The USA group! Notice how only the women and children are wearing our official jersey (well, plus Paco and Barry front and center)

It’s time for another coast-to-coast bike ride! After doing the 250km Dead2Red three times in 2009, 2010, and 2015 as part of a 5-person relay team, I’m ready for a new challenge – the 95km ride between Colon along the Caribbean coast down to Panama City on the Pacific. The race is in only three days, and while I don’t think I’ll bother to pay the ridiculous $100 registration fee (I’ve been told by multiple people that the support is terrible, they run out of water immediately, and the ‘celebration food’ at the end is mediocre) to become an official registered racer, there’s going to be approximately 3000 other riders milling around the starting line, so it’ll be easy enough to just bring a bike up to the starting line and just start pedaling.

I heard about the ride from the USA embassy, and was twofold lucky – first, I’ll be getting free transport for my borrowed bicycle and I up to Colon at 5:30 in the morning on Sunday, and second, the embassy is paying for free jerseys with USA Embassy of Panama proudly and prominently emblazoned on them. Ever since the USA ambassador to Panama suddenly announced his earlier-than-planned retirement a couple months ago *cough no idea why cough* I’ve heard that it’s a little bit of a wild west around the embassy. As long as you’re within your budgetary goals for your division, you can get a lot of stuff greenlit and quickly approved. Another commemorative bicycle jersey, hurray! My 2009 jersey from assisting the Rome to Mecca bike group from the border of Syria down to Amman is starting to get a little long in the tooth…

Anyway, where was I? Our practice ride last night – about 150 people, including a few children, met at the Hotel Miramar on Avenida Balboa (right along the Pacific coast) was larger than usual, as we were joined by some young Marines on a new deployment to the city, a lot of jersey-clad embassy employees who’d be doing the Ocean To Ocean this weekend, and even the president of the USA Triathlon club, Barry Siff.

Unfortunately, I almost got lost and missed the entire thing! I had no idea that the hotel would actually be located inside the giant median between the northbound and southbound lanes of traffic on Balboa. I had waited the entire 5 minutes for the light on the southbound side to allow me to cross, then took the pedestrian overpass over the northbound, before I realized – wait a minute, the hotel couldn’t possibly be on the pacific-side of the highway. There’s no room over here! It must be on the other side! But where…? So then I had to backtrack for 15 minutes to get all the way to where I’d originally waited on the other side of the highway, then back down the street with the traffic to finally find the hotel, which I promptly got lost at again trying to find the parking area everyone was waiting in.

Thankfully though, I made it in time to catch the last bit of Barry’s greeting to the assembled audience, and my embassy contact Paco also greeted everyone and, to my untrained spanish-hearing ear, extended greetings on behalf of the United States too. Pretty cool. When you work at an embassy, maybe you get to extend greetings on behalf of your country a lot if you want to!

There was something surprising about the jerseys: they’d all been ordered in strange women’s sizes. Normally I wear a Medium or Large, but as I grunted, strained, and discovered I couldn’t even close the front of the jersey enough to zip it up, it was revealed that only the XXL’s and XXXL’s fit even the normal sized men in our group. Paco kindly told us that we’d be provided with larger jerseys by the time the ride would start on Sunday morning – either way it’s fine by me.

Then we were off! It took about 5-10 minutes to get the group going each time we stopped; there’s a lot of entropy with a 150 person cycling group, but after rolling about a bit in the parking lot, building up speed, we hit southbound Balboa at about 10km per hour, to the sound of resounding whistles of the orange-shirted CCP (a local cycling club) volunteers skirting about the outsides of our 200 meter long caravan.

The cars had…mixed reactions to us. We’d end up doing two hours cycling together, on many different kinds of roads, but it was a little collar-pullingly nervous to be constantly surrounded by honking cars. Were they honking in friendly camaraderie? Look at you go, cycling at night, way to go? Or were they honking in irritation and frustration that they had places to be and our 200 meter tight column was impeding their progress? Probably both. It didn’t take us long to reach first Calidonia neighborhood, then Casco Viejo itself. The old city was designed with horse-driven carts in mind, and the city decided to keep the classic old buildings as they were and not increase the width of the streets. There was no way any cars were getting around us. I remarked to one of the Marines, a friendly young man with a round face, that it seemed like the streets were deserted, which was surprising to me. Minutes later, much like the phone game Snake, we doubled back around on ourselves, almost eating our “tail” of straggler bikers, and we saw where the cars were: backed up behind us for several blocks. I saw a Traffic Cop pointedly flag down one of the CCP volunteers and I caught the Spanish phrase for “what are you doing here….” before I had pedaled past them. I figured we were pretty safe though; the traffic cops are on the lookout for ongoing stuck traffic jams, not slow moving traffic. As long as we didn’t stay in one place for too long, they’d ignore us.

Disaster almost struck when another one of the Marines, a pretty woman with long black hair took a spill right in front of me. The front wheel of her collapsible “1-800-RentMe” bicycle had slipped into the slots of a sewer drain, “el cantaria,” and laid her out flat instantly. She hopped back up immediately, a little red-faced but no worse for wear, but since I was behind her, I got off my bike and immediately started waving people around the drain pit. If the slots had been going in the other direction there’d be no risk at all but with so many inexperienced bikers, much less people not used to group or night riding, I figured it couldn’t hurt for me to help out where I could.

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I look like some kind of low-rent Batman villain

We stood outside the building and looked up at the large sign. “Premedico” it said, the Condado del Rey location. We had found a “groupon” equivalent deal for a local dentist (the most popular service for group-coupon hunters in Panama is named OfertaSimple) but I had no idea it was going to be a combination clinic, handling everything from cancer treatment to, well, a tooth cleaning.

Christine went first and came back 20 minutes later, wincing a little and slowly sipping a little paper cup of water. “It was….weird,” she said. “They used a waterpik instead of a metal scraping tool. Kind of hurt my teeth.”

When it was my turn a few minutes later, she went with me, in case she’d be needed as a translator between me and the dentist. “She’s super nice though,” she commented as the assistant led us up to the second floor of the little clinic. I was impressed by the office upon first entry though; plenty of high tech looking things, similar in styling to stereotypical USA dentist’s offices in the 80’s and 90’s – lots of milky white porcelain and that pastel blue padding on all the soft areas.

The dentist confirmed for us that she could indeed speak English pretty well, but Christine settled in with her book in the corner chair anyway, just in case. I was intrigued to see that the young male assistant, who I thought would be elsewhere by now, was actually just that – a straight-up assistant to the doctor, handing her tools on her command and helping her by holding things (and my face, sometimes) in place. I’d never been in a USA dentist’s office that had both technician and licensed dentist working at the same time.

Christine was right though – a little angle mirror was the only stereotypical thin metal tool that went into my mouth. A sleek and alien looking waterpik was handed over my wide eyes (covered in extremely large red tinted glasses) to the dentist, and when she fired it up, it whirred like a miniature jackhammer. Like I’d been warned, it did hurt quite a bit vs the unpleasant, but very used-to feeling of the scraping tool. I figured that in order to get the same effect as the physical contact of a scraper, the water had to be coming out of the tiny tip like a bullet, and I was probably feeling billions of tiny water bullets hitting my teeth every minute. Like the difference in water force in a touch-less car wash vs the one where attendants dedicate some actual elbow grease.

You know how some dentists will let you hold a little plastic vacuum tool so you can remove liquid from your mouth without spitting? Some don’t have that tool, or they have it but don’t let you hold it, and in some you just spit, “the old fashioned way” – well, Panama has the tool, but instead of doing either of the aforementioned options, they bend the plastic tube into a hook and then leave the vacuum constantly hooked and running over the side of your mouth. I had never imagined something like that before. It was annoying during the waterpik procedure, but I had no idea how bad it was going to get.

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At Valle de Anton’s India Dormida – only 2.5km of walking, but most of it was uphill!

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.

With the helpful (and thankfully easygoing, since my Spanish is so bad) hat salesman

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.

Later that afternoon we saw a double rainbow up on our rooftop pool!

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.

The train goes over a narrow causeway through Lake Gatun

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.

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Stop staring at me, KLM flight attendant cutout!

It’s 12:30 in the morning at the Houston International Airport, and I’m 10 meters from the locked door to the KLM crown lounge, staring wistfully at the “will return at 6am” sign being held in the hands of the smiling blue-suited cardboard cutout of a KLM flight attendant. I do remember agreeing and accepting that it was going to be a crappy night of sleep on the floor of an airport, and that the Priority Pass lounge probably wouldn’t be available….but really, terminal D of the IAH airport, do you have to play horrible, twangy pop-country nonstop? My headphones aren’t blocking the music nearly enough.

But what a great mini-vacation back home it was. The night of the 23rd, haggard after another all-day travel affair so soon after returning from Colombia on the 21st, found me back at my parents’ home in Brodhead. Not much changes in 5 months on the farm, except that their beloved Maine Coon cat, Omar, is slowly dying of kidney failure. Neither me, my parents, nor my veterinarian little brother were able to keep completely dry eyes over the days we were all together. Omar has always been the friendliest, chirpiest little show cat a family could have, and seeing him in a dazed, weakened state, barely able to walk steadily much less writhe happily on the floor, sing-meowing to us in hopes of being petted…it was rough.

Suleiman the orange tabby gives his sick brother a friendly head bonk.

That was the only sad part of the return home. Josh and Becca have moved to Chicago, which means my parents can see them far more frequently than when they were in the boonies of Ohio, my parents were happy to test new dinner dishes out on all of us, and I felt an unusual compulsion to butt in on my parents’ holiday task list. I can probably blame all that on Panama; when you spend your days sweeping, mopping, making food and washing dishes – for someone you love, not as a corporate employee – to do the same thing for different people you love just becomes automatic and instinctive. There was food prep and housecleaning to do; I did them without even thinking about it. I’m not trying to imply I was a spoiled little wastrel in prior years but my interest in helping out this Christmas even surprised myself. Who knows; perhaps Panama is making me into a harder worker!

My parents aren’t the ones to prepare unhealthy food, of course – that all came when my dad dropped me off at my beloved workplace of the past seven years, the SSCC at the UW. My dear friends Caitlin and Branden (of Dead2Red fame) had offered to put me up at their newly remodeled, newly purchased home and Caitlin, my coworker, had offered to buy the SSCC staff – including their leave-of-absenced friend Zach – a Glass Nickel Pizza lunch.

Oh, good pizza…how I’ve missed it in Panama. Pricesmart, much like Costco, can make you a $11 18″ pizza that’s pretty darn good for the price and the size, and Ciao Ragazzi will make you a thin crust that’s acceptable. But really, the only pizza in Panama that I can say I’ve truly enjoyed eating was up in Boquete, at the Neapolitan pizzeria owned by an expat. Sadly, the locally designed pizza in Panama City is lacking. Of course, USA chains like Little Caesars and Papa Johns exist too, but same as in the USA, their quality isn’t worth mentioning.

That night was pizza again! Not Glass Nickel a second time – although I’d have been completely fine with that – but the truly spectacular Grampa’s Pizza on Willy St. You’d have to pay quite a bit to truly fill yourself up on the small pizzas they make vs what people think of as a standard pizza size, but the combination of unique and extremely rich (i.e. gloriously unhealthy) toppings would probably make you pause after a couple.

Branden and Caitlin had a surprise for me – they’d gotten late night dinner reservations in Chicago at Rick Bayless’s Topolobampo restaurant for the next night and taken the week off work so we could all hang out and do the main thing I’d constantly been telling them I wanted to do: eat all the rich foods I’d left behind. We can’t just go to one restaurant after making the drive to Chicago though, they told me – we’re going to Little Eataly for a light lunch first, and we got hotel rooms for after the restaurant.

I’m usually a budget grocery shopper, but after paying punishing prices for groceries in Panama City, I was casting my eyes on the fine Italian pastas, sauces, and ingredients with new interest. Woodmans and ALDI prices aren’t possible due to the ballooning cost of living in Panama City, so if I was going to be paying so much for mediocre brands in PC, why not fill my empty checked bag with stuff to bring back? After a tasty tapas lunch of shrimp, bread, risotto, and fresh mozzarella, I took a few moments to smell the truffles (literally) and buy a half dozen cans of Italian-made tomato sauce and spaghetti noodles.

We killed a few hours before our 9:15 Topolobampo reservation by playing some pinball and Galaga at a barcade nearby, then it was finally time for the main event. We filed into the quiet, playful-yet-somber restaurant and were seated by a jovial waiter at an immaculately linen-ed table. A brochure for their limited time “Pre-Colombian” menu was on the table. I almost wanted to take a copy as a souvenir, it was so well written. Having just gotten back from Colombia, though, I was happy to try their Classic Menu which, according to Branden and Caitlin, had made the place famous. (Bear in mind I’d barely heard of Rick Bayless, much less the names of any of his restaurants, before yesterday. I sure was enjoying his food, though)

Much like Madison’s Pig in a Fur Coat, the next hour and a half was a dreamy, hazy blur of having dishes placed in front of me, and then me trying to consume the delicious food as slowly as possible and savor every bite, taking moments to re-read the menu with my mouth [partially] full and try to figure out which flavors I was tasting were which. Sometimes I burst into exuberant exultation regarding the food we were all eating at that moment, prompting Branden to laugh and say “keep it together Zach, use your Michelin Restaurant voice in here.” Oh but Branden, you can’t possibly understand how happy I am to not be eating a plate of chicken, rice, and plantains right now.

A pretty terrible picture of the main course (seared foi gras with carne asada in mole) but to be fair, it’s really dim in the restaurant and I was trying to not to be gauche with avid photography

Caitlin contemplates the priciest sprinkles-coated dessert any of us are likely to ever consume

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What a great little mini-vacation right before going home for Christmas! Christine and I just returned from four wonderfully relaxing days in Medellin, Colombia – a one hour plane ride from Panama City. We’d been hearing great things about the place for the past four months here and I’d always wanted the chance to visit South America (never been before) so even though timing was tight, we were able to swing 3 flights in less than a week.

This past Sunday night was hectic; we had finished our second and final concert with the Cantus Panama choir and had enough time to grab dinner, drop off our Wii U with my friend and upstairs neighbor Denis (he had loaned me his PS4 so I could play Uncharted 4 while he was visiting his girlfriend in Venezuela over Thanksgiving, so I was happy to return the favor for him), and then catch forty winks before being overcharged by a genially smiling taxi driver for a $25 tollroad drive to the airport on Monday morning. I’m semi-terrified about the upcoming legal changes to Uber in Panama starting in April. I might be seeing a lot more taxis and a lot less ubers, unfortunately, so I’m going to have to get better at haggling out prices. I hate haggling in any language, but especially not in ones I lack fluidity.

Copa Air (Panama’s main national airline) served us a nice little ham sandwich snack during our short flight, which was unexpected. Our first step off the plane was a breath of fresh air, like being back in Boquete. We had done little research before our trip (less and less with every passing year it seems – thanks to unlocked smartphones and the internet Christine and I both operate in a “figure it out when we get there” mentality) so with some trepidation, we each withdrew $200,000 Colombian pesos from our bank accounts – or $66.67, since the exchange rate calculation method for us rapidly became “divide the Colombian amount by 3,000 in order to get the USD value.”

Getting an uber was a bit tricky; with my $10,000 sim card and 100MB of data jammed into my S8, three of them cancelled on me before we finally hooked one, a friendly, somewhat acne-covered young man named Juan (who was using his brother’s uber account, a bit disconcerting but at this point we weren’t going to turn him away) who needed to ask us our arrival flight info via the Uber chat system before agreeing to get us. Once we were in the car, he explained in a friendly broken mix of English and Spanish – Uber is semi-illegal in the country and the taxi drivers run a cartel with their buddies, the transit police, to make life hell for Uber drivers whenever they catch them. So Juan needed to pretend that he was going to the airport to pick up “some friends” and therefore needed info about our flight. He told us that if we took ride-sharing services in Medellin again, we should have someone up in the passenger seat so that taxis and the transit police wouldn’t stop him. He said that in Bogota, someone set his brother’s friend’s car on fire for being an Uber driver. Like all Uber drivers though, he pointed out how corrupt and lazy the local taxi drivers were and said that if they provided a better, cheaper service then Uber wouldn’t be so popular.

It took about 45 minutes and $17USD to cross the 10km distance from the MDE airport to the actual city, nestled beautifully in a bowl of the mountains. Cool and temperate climate aside though, that bowl unfortunately captured a lot of traffic smog and I could immediately start to feel my throat swell up as Christine casually picked up our “Christmas present” from the security guards at her friend’s building. This friend was the Colombian equivalent to Christine – an English Language Fellow (ELF), assigned here by the USA Dept of State, and she and her husband were gone for Christmas. Knowing that we were interested in seeing the city, she invited us to stay for free at their apartment, but the guards refused to hang onto a housekey for us so instead, we were left “a present” in an envelope that Christine retrieved. The envelope had been opened for us ahead of time (how nice of the guards!) so they certainly knew it was a housekey. But, thankfully, no problems arose from this and we were able to relax and look out over the city to the surrounding mountains.

It’s a good thing EPM handles the light donations as well as the electricity!

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Photo provided by BOA’s guides as we go down the Chiriqui Viejo River

This past weekend was Panama’s independence day from Colombia. Christine and I, along with apparently everyone else in Panama City, escaped out from the muggy, humid November weather (it’s the rainiest part of the year for us now) to cooler climes in the country. In our case it was the famously-expatriate-filled town of Boquete, which despite having been a Panamanian city for generations, has been steadily filling with global expats for the past thirty years – starting adventure, hiking, and coffee farm tours left and right.

We found a truck-bed style RV unit on AirBnB for a good price and booked it ASAP – rooms fill up fast at this time of year with Panama City emptied out. I found a company called Boquete Outdoor Adventures (BOA) that offered two day combo trips and booked that, too. I’m the one at home most of the days while Christine’s at work so I took care of most of the planning for this one.

Christine meets two of the ranch’s four horses – these two had free range of the grounds during the day

With Riba staying at Auntie Deb’s again, we left early Thursday morning for the long, dull bus ride. It takes about 6-7 hours of driving to reach the large city of David, where you have to transfer to a smaller local bus for a final hour long ride to Boquete. Uneventful other than the loud, explosion filled Spanish-dubbed movies playing through the loudspeaker system the entire time, I was able to understand the plot of “Kong” pretty easily.

Thankfully, a taxi ride from the center of the delightfully cool and temperate town was only $3 for the two of us; despite taxi drivers probably rubbing their hands together with excitement at the prospect of new tourists in town (Uber is only in Panama City, nowhere else). We were greeted by our AirBnB host who showed us the hobby farm’s animals – horses, four dogs, chickens, and an eerie-sounding yet adorable goose named Alejandro.

Drum Majorettes and Drummers with their teacher on main street

We were able to catch a ride back into town the following morning at 7am with the owner of BOA, Jim – who happened to only live a half mile away from our AirBnB – sweet! He’s from the USA but has been living in Boquete for a decade and knew all the good dining spot and offered some camaraderie on living in the country. After grabbing a quick breakfast up the main street and passing by the first of the Independence Day parades (high schools only do female majorettes and drum-guys here vs a full band, at least that I’ve seen so far) we were on the bus, heading westward towards the Costa Rica border and the whitewater rafting river.

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