I’ve just finished hosting my first visitor to Panama! My friend Aurelia and her boyfriend Clayton spent two weeks in Panama at our invitation, and I think they enjoyed themselves fully. It’s the sunny and dry season now in Panama – well, as dry as this tropical country seems to be able to get – and I’m sure coming down here was a welcome respite from the cold of Washington D.C. and even Los Angeles.
Since Decreto 331 one went into effect at the beginning of 2018 and hurt the ability of Uber and other ridesharing drivers to work in Panama, Aurelia got the unintended chance to experience the bus system right away. Thankfully it was a direct bus over the South Corridor toll road, so we were able to escape the far-as-we-could-see traffic on Avenida Domingo Diaz pretty quickly. Arriba was fairly polite to our guest; we’ve noticed that she gets sassy and more hyperactive when there’s lots of human voices talking to each other and ignoring her. It’d been a full day of travel for Aurelia though, so she wasn’t able to stay up late enough to be nipped at too much.
No trip to Panama City can begin without a trip to Casco Viejo, unarguably the main tourist area for the city. The last time I was a tour guide in a foreign city for guests was Jordan 2015, but at least there I could draw upon two years of recalled Arabic to get me around. But this tour guide doesn’t speak Spanish – not well, at least! But since she was able to buy a Panama Hat and haggle prices for tribal artwork on the street, perhaps I did a little better with my muddled translations than I’m giving myself credit for.
The next day, we took “the fancy method” of getting to the city of Colon, on the other side of the country (!!) straddling the Atlantic coast – the Panama Canal Railway. A classic and classy mode of transport to be sure, but I hope that the monthly commuter rail pass is more affordable than $25 each way! I can’t find any documentation on their website that tells me how much that rail pass costs. It’d be astronomically pricey for the average working class Panamanian to be paying $50 a day on transport when a bus between the city and Colon costs 50 cents. I enjoyed the free coffee service and being able to easily step out into the “smoking area” between the cars to watch and listen to the jungle rushing past.
We didn’t spend much time in Colon, just walked up from the train station to the bus station to catch an onward bus to the village of Portobelo, further northeast up the Atlantic coast. As we walked through the squelching mud at the side of the road, we were politely hassled by smiling, English speaking women in tight shirts advertising Colon city tours and local restaurants. I felt bad; we had been told by basically everyone to avoid Colon as much as possible and spend as little time in the city possible. Desperately poor, the city is considered a mugging hotspot for tourists and foreigners, and I’ve heard that in fact, it’s dangerous enough for even locals, that the city pays for thousands of those commuter train tickets for canal workers at the Atlantic port, so that its workers can live in the safety of Panama City but work in Colon each day. If a place is supposedly dangerous enough that workers in its most famous nationalized business have to be shuttled in and out each morning and night, I probably am going to avoid it, just to be safe. But my heart went out to those bravely smiling guides with their laminated cardboard menus of trip activities. I hope there are tourists out there braver than us bringing a bit of tourist money into the city.
This was Aurelia’s first time on a Diablo Rojo, the “Red Devil” school buses that provide the absolute backbone of Panamanian cross-country travel. In the City we’ve got modern air conditioned metro buses that accept RFID payment cards. To go between the major cities you have USA-style coach buses with TVs and bathrooms, or even simple but serviceable white “chiva” mini-buses. But to reach all the myriad tiny villages that sprawl out through the jungle, you look to your last option – the Diablo Rojo. You have to pay with cash, as each bus is independently owned and operated, and while they are amusing to look at with their complicated, detailed, and unique paint jobs, their pollution and lack of safety is legendary. They’re in the process of being phased out throughout Panama City, where there’s a bland and modern Metro Bus being constructed to take each route, but I don’t see how they will ever replace every Diablo Rojo in the country. There’s just too many small villages with people who expect to be able to reach the town over. The local governments are going to casually look the other way when the national government says “so, you’ve gotten rid of all those buses in your district, right?” Unless the Federal administration has suddenly found the money and planning skill to acquire a 1:1 metrobus to diablo ratio, people – both passengers and diablo owner – are flat out not going to accept their routes going away. The painted bus, much like the plastic grocery store bag (which was banned 8 months ago to absolutely zero effect besides the gales of laughter of Panamanians when we foreigners ask about the ban’s status) is going to be around for the foreseeable future.