Panama Part 3

I seem to have done fuck all in Panama City despite being there for 4 days but I will cover it nonetheless for completest sakes. Once we landed in our diddy plane in Panama City, banking and rolling onto the runway we were greeted by the world's most pointless customs. They dumped our bags on the tarmac and had to hand them through a small plastic flap. We could easily have just gone and picked them up ourselves. Then as we were flying from the Darien we were treated to a thorough search for undesirable materials. This consisted of a pat down and a quikc look into one of the bags. Why bother. Either don't check or check it properly. Whats the point in doing some half arsed neither one nor the other. Oh well. Also one line was pointlessly slower than the other. It felt like those times on the London Underground when you get stuck behind that old guy who has practically died from the exertion of standing motionless on an escalator and then proceeds to crawl like a snail through the narrowest of tunnels. Only Oxford Street shoppers are more annoying than that. Though London appears to be falling apart at the moment (despite the pounds brief rally) and maybe there will be no shoppers left and when I return home my hometown will resemble 28 days later. Once we got through the vigorous pointlessness we grabbed a bus into town and found out that Luna's Castle was full. So we checked into a shittier cheaper hostel that we never left (bit like now in Cartagena really) and really needed to wash our clothes. We managed to find a local laundromat and I did my best imitation of a bad TV advert. I stripped down to just my swimming trunks, loading everything in the machine and then hung around outside to watch the people walk by (there was a catwalk show in the local square that night). In our hostel room we bumped into a bunch of young posh kids from the UK. 'When mommy takes out the porsche', you know the types. Good bunch though and the girl Poppy had a sensational figure. We decided to drag them along with us for a night out in Panama City. Beforehand I was ambushed on our balacony by an Argentine girl who pinned me to the railings with her Spanish. I felt like Mohammed Ali rope-a-doping the zinging the rapid fire Spanish.

Having lost on points, we grabbed a taxi and headed out to a bar called Habibi's in the posh part of town. It was completely contrasting from the shitheap of an old town we stayed in. It was full of weirdos (some old woman calling me a beautiful, beautiful man in some chicken shop and a man covered in talcum powder trying to solicit us for money), but it did have its rustic charm. It also provided the contrast on the malecon of looking right and seeing a place that looks like Venice and then looking left and seeing a place that looks like New York. In Habibi's we struggled to get a table amongst the beautiful people, before they eventually cleared some corner table out of site of the other clientele. The sheesha was not badly priced, but the beer was going to be beyond us. Afterwards the seven of us decided to grab a bottle of rum (1.75 litres) for $2 each and go drink in the park like British teenagers. Its remarkable how fun that was and how much you forget how much fun these nights were before you could actually get into bars and be done up the arse on prices. Then we decided around 3am to hit up a club and went out to the only late after party dance club. Not a bad venue, though Poppy and I broke their cage with our dancing. Damn papier mache structure. Poppy also managed to get stuck in the toilets for half an hour. I thought she would surely have been able to get out underneath no, but she calmly informed me her breasts were too big. Yep, sounded feasible. I stopped drinking in there and missed a free shot round because I was in the toilet (bowel timing). It was bought because the English kid Tom had accepted $10 for entrance fee when Dom was on the verge of haggling it down from $20 to $5. This was a poser club, with the beautiful plastic people out in full force, but it did feel good to be in a proper dance place again. Outside I got chatting with an Aussie and his Panamanian girlfriend. He was in the IT business. I asked what type. He said the most profitable thing on the internet. Ah he was in porn. Well actually he ran his own webcam business out of Panama City and his girlfriend was the secretary. They invited us to a house party, but by this point we were all a little mullered. One of the English guys suggested going to a casino, which I fancied, but instead we hired a taxi to take us looking for food and left him waiting outside some food place while we fucked about for 20 minutes eating. Poor man.

In the morning we were woken up by Poppy bursting into our room in skin tight gym clothes. The English guys only stayed briefly before taking off and then we noticed Dom's memory card for his phone was gone. He suspected the English guy. Both me and Tom could vouch for Poppy's movements and that it wasn't her. We also did not believe that upper class English would steal something (well nothing that was not proper white collar crime anyway) and it was one of their better qualities. Ventually it turned out Dom had put it in his wallet and crisis averted, morning lost, we seemingly did nothing. We must have done something. Yet my notebook is conspicuously blank. I think maybe I was doing my last lot of writing up. I had also sorted out meeting Yoana in Colombia and had the Yankee girl from Dominican Republic confirm she would probably take the CELTA with me in Buenos Aires. I think the other guys took some street photos. There wasa random teaching Yankee who I chatted with. I concluded that the Alcott shopping centre is actually hell on earth. The bastards have you wandering from place to place in some sick twilight zone, as they can't decided which incorrect bus they will send you to next. I got furiously angry at one point and then I was told it was impossible to walk. Motherfuckers. Tell me which bus is mine. Eventually I escaped my prison of shops and bad buses. The old town is a damn insane asylum. They should send in specialists to assess this unique human region. Will leave this paragraph with a thought. The Yankees never pronounce their t's especially in water or wa'eh as they call it. It seems that when they had the Boston Tea Party, the drink wasn't the only t they chucked out.

Dom and I grabbed breakfast with the Yankee Richard in the morning and then set off to see if we could get a yacht up the canal. Then we got boradsided. The Puerto Obaldia flights were sold out until the 13th April. Shit. We needed and alternate route and fast. I also did not want to spend many more days here in Panama. We would probably have flown that day if Dom had not wanted to meet his friend. All the alternatives were too long by boat and Medellin flights were expensive. Bugger. We set off for the Miraflores locks with this problem in mind. This was all I would see of the canal and it was just some super strong trains pulling huge boats through it. We did not even visit the observation decks. We were also told we would not be able to board a boat there. Shitty. We tried to pretend we did not speak any Spanish and climb up an electrical place next door for a good view but they did not buy it and kicked us out. Then we went to find the yacht club, but we had bus problems again as they played ping pong with us between a square and the main bus station. I believe my shorthand sums it up well enough. 'Fucking bus cunt faces'. Must have been really shitty for me to write that. We abandoned the yacht idea and then apparently I did a lot of writing. Is that so? What the fuck did I do on the sunday. Maybe we wiped out the whole day. Oh well I think i just wiped out most of my time in Panama City in general. At least I am not spending all my holiday waiting for dates with checkout girls like this arsehole Dane in my hostel at the moment. In the evening we had a few quiet ones and planned our escape to South America.

We dicked around a lot in the morning, before deciding to fly to Barranquilla (a town lonely planet describes as a place not worth visiting). The cheapest flight we could get was with an airline called Aires. We then headed to a post office so the others could send stuff back. This seemingly simple task took two hours, because the post office does not have envelopes and requires as many forms to be completed as a Russian border official. Also the place we went to buy envelopes had a security guard who offered Dom a free shoe box for his stuff. Then when we came back down he was gone and we had to go through every level of management before we could finally take the damn box. Of course they said we could never reenter the shop with the shoe box. How terrible. After this mission we went off to the 'best bookstore in Central America' which was crap and the one in Costa Rica is the best I saw. The other guys went to the Bridge of the Americas (which I did not even see) and we did not have enough time for Panama Viejo (We saw it from the taxi to the airport the next day) and I phoned both my sister and my dad for their birthdays and we had a long chat. When I got back to the hostel I went for dinner with an Israeli guy and a German/Englishman. We then joined them, an Italian guy and a hot but bitchy Israeli girl for drinks in an extortionate bar. They told us it was $2.50 a beer than charged us $3.75. Bear in mind we were paying $0.60 in the hostel. I argued with them in Spanish and the head waiter said sorry but the guy had not known the prices. I said sorry thats not my problem and you are only getting $2.50 so they accepted that in the end. Dom had gone out with his Catalan friend from home and she had paid for him to have a swanky night out over the good part of town. He came back around 4am or so but noone could let him in so he climbed in the balcony like Spiderman up a drainpipe and along. Considering Tom had done this on his first visit to Panama City I felt like a fraud for always using the front door. In the morning we picked up a taxi and headed for the airport to pick up our flight. We were worried they would ask for proof of onward travel, but they didn't. What they did ask for was the original credit card used to book the flights. Well they asked Dom. Fuck it. I didn't have mine. It was back in England. I sweated and nervously filled out my form, waiting for the inevitable rejection. Yet they never asked me in the end. Tengo muy suerte and this time I needed it. I did not ask too many questions and we ducked through the airport where a bar of Swiss chocolate was over $10. Ah how I remembered this place from when I was there exactly 2 months before on the way to El Salvador. I had successfully managed to see fuck all of Panama. I had however managed to reach the psyhological mid point of my trip and the geographical one as well (if not quite the time one. That will come in May). We borded our crappy little plane (that was going to stop in three cities like some public bus) and set off on our exodus to Colombia. The plane was a nightmare of rocking, rolling and unstable flying. At one point I thought we were going to try to land on the grass. I tried to sleep. I prefer that method. Either I wake up touched down or I don't wake up. Either way its less stress. When we touched the tarmac in Barranquilla I felt tremendous pity for the other passengers who had to endure two more take offs and landings under this pilot. I hope they made it. Oh well you can see why it was cheap. But fuck it. I was in SOUTH AMERICA. Woohoo. Bout fucking time.