Cambodia Pt. 2 (Kratie and Sen Monorom)
Failing Better: the Key to Incremental Improvement
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett
This is just something that I’ve been putting a lot of thought into lately and even though it’s got nothing to do with travel I wanted to throw it up here…
Da Vinci didn’t become Da Vinci overnight, and even at the height of his abilities he couldn’t just doodle masterpieces. ‘Failing better’ means being okay with repeated, sequential failures through which you are able to improve your position.
A story I heard in college really drives this point home for me. Once upon a timeThe Emperor of Japan learned of a zen master that lived in the hills whose paintings were said to be the truest, simplest distillations of creation ever produced. Desiring one of these masterpieces for himself the Emporer climed the mountain of the Zen Master and requested from him a painting of the perfect crane (think the zen version of a platonic ideal). The Zen Master replied that such a painting would take him ten years and asked the Emperor to return in a decade’s time. Ten years later the Emperor again climbed the Zen Master’s mountain and asked the painter for his masterpiece. The Master replied ‘just one moment’ and went to his easel, where he picked up his brush and five brush strokes later produced a painting that no one could deny captured perfectly the soul and essential essence of the crane. However, rather than causing the Emperor joy this act infuriated the monarch. ‘If producing this painting was such a simple task for you, why did you cause me to wait for ten long years before making it for me!’ The Zen Master looked at the Emperor, and without uttering a word walked over to a large cabinet in the corner of the room. He turned the door handle and stepped back as hundreds upon hundreds of crane paintings poored onto the floor of his simple cave dwelling. And with a start the Emperor realized that the Master had spent the last ten years doing nothing but practicing and improving with each iteration so that he could reach this moment ten years later on. In other words…fail better 
Cambodia Pt. 1 (Phnom Penh and Siem Reap)
I landed in Phnom Penh on Dec 28th, 2009. I spent the first few days in the city getting over a cold, jetlag and travel inertia simultaneously. The city was so-so for me in most instances with two exceptions, one specific, one more general.
1)NYE day
I had heard rumors that outside of PP there were gun ranges where you could throw live hand grenades, shoot automatic weapons and even shoot RPGs. I asked around at the guesthouses and tourist areas and kept getting quoted prices ranging from $300-$450 dollars for one RPG, which was way more than I was willing to pay. Eventually I found a tuk tuk driver who said he had a friend on an army base far outside of town that could do it for less and after a bit of haggling we agreed on a much better price.
He told me it was far away and that we’d have to take a car. I thought he meant his car, but in fact he meant a local public mini-bus. These are basically mini vans that drive set routes on main roads where anyone can flag them down. The capacity of these vans has apparently been found to be infinite and no where else outside of SE Asia (the mini-bus is fairly standard) can you find more fervent worshipers of the ‘there’s always room for one more’ philosophy.
So into the crouded bus we went and a few minute later in came another person and another and another…I’m writing this a few months later on and packing a three person bench seat with 5-6 people seems totally normal to me now, but at the time it felt like quite an adventure (albeit a slightly less enjoyable one during the half hour where I had a man sitting on the floor of the bus at my feet with his sweaty armpit jammed into my knee since he had no where else to put it). We finally arrived about an hour and a half later and the result was this.
2) The second go ’round
I was actually in Phnom Penh twice. My second time there was much shorter (I was just passing through after Siem Reap to get a Laos visa and more pages for my passport), but also much more enjoyable. I did in fact meet up with Shira (mentioned in the last post), a friend of a friend who took me around to some of the nicer parts of town (PKK/Golden Alley, street 240, the lakeside) and while it’s still not one of my favorite cities, Phnom Penh grew on me a little.
And that was Phnom Penh. Siem Reap was the second stop in Cambodia and although it was a total tourist trap I enjoyed it. Good food, $5 massages, and between the bars and the temples there were a ton of things to do.
I spent two days touring the various temples and waterways of Angkor. It was totally amazing, although I found my sense of wonder somewhat diminished by the hundreds of tourists (self included) scrambling all over the ruins.
I was lucky enough one morning to have an entire area to myself and that was really special. My Tuk Tuk driver Am had taken me to a 1500m hiking trail that terminates at a section of riverbed that was carved into hundreds of lingas (Hindu phallic images) to promote the river’s fertility. On the way up the hill I met a man named Chan who was cleaning the path and as we walked he acted as my impromptu tour guide. I am REALLY glad I ran into him because otherwise at least half of the carvings he showed me would have gone unseen.
There is one other riverbed that is carved in the same way and two days later Am and I drove out to Phnom Kulen to see it. Phnom Kulen isn’t entirely on the tourist trail due partly to the distance one must travel to see it, party to the extra $20 entrance fee one must pay (plus transportation costs), and partly because the Cambodians want it that way. As it exists now it is primarily a place where Cambodian people go to have a picnic day, swim in the water, and pray at both the giant reclining Buddha that is carved into the mountain above and the seven colored water that seeps from the ground and turns into a natural wellspring below.
After two hours by moto over some rough country roads Am and I arrived. We visited the reclining Buddha, bought some rice and chicken and walked down to the water to eat and relax in a rented bungalow. After lunch we relaxed with some coconuts and then hopped into the beautifully cold water to enjoy the rest of the day.
Helping Haiti
As we all know Haiti is in big trouble right now. The poorest country in the western hemisphere has just been hit with a devastating earthquake, which decimated the small amount of support infrastructure already in place there. This means that hospitals, waterlines, powerlines etc have all been knocked out of commission and right now there is a very real race against time to pull people that are buried alive out of the rubble, get them clean water and medical help.
I hope everyone that sees this will consider donating what they can to Doctors Without Borders or a similar organization. To make it easy on you all here is a quick link to their sight.
You can also check out Chris Sacca’s blog entry on other ways you can donate here: http://www.whatisleft.org/lookie_here/2010/01/six-ways-you-can-help-in-haiti.html
Holiday in Cambodia (not really a ‘travel’ entry)
Surely. Surely I must be the first and only person to title the Cambodia entry of their travel blog this, right?
So…I began this leg of the journey a little less than enthused to be uprooting myself yet again only to re-plant in the ever-changing loam of new culture after new culture.
To take the metaphor further: when you do this to a plant once in awhile you’re helping that plant by giving it new nutrients and replenishing the irreplaceable inputs that give that plant it’s vitality. Transplant it every week and eventually you kill it. So for me going to Europe for four months after college was a much needed replenishment of my soul’s ‘soil’ and Israel, Malaysia and the trips that followed (even Central America) felt like well-timed PH adjustments.
The first few days of my time in Cambodia didn’t feel that way at all. In hindsight, I blame my stop over in America for this. In a very tangible way the time I spent at home (meaning both my time in SF and my time with my parents) stunted the growth and progression of some very intense and productive thinking that was just starting to flower in Belize. Please don’t get me wrong; I loved seeing everyone again and a part of me really needed the kind of relaxation and in some ways flat out lazyness that I experienced at home and all of me needed to see family and friends…but if I’d just kept on traveling…I wonder what that blossom would have looked like.
The thing is….the thing is it’s not enough to just travel anymore. I don’t really know what this means yet; certainly I don’t know yet if this is a positive or a negative change, but I can tell you that it’s happening and it makes travel much more difficult (obviously: if the purpose of travel is merely to travel, then you’ve achieved your entire goal simply by getting on the plane, train etc). I’m hoping though that by applying a little purpose to this leg of the trip (simply meaning taking some time to think about shit and finding a few goals to set during the trip so it’s a little less aimless) I can make this bit of travel not only enjoyable, but also meaningful.
I don’t want to paint with too grey of a brush though. It’s not all doom and gloom. I can say that it’s been a couple of weeks now and the stress and uncertainty that followed along from America has started to dry up and fall away and underneath there is a fresh scab of hope and optimism. But like any tender break in the skin I worry that if I move too quickly right now I’ll break it and it won’t heal right.
So…if you can’t tell I’m a little confused, a little uncertain and a little unsure. Then again, if you go through your entire life without a few of these little moments you’re either Buddha, a rock or the most boring person on the planet
P.S. I AM having a lot of fun (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrmZwh-pax0 and http://twitpic.com/xc41g for a couple of examples) and there will definitely be specifics coming soon on what I’ve been up to day to day.
P.S.S. Thanks to Shira Liff-Grieff and her travel blog http://www.shiraliffgrieff.com/when-in-asia.html for some much needed writing inspiration. I was reading about NYE and kept right on going. I hope we get to meet soon!
Getting back on track
So…It’s been awhile since I last posted. I truly did mean to keep up this journal regularly so that y’all could follow along and I could keep my memories fresh for later on down the road.
But since that didn’t happen and since it would take faaaar too long to re-cap the last…4 months (jeez) I’m just going to hit a few quick highlights of what came after Neal’s departure from Bocas and start fresh from there.
First, the highlights:
-Bocas Pt. 2.
When Neal left for NYC I intending to move on from Bocas and continue on into Costa Rica. I moved into Hostel Heike down the road from Claudio’s hotel to save some money and ended up staying put for about 3 weeks. The people I met there were wonderful and friendly and I took full advantage of the time to do some deep, way down relaxing and unwinding. These weeks in Bocas were the decompression time that I needed…maybe that we all need from time to time when life over-winds our springs.
The whole experience culminated for me in a very special night on the beach with the friends I made there. We hired a boat to take us to the beach at midnight and spent the next 5 hours by a bonfire drinking, playing in the bio luminescent waters, watching shooting stars and communally enjoying the fact that we were all lucky enough to be there, in that spot, at that moment.
-Costa Rica
My favorite moment in Costa Rica occurred in a town called Arenal. Arenal is located very close to an active volcano and has some wonderful hotsprings and lookouts where you can watch red hot lava rocks shoot out of the volcano’s cone and explode upon the sides of the volcano.
I did a day tour with a very nice Israeli couple to the volcano and the hot springs after. During the day while we were waiting for night to settle in so we could see the lava rocks we hiked around the base of the mountain. Our guide took us to a lovely pool of water with a waterfall cascading into it and asked if anyone wanted to jump in. It wasn’t a very warm day and it was raining and so most of the group wasn’t very excited about it, but before I lost my chance I stripped down to my skivvies and in I went!
It was amazing. One of those great moments when you think to yourself ‘Holy shit, I’m doing (insert awesome thing here) right now. I still can’t believe I was the only one that went in…
-Cuba
Cuba was a very intense and confusing experience for me. I might write an entire follow up post just on my experiences there, but for now let me just say that while I was there I was intrigued, nervous, heart warmed, amused, hysterical, fascinated, sick and a whole lot more. The highlight of this part of the trip is a small moment. I know that frequently for me it’s the small moments that stay with me the longest.
I had spent the day wandering the city taking photographs and I was hot and worn down. I popped into a local watering hole and ordered a soda and tried to start up a conversation with the bartender. I wasn’t holding out much hope for a great discourse between the two of us for two reasons: One, my Spanish is TERRIBLE and very few people in Cuba speak English and two, almost every person I’d met turned out to be Jinteneros (street hustlers) or people that just wanted money from me. For me this was the biggest, somewhat insurmountable barrier to friendship that I found there.
But between my terrible Spanish and his terrible English that bartender and I had one of the only honest, person-to-person conversations that I had in my entire time in Cuba at a time when I really needed my sociability battery re-charged.
-Nicaragua
I ended up catching a terrible stomach bug in Cuba and carried it into Nicaragua. It knocked me out of commission for longer than I would have liked and I didn’t really see a lot of this country. I did end up spending a week in Granada and can say that I really enjoyed the city. Its certainly the most visually charming town that I went through on this trip.
-Honduras
I scooted straight through Honduras (only due to time constraints- in my limited experience there it was a terrific place) and went right to an island called Utila to see my friend Sarah and do some diving.
The highlight of this trip for me is easy. It was my first ever night dive where I saw an octopus!! I have wanted to see an octopus in the wild for as long as I can remember…I’m pretty sure since the first time I saw one at the Seattle Aquarium and the experience did not dissapoint. Over the course of that week I also saw moray eels, crabs, lobsters, barracuda, sting rays, sea turtles, halibut, and even snorkeled in the open sea with dolphins!
Belize
- By the time I got to Belize City I only had a week or so left on the trip. I spent a day in the city simply because I’d landed there from Honduras and then kicked out to San Pedro, Ambergris Kaye. I spent the first few days in my hotel room waiting for Hurricane Ida to stop dumping rain all over the country and then had a few beautiful days in the sun listening to music, writing down my thoughts and generally mentally closing the chapter on the first leg of this journey.
When I flew back to the US I didn’t go to SF or Seattle, but instead to a part of the country I’d never seen before: Austin, Texas. I’ll write more on this part of the trip later, but I will say that for a variety of reasons I loved my time in Austin (so much so that I went twice!) and to me it felt like a home away from home from day one.
At the moment I’m sitting in Philz Coffee (my favorite cafe in SF) finally breaking my writer’s block and gearing up for round 2: the Asian leg of the trip. Its a little hard to believe that I’m going to be sitting in Phnom Penh Cambodia in only a week’s time! I’m going to try to do a better job of regularly jotting down an entry while I’m in Asia and hopefully y’all will find it worth reading .
Happy holidays to one and all!
Bocas del Toro
I’ve been having a little trouble putting together a post for this last part of the trip. Each day has been so different and each experience so disparate from the others that it’s become near-impossible to create a cohesive narrative for Bocas. Instead, here are a few mashed together impressions from a few of the days we spent here:
La Finca de Claudio
This was by far the best day we had in Bocas. Claudio (the aforementioned owner of our hotel) invited Neal and I to come with him to his private farm and hang out for a day. We had heard about his farm from another Gringo ex-pat a couple of days before while waiting in line for some late night fried chicken and he had gone on and on about what a beautiful place it was.
And it was too. When we pulled up to his little crumbling dock and walked up into his ranch house I think both Neal and I knew that we were in a special place.
For the first couple of hours we relaxed with Claudio in his house. He was a perfect host; he offered drinks, told us emphatically to relax and treat the place as our own and soon sat down to talk with us.
We talked politics, religion, philosophy, ethics. He is a very smart man and has a very classic christian viewpoint (do no harm, turn the other cheek, love thy neighbor etc). He told us that he left America because he could no longer abide paying taxes that went to kill other people and that in Panama he was his own man, with no one telling him what to do or how to do it.
We talked about growing up Black in the south. He told us that his father had been killed when he was 6 months old because he refused to step off of the sidewalk into the mud when some white men passed and so they shot him. His mother died at 37 from breast cancer and he was mostly raised by his grandmother. He was 33 before he could legally vote.
All of this naturally blew Neal and I away. He went on to talk about his time spent in the civil rights movement in Chicago, marching with Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson, seeing the fear in Dr. King’s eyes one day near the end of his life when, while surrounded by mammoth body guards, he walked out into the streets of Chicago knowing very well that somewhere out there in those same streets were people that wanted him dead.
Claudio’s grandmother is the one that raised him. His eyes lit up with warmth and bitter-sweet rememberance when he talked about her. He said “she told me I could be anything I wanted to be. Imagine that! In a time when I couldn’t go to college or hold a trade, she told me that I could be anything I wanted to be. That I was smart. That I was good.” He went on to say that he felt this was maybe part of the difficulty in the American Black community. That there aren’t enough people telling young kids that they are worthwhile and full of potential.
We talked about religion and war and the tragic sadness that is the human condition, greasing the wheels of comminication with another glass of wine or a beer now and then. When we finished Claudio took us outside to show us his farm. It was quickly apparent that he loved this land. Out there his step was a little lighter, his movements somehow more child-like and joyful. It began raining and his youthful energy spread into me. I suddenly felt 7 years old again, in the wet grasses of my childhood home laying on the land with my dog and soaking up the rain in equal amounts with the ground.
He took us from tree to tree, telling us what everything was and explaining what some of the more obscure plants were for (This one I make into tea every morning, that one is a cure-all for aging, that over there protects against cancer). I saw a breadfruit tree for the first time in my life, a papaya tree, the Noni tree. The rain beating down ever harder Neal and I toured with him through the entire property. He explained that certain things grew better in certain areas, but that he couldn’t predict it and so he’d plant random rows of different crops all over the place to see what worked there. I think that was the secret relationship he had with the place. I don’t think he wanted orderly rows of crops, but rather haphazard placements of plants that fit in so well with the natural chaos of the jungle.
Eventually we went back to his house and I sat on the porch soaked to the bone and never more relaxed.
La Finca de Dawna
Dawna was a friend of a friend that I connected with on our first day in Bocas. Full of energy and very friendly, she was an easy person to get to know and hang out with. The first night we met up with her at her house (a very nice apartment in the town) and learned that she was staying in Bocas to develop a 100 acre piece of land for a private family. They wanted to create some kind of eco-lodge and it was her job to lead the development and make decisions on what specifically should be put on the land.
She had invited us to come with her to a ‘locals’ party in one of the two boat marinas in Bocas. We hopped a quick water taxi with her and a friend of hers and soon found ourselves smack dab in the middle of a Jimmy Buffett music video.
I like to think of that event as a ‘Gringo fabrengen.’ There were 40 or so ex-pats sitting around tables in casual boating gear or hawaiian shits communing in mutual agreement that there’s was the life and that this was the place to be. There was a belly dancing show put on by 4 of the wives from the Gringo community followed by some so-so fire spinning from a gay couple that owned the Marina. For some reason I never quite got comfortable in that place. The only good conversation I had was with a 17 year old girl from Oregon whose parents had brought her down with them for the summer to work on their vacation property. I told her that it was a pretty amazing thing she was getting to do for a 17 year old and at the end of the night when she left she said talking to me was the highlight of her night. It was actually one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received.
It was a couple of days later when Neal and I managed to hook up with Dawna again and visit her plot with her. We met her and a couple of her friends/construction workers at the dock and drove over to the mainland.
The place was pretty cool. I tried some foods I’ve never had before (raw sugarcane, raw Cacao and something called a jobo which is like a small mango) and ate a pineapple that had been in the ground only minutes before. We also finally got our fill of poison dart frogs. They were everywhere. You couldn’t take a single step without some tiny thing darting away from your foot (yet I couldn’t get a single good picture of one).
We helped Dawna plant some seeds so she could see if she could grow coffee or cotton on the land and toured around with her has she explained her plans for the place’s future. Every 45 minutes or so we’d hear the dinosaur roar of howler monkeys in the distance, but unfortunately we never saw them.
Zapatillas and the rest of it
The other main highlight of this last week was our day on Zapatillas Island. Zapatillas means tennis shoe and this place wasn’t much bigger than one. Reachable by water taxi, it’s one of two islands that sits in more open waters than the rest of Bocas and common local agreement has the most beautiful beach in the area. It’s also a national park so you have to pay 10 dollars just to set foot on it. Neal and I went there with an Italian couple named Andrea (Andre) and Ludavita. They were very nice and we would spend a good amount of time with them before they left back to Panama city.
That entire day was spent snorkeling in aquamarine waters and sunning ourselves on a true desert/deserted island. We kept joking that the boatman could go home, that we would be staying put. I spent a good two hours in the water out there diving down to get a better look at the coral and the fish, ignoring the ever-growing burn on my back so I could stay out for just 15 more minutes…and just 15 more minutes…
If there was a single blemish on Zapatillas it was the sand flies. They harassed us on the beach, they followed us into the shallows, and they made damn sure you didn’t lay down in the sand and fall asleep. At first I was quite upset by them (their bites HURT!) but Andrea sagely told me they were there to remind us that ‘nothing’s perfect.’ Like I said, very good, cool people.
There were other good moments in Bocas, other cool things. We saw dolphins coming up for air in Dolphin Bay, we had some great snorkeling in Crawl Cay, and some fun nights out. But for me these are the highlights.
Neal has been sick the last couple of days. He’s shivering with a fever and we haven’t done much. Claudio, being the beautiful man that he is, made him some lemon and honey tea last night (his grandmother’s recipe which calls for the boiling of several lemons and the addition of gobs of honey…His Grandma also used to make him eat one of the lemons to make sure he got it all in.)
He left today for San Jose and ultimately the States and I was supposed to go to Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica to get on the next leg of the journey, but here I am instead…in a Hostel in Bocas town realizing that for better or worse the attitude of Central America has got me in it’s grip…and I’m not in a hurry to go anywhere.
Panama City
I’m writing this entry pleasantly suspended over the waters of Bocas del Toro, Panama on the restaurant deck of my new hotel.
Neal and I flew into Panama City on Monday, took a relatively hassle-free ride to our hotel in Casco Viejo and found ourselves politely shuffled into a cramped room with two single beds and what I like to think of as a ‘first class Alcatraz’ bathroom. I had just experienced a schedule of connected overnight flights that was perfectly timed to ensure that as soon as you started to fall asleep it was time to get off the plane and sit in an airport for just long enough to not fall asleep before restarting the process.
We would come to discover over the coming days that not only were the ceiling boards between our room and the dorm above us quite thin and entirely without sound insulation,they were also supporting a series of smiley, but incredibly loud afro-carribean hippies who felt the occasional need for a 3am drum circle with their most successful reverie coming on the night that Neal and I had to be up at 5am to catch a plane (LOVED those guys!)
Day 1 in Panama city was rather uneventful. After we had put our bags down Neal and I took a long walk through Casco Viejo (more on this VERY interesting neighborhood in a moment) down to the waterfront where the city of Panama has installed a very pleasant boardwalk for joggers, cyclists etc. We stopped briefly along the way in what turned out to be one of the worst neighborhoods in Panama City for some BBQ chicken that a plump old woman was cooking street side. Later on we would be told again and again that this section of Casco Viejo was not a good place and was to be avoided at night, although I never felt threatened or endangered there (don’t worry Mom, I’m being safe ). Either way, after eating that chicken I say it was worth it.
After a couple of miles we ended up in the high rent/tourist-centric area downtown. We checked out a couple of the nicer hotels (pretending to price a hotel’s rooms and check out their facilities is a good way to get a free bathroom and some mid-day AC) and ended up eating at a restaurant called the Greenhouse, which touts their eco-sensitive practices. Our server was a nice guy and thankfully encouraged me to try some local Panamanian beer over the more standard choice I’d initially ordered and it turned out to be quite good.
Neal and I dealt with some slight tummy rumbling, went to bed and proceeded to not sleep at all due to the heat and noise of our room.
By the next morning I’d slept a total of 5 hours since Leaving Seattle and Neal was probably not much better off. Even so, we dragged ourselves out of bed to inquire about rooms at a nearby hostel called Luna’s Flying Castle (well revued in Lonely Planet and certainly a good, social backpacker hostel from the look of it) but they were fully booked and after looking at the dorm rooms they had available we decided that we wouldn’t be better off with those arrangements anyway.
We had breakfast at a nice place called Cafe Coca Cola, which served us good, cheap food (eggs and pancakes ran us $2 each). From here we began a very nice walk through Casco Viejo which covered Ave Central where most of the shopping is, the presidential palace (at least the outside of it) and a good chunk of the remaining neighborhood.
We finished the afternoon in a very pleasant cafe run by a nice woman who spoke near-perfect english and I had a delicious lunch and a nice chat with a coupld Kiwi teachers that were just winding down their trip before returning to London to start the school year (it seems to be common for young Kiwi and Aussie teachers to spend some time in England earning in pounds so they can travel more easily during their school holidays). From there Neal and I went back to the hotel and made two decisions that would turn out to be quite good for us: he decided to take a jog back along the waterfront to some basketball courts we had passed to see if he could get in on a game of pickup and I decided to take a nap.
A few hours later I woke up and strolled into the hotel’s lobby to hang out where I soon encountered an extremely sweaty Neal (he would later profess to being woefully unprepared for sport in 90 degree/90% humidity) and a new friend of his named Oscar. I briefly shook hands with him and he left, with him and Neal agreeing to connect the next day. He ran a BBQ chicken stand with his Grandmother Sonja a few blocks from our hotel and having gotten our first decent night’s sleep (and a late one at that) we decided to go there for lunch.
Oscar and Sonja saved Panama City for me. Until we met them the city had been pleasant enough, but we had just been two more tourists walking around trying to find stuff to look at. Panama City had left me with a strong impression that unless you had some kind of local ‘in’ you would be unable to access most of what it had to offer. Having met these two, I was able to leave Panama City with the feeling that I’d really seen it, and just as importantly, that the Panama City that I’d been hoping was there in the undercurrents was there indeed and running strong.
When we arrived at the BBQ stand Sonja took one look at us and said ‘You must be Neal and his friend’. Neal smiled and introduced himself to her and she explained that Oscar had told her that two Big Americans would be coming by for lunch, one a little taller than the other (Neal is 6’2”). She made us some plates (the food was amazing) and Oscar came by shortly thereafter.
We ate lunch on the steps of the building opposite to the apartment that served as both house and storefront. Neal and Oscar caught up for a bit while Sonja and I chewed the fat, agreeing about the difficulties of quitting smoking and talking about the state of the neighborhood. After eating Oscar went off to make a couple phone calls and arrange a trip for the three of us to the Panama Canal while Neal and I sat with Sonja.
Sonja was the soul definition of grandmotherly warmth. I imagined that just like my Grandma she could probably go through the line at the supermarket and come out the other side knowing the names of all the checker’s children and what was troubling her that particular day. When she was 17 she had fallen in love with an American man from Duluth, MN that was living in Panama and ended up moving in with him. She became pregnant shortly thereafter with what would become her daughter and Oscar’s mother and things continued with him normally until about the 6th month, when he was suddenly called away by the army. She said she clearly remembered tears streaming down his face as he left, leaving promises to send money every month and to return as soon as he could. For the next few months Sonja received $500 monthly through a friend of his, but ultimately both the money and the man failed to show back up. She had initially thought that he was sent to Vietnam and killed, but now having done a little research she believes that he’s back in Duluth and she is very focused on re-connecting with him. I think this is important to Oscar too, both as a gift to his grandmother and as a way to connect with his grandfather. We are both going to be keeping in contact with Oscar and doing our level best to help them make that connection.
The other main topic of conversation we shared with her was the neighborhood itself. As I mentioned earlier, the face of Casco Viejo is rapidly changing as the City continues a strong push to ‘revitalize’ the neighborhood.
Some quick back story: at one point this had been the rich part of town (actually, it had been most of the town period) but was later abandoned by the wealthy in favor of more modern living arrangements. As this once rich neighborhood fell into disrepair trooms in mansions turned into apartments, houses turned into squats and some homes collapsed into ruins.
Sonja has been living in her apartment for over 35 years and to this day isn’t sure that anyone owns the title to the building. Hearing it from her it sounded like many of the residents of the neighborhood didn’t pay rent simply because they had no one to pay it to. But now every second block has a real estate office on the corner selling condos and houses “as is” or with guaranteed titles. This basically means that some very poor people that have been scraping by rent-free for years are now or will soon be evicted from their homes in favor of Gringo retirees and Columbian drug barons investing in an area that will soon turn back into one of the more affluent districts of Panama (and possibly of Central America).
Of course by this point I had completely fallen in love with Casco Viejo, but carefully; the way one falls in love with a flower whose stem has already been cut. I can’t express enough that what I saw was clearly the ‘eye of the storm’ is in the middle of the most rapid gentrification I’ve ever seen. On any given street you’ll see an abandoned ruin on your left and a newly rennovated $500 million mansion on your right. In ten years I guarantee the Casco Viejo I was priveledged enough to see will be dead and gone.
The good news is that the heart and soul of the Panamanian people seems to be very much in tact. For better or worse until we met Oscar our interactions with most Panamanians had been polite, but distant. No smiles, no expressed interest in sharing a cross cultural experience or conversation with us even if the language barrier wasn’t an issue. Everywhere I asked directions or assistance people were quick enough to oblige, but they just didn’t seem that interested in us. And I guess we both found that surprising. We had certainly gotten our fair share of hard stares from the locals (not mean or aggressive, just sort of blank and disinterested looks that felt the same as the look one gives someone else’s mail when it appears in their mailbox. A look that says ‘huh…that shouldn’t be there’ but doesn’t convey any interest in thumbing through those papers to see what might be inside because clearly it’s meant for somebody else.) In a way, that sort of disinterest might be a good thing. Hopefully it will help insulate the Panamanians and their capital from the washed out, thinned cultural leavings that exist after too many tourists spend too much time ‘improving’ a place.
All that said…our next stop was that Panama Canal. Engineering marvel of the world, left ventricle of global commerce and global tourist destination the Panama Canal was actually something that wasn’t very high on my list to see. Oscar had arranged a taxi to take us there and back and along the way had extended a kind invitation for us to join him and his girlfriend’s family at a soccer game that night between Aribe United (a local Panamanian team) and the Houston Dynamo’s, who had flown in to play them in an exhibition match. The soccer game turned out to be the highlight of the trip so far for me, but first a little about our experiences at the canal.
We went to the Miraflores locks where for $5 you can watch giant cargo ships as they are passively dragged through each lock in the canal by some VERY impressive little train trolleys. Each trolley costs $2.2 million and a single passage through the canal costs about a $250,000 paid in advance. I have to say, once we were there I was very glad I got to see the canal. The way they manage to move such vast quantities of water so efficiently and ferry some of the largest cargo vessels out there through these relatively tiny channels cannot fail to impress when you’re seeing it in person. We ended up spending about 45 minutes watching a couple ships go through and then went back to meet our driver (whose name is Pablo) and had him take us to the bus station. Before we got off at the Albrook bus station/mall Oscar arranged for Pablo to pick us up from our hotel at 5:45am the next day and take us to our plane at Albrook Airport (right next to the bus station) so we could catch our plane to Bocas.
The bus ride out to the game was relatively uneventful. I fell asleep on the bus (yes mom, this STILL happens) and it was a smooth enough ride. Lucky too, because the buses in Panama City have a terrible reputation. They are known as ‘chicken buses’ and apparently they race each other and crash all the time. Oscar said he tried to avoid them as much as possible, however since our bus was taking us outside the city if was a different story.
We arrived in a smaller town about 30 minutes drive outside of the city and sat down to a very nice dinner which included a few local takes on plantains (one fried, one cooked in cream) and some very nice meat options. From there we walked over to the Stadium to meet with the family of Oscar’s girlfriend.
I don’t know exactly what I expected to find at that game, but it certainly wasn’t the raw exuberance and energy of the Aribe Unidos soccer fans. It turns out these guys are basically the Oakland Raiders of Panamanian Soccer. The team is physically aggressive (there were 5 red cards and an additional three yellow cards pulled during this game. The stretcher was brought out three separate times to take a Houston player off the field, although two of those three times the guy was able to hobble off on his own power). Instead of stadium security there were full on riot police complete with shields, helmets and batons.
One other thing Oscar forgot to mention: This wasn’t Aribe Unidos’ home stadium. Their stadium had been having power problems and couldn’t host a night game so instead they were playing in the hometown of their arch-rivals. The police were there to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. Between the drums that played throughout the game, the hundreds of chanting fans that shouted slurs at Houston the their rythm and the riot police spaced every 15 feet the ‘authenticity’ of my experiences in Panama City was no longer something I was overly concerned with.
We were introduced to Oscar’s people (who were all VERY nice and welcoming) and took our seats. I failed to mention earlier that the father of Oscar’s girlfriend is the team doctor for Aribe and so her family are all superfans. The game began without much fanfare. I had drank a few too many beers and right before half-time decided to beat the rush and hit the bathroom. I certainly got my fair share of looks in there, but I just said ‘Hola’ and no one hassled me. Neal went down to relieve himself a few minutes later after the half had been called and his experience was a little different. While in the bathroom a couple guys came up to him and said ‘Are you from Houston?’ Quickly as he could he replied ‘No! No me gusta Houston!’ and they left him alone. I wasn’t there, but he said he definitely felt uncomfortable.
The score was 0-0 before the half, and as the crowd got more and more hungry for a goal from Aribe (and likely more drunk as well) they began to increase the volume and frequency of their fandom. And then finally: GOAL!…for Houston.
The entire stadium went dead silent. It was the only time in the entire evening where the drums weren’t beating. But soon enough the crowd had recovered and doubled their efforts to will their team to a goal.
After 15 minutes and several frustrating near-misses (often accompanied by a very endearing and fun shout of ‘Boohm!’ or ‘Whoosh!’ whenever there was a particularly good strike or near-miss) it finally happened for them. In went the ball, up went every single cup of beer in the stadium and there were Neal and I; soaked in beer and shouting in celebration as loudly as anyone else there.
By that time the game was almost over. Both teams were frantically trying to score a winning goal, but I think we all felt that we had seen the final score for the game. And then something very cool (and in a way very ironic) happened. The stadium lost power. Having traveled an hour and a half into the land of their enemies so that they could play a night game with proper lights Aribe Unidos and their fans now found themselves in complete darkness. This had also happened only a couple of minutes after Aribe’s goal and at first I thought it was a planned celebration of that goal because the crowd used it as an opportunity to roar up into their very loudest and most proud. The drums went into overtime, cell phones, cameras and anything that would produce light came out as the entire crowd chanted and danced together in the darkness.
And that was really the end of the game. They did get the lights on, the teams did play for a few more minutes to finish out the regulation time, but that game ended for me in the dark night, dancing and celebrating with people I didn’t know about an event that I should have cared nothing about…happily allowing myself to get swept in the strong rivers of their exuberance.
Most of the crowd left when the lights first came back on, but several men stayed to jeer at Houston and the refs. In the end the police had to clear out the stadium themselves and escort the refs and the Dynamos off the field to safety (they did this by forming a phalanx of riot shields that covered both the sides and the top). We went out into the night air, listened to the sounds of police sirens dispersing the crowd and thanked the powers that be that we were there with Oscar and his people and not walking home alone down the alleys of the city.
So…back to where I am now: at Hotel Angela in Bocas del Toro town on Isla Colon. I actually got up from the computer halfway through writing this to meet the owner of the hotel. He’s a very nice american ex-pat named Claudio who took one look at Neal and I, one look at the tiny room we had booked, and upgraded us to a larger room for free. As he put it to me when I thanked him “that room wasn’t big enough for one guy your size, let alone two.” Like I said, very nice guy and I think we’re both looking forward to the white sands and coral reefs of the islands after a few cramped, but ultimately wonderful days in Panama City.
The plan thus far
There’s not a lot about this trip that has been set in stone at this point, but what I know so far is that I’ll be putting in on August 25th in Panama City, traveling with my friend Neal through Panama and Costa Rica, and then moving through Central America to meet up with my friend Sarah in Honduras.
From there I intend to head to Austin, TX just to recuperate and see the city (I’ve never been there before) and consume as much BBQ as is humanly possible before flying into SE Asia for what should be the bulk of the trip.
I intend to see Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam…possibly adding in China, Indonesia and Nepal. If all goes as planned I’ll move on from this portion of the journey to India (most likely Northern India) before finishing in Berlin, Germany to see my brother Jake, his girlfriend Henrieke and my brand new neice!!
Of course…any or all of this might change once I’m out on the road, but this is the plan for now.
