they were transporting us all to the one airport in the region that wasn't working. Had they left us in Guatemala, surely it was more likely that they could arrange alternative flights.

To make matters worse, by the time we driven for five hours through Gautemala City, the surrounding countryside, patiently filed through the border controls and on to San Salvador, the airport was not only disfunctional but noticeably shut. The security staff let us use the toilets and charge our phones, and their armed presence was reassuring, but it wasn't so far from being dumped in the street at 1am and told to sleep there until dawn.   

Travel Iberia in comfort!

 Throughout the night, various plans were hatched. We could pay the bus driver to take us on to Nicaragua. Then we couldn't. We could get a taxi for only $90. Then we couldn't. There was a mini-bus that could take us. Then it couldn't. Eventually the dawn came, and we discovered that we would have another 14 hour wait for a flight. Sit all day in the airport, or take a chance.

Latching on to Juan, a Spaniard also heading for Managua (who was also the kind stranger from the plane), we hit the taxi rank. There were a few startled looks from the Salvadorian drivers when we stated our destination, but a few whispers later were were offered $150 each. Hoping the travel insurance would cover that, we accepted, confident that a car could over the 300 miles to Managua faster than an aircraft that wouldn't be going anywhere for most of the day.

It turned out we were right, but by less of a margin that we had hoped.  The main road through El Salvador is in very good condition, but it's just a two lane road, and for all the stretches where our driver, sporting a borrowed ute with our bags tarpaulined in the back, was able to rattle along at 100kph, there were times when we were stuck behind, variously, an old bus, a motorbike with several people on it, or a donkey and cart. The border crossings were also interminable, though our Hispanophone friend at least made them less stress filled that might have been the case. Our driver was sweating and nervous at each crossing, which in turn made us edgy, but we preceded through several border checks before we hit a snag.

The Honduran highway feels like a neglected cousin of those around it, its roughness reflecting the scraggy terrain of the pacific coast of Honduras, but its border staff were helpful enough. At one point they filed us through a cage, giving us the impression were about to be handed our orange overalls to prepare for incarceration, but Juan was able to handle any questions about our bizarre voyage without too much trouble. The Hondurans were fond of passport stamps, customs forms and receipts. The Salvadorians let us through through entire country with nothing but a cursory glance at our documents: there is no evidence we were ever there.

The Nicaraguan border at El Gausaule is a (comparatively) plush affair, with trees and gardens and a small boy who (for some reason) "refreshes" your car tyres with a squirty thing. Regrettably, like Bill the pony at the gates of Moria, it was here our trusty steed deserted us. The Nicaraguan authorities, for reasons we still don't entirely understand, took exception to our driver and barred his entry. The driver, in turn, then insisted that he get his full fee, and was most crestfallen to be asked to take a cut, and we departed on less than amicable terms, but we now had to hire another taxi at great cost, or take a bus that would almost certainly reach Managua after our rescheduled flight, rendering our whole journey entirely redundant. We did explore the bus station, but the small boys standing around holding broken plastic guns and staring at us were discomfiting, and we slunk back to the patch of gravel that seemed to serve as the official taxi rank.

$110 dollars later, we were on the road again. The driver, despite claims to the contrary, was unable to supply a receipt official enough to satisfy insurance, and had to borrow one from his friend in a local restaurant.  I look forward to discussing this with my insurers when they ask why my taxi receipt has a picture of a roast chicken on it.

The Nicaraguan road, briefly, led us to despair. It was so potholed that for a first mile or so I thought Nicaragua's brush with the British Empire had led to them driving on the left, so often did the taxi take evasive action on that side of the road, but once it levelled off normal service was resumed.

According to Lonely Planet's map, Managua is 47 kilometres from the border as the crow flies. Sadly, Lonely Planet maps have long come with all the accuracy of a six-year-old's crayon drawing of a human face, and the actual road distance turned out to be 186km, a difference not explained by the occasional wiggle on the road or volcano avoiding reroute.  So the last phase of our voyage dragged on, and on, with the prospect of losing our race with the airline a distinct possibility. Our impromptu interpreter, Juan, was staying in Managua itself, so we entered the congested streets of the capital to enjoy the view of bright shiny orange Christmas trees, flashing elves and prostitutes, finally abandoning Juan and - it turned out - our driver in a shopping mall. Juan kindly gave us a bottle of wine in thanks for helping him escape El Salvador. We still haven't drunk it.

Our final driver, Bayardo, ploughed the journey to the city of Granada with great aplomb, and very kindly didn't hold us at knife point until we gave him all our money (apparently a hobby of Managuan drivers).  As we slumped gratefully in our hotel, we calculated that we had beaten the plane by about three hours, and - cumulatively - been on 420 miles of road for 18 hours. Worth every cent. 

* though they may not know how to say "quiero vomitar" in English.