Panama, Beyond the Canal By John Briley Special to The Washington Post Sunday, March 12, 2000

A ship makes its way through the massive Miraflores Lock on the Panama Canal. Photo by John Briley

Millions of gallons of water filled the chamber silently through unseen pipes below the waterline, and we rose 24 feet into full daylight in just three minutes. Our eventual liberation into Miraflores Lake, a small pool located below the Pedro Miguel Locks, was delayed further while the Nepalese hulk was pulled through the slot by four locomotives crawling atop the lock walls, tethered to the giant ship by fat cables.

Of my adventures during a two-week trip to Panama in mid-January-archipelagoes, jungles and highlands included-making the 50-mile canal transit is the one that made me feel most at home. The tour vessel was clean, announcements were translated into English (albeit roughly), the transit departed on time, service was attentive and I got a fair idea upfront of what lay in store for the day ahead.

But such certainties are largely absent while touring Panama's incredible natural attractions. And shaky infrastructure and spotty services are only exacerbated by the unflagging enthusiasm of the nation's tourism promoters, who do their best to make a stuffy, buggy hotel on a littered beach sound like a five-star Tahitian bungalow.

Witnessing the canal and its awesome, gentle efficiency up close prompts a swarm of questions and fascinating answers. But nothing you hear now is as colorful as the stories from the route's distant history: the U.S. gold rushers who rode steamships from the East Coast, walked the isthmus and ferried up the West Coast to avoid Native Americans in the Midwest; the 22,000 French lives lost to yellow fever and malaria during construction; the 1928 swimming of the passage by a man named Richard Halliburton (his toll: 36 cents).

The transfer of the canal on Dec. 31, 1999, from U.S. to Panamanian control has unsettled the remaining U.S. residents of the Canal Zone, the area surrounding the waterway that has essentially been a U.S. colony for 90 years. Many Zonians departed during the past year as U.S. operations there wound down. Those who stayed are watching their cloistered lifestyle evaporate.

Once-homogenous clusters of white stucco buildings with red-tiled roofs are now spiced by the multicolored paint jobs of Panamanian families who bought some of the vacated structures. The waterway's work force has become almost exclusively Panamanian. And among other edicts, the government recently ordered that all signs in the Canal Zone be translated from English to Spanish, a move that Zonians took as an insult. For now, at least, English remains the official language of business within the canal.

Meantime, adventure-seeking tourists are starting to flood Panama, drawn by affordable and accessible beaches, jungles, hills and islands, and by the safety of travel there (notwithstanding parts of Panama City and the eastern Darien province, where Colombian bandits vie with malaria and poisonous snakes for threat of the day). With the turmoil of the Manuel Noriega years well in the past, Panama has earned a reputation for friendly people, low-key living and mugger-free travel.

The total number of foreigners entering Panama rose only 3.8 percent from 1998 to 1999, but visits from the United States jumped by 18.5 percent during that period (from 97,100 people to 115,119 visitors), according to Panama's tourism department. Between 1990 and 1999, the total number of tourists entering the country more than tripled (from 171,800 to 538,100). Panama's outdoor offerings easily equal those of its tourist-besotted neighbor Costa Rica, and available rooms and airline seats-and uncrowded beaches and untrammeled jungles-are a lot more prevalent on the isthmus than in Costa Rica.

The question remains whether Panama's tourism industry will mature enough to handle the inevitable traveler influx, or opt to sit on the sidelines counting money while the very environment that drew the visitors falls apart.

The dugout canoe sank lower in the water as each trash barrel was added by a Kuna Indian teenager. Two other adolescents adjusted the load and motored away from the dock.

The three cans of garbage represented a few days' worth of refuse from Nalunega, one of about 400 islands in the San Blas archipelago, a string of mostly photo-perfect islets freckling the Panamanian Caribbean. Much of the trash came from the Hotel San Blas, a bare- bones sand-and-thatch arrangement amid a 448-person Kuna settlement. Though modest, the hotel is the most popular and accessible San Blas destination for gringos on a holiday.

"They'll tell you it's going to a landfill on the mainland," said Bill, a pottery peddler from Kansas City, Mo., as he swung in a hammock, an open beer resting on his belly. He and his girlfriend, Linda, spend up to two months yearly in Panama, much of it at the hotel. "But watch that boat. They'll go a half-mile offshore, hang out, then come back without any trash."

Sadly, the boys followed the script, methodically unloading the empty barrels when they returned to land.

Many of Panama's waste management practices are appalling - and typical of the Third World. But for the Kuna, such behavior is part of a stubborn resistance to any change, fueled by fear that outsiders want the Indians to assimilate into modern society. Kuna have governed the San Blas since the 1920s, when they took a stand after centuries of fleeing warring Indian tribes, Spanish conquistadors and others. The Kuna have two representatives in the Panamanian legislature and may vote in national elections.

Still, they distrust outsiders and keep a solemn profile, unless you show interest in buying one of their brightly woven molas-textiles typically depicting resident fauna or flora. Sales opportunities transform reserved Kuna women into animated marketers capable of haggling indefinitely without lowering their prices much at all. (I returned to the United States with four molas.) Kuna women also sustain tradition by wearing long, mola-adorned dresses, beads wound tightly from ankle to knee and a thin black line of paint down their noses (the men in this matriarchal society have no such traditional costume).

Nalunega is a typical Kuna community: dozens of huts crammed tightly together, built right up to the shoreline. This creates a trade-off for visitors: gorgeous white beaches lay like silk under palm fronds on hundreds of the islands, but not on the ones where tourists sleep and eat. So each morning we'd pile into dugouts and head out to isles occupied by, at most, a handful of Kuna. (The boatmen favor the inhabited islands because island-dwellers collect $1 from each tourist per visit. But you can hire guys in San Blas to take you to deserted islands.)

Because each island will take no more than eight tourists at a time and because the Kuna living there keep to themselves, I never felt crowded on these excursions. On successive mornings, we landed on Isla de los Perros and Grass Island, places clearly cooked up in the fantasies of island lovers.

I walked the circumference of each island in under 10 minutes before descending with snorkel into the plentiful coral reefs where pastel parrotfish wandered in force, and even the elusive sea turtle and octopus showed themselves.

As I sidled from the water to a Kuna hut on Isla de los Perros (Island of the Dogs), I was handed a halved coconut by Ramon, who constituted half of the island's population (the other half was his brother, Jose). The sun pounded like a fist on the exposed beach, but the shade of a thatch overhang was cool and sweet. Palms rustled, pelicans cruised and I gnawed at the coconut, sea salt caking slowly on my skin.

"You don't think that cage is too small for them?" I asked our boatman, Oriel, as we stood looking at two 20-inch sea turtles confined in a bamboo pen built between the pilings on the dock of a restaurant in the Bocas del Toro archipelago, off Panama's northwest Caribbean coast. He smiled and shook his head, either to dispel my suggestion or to say he didn't understand the question, and walked away. As I too walked away, four Taiwanese women from our nine-person group chattered in a huddle, photographing and pointing at the turtles.

The restaurant itself was unusual-a rickety slat-and-thatch structure built on stilts next to a band of mangroves and unattached to any land above sea level-but our time there was frustrating. I wanted to snorkel. Back in the town of Bocas del Toro (the one real town among these islands), my friend Courtney and I had paid $15 each for what we thought would be a day of shuttling among snorkel sites, with a beach stop or two and a quick break for lunch. But here we were on this docketeria and the entire purpose of our visit was to order, but not yet eat, lunch.

"It takes time to cook so we come back later to eat," Oriel explained. We had spent our first hour that morning buzzing around wide lagoons and mangrove forests, engaged in an absurd game wherein Oriel would spot broaching dolphins, roar toward them in the 25-foot motorized dugout, look disappointed at their sudden disappearance and start scanning for more creatures to harass. With each surfacing fin the Taiwanese tourists would shriek with excitement and take pictures of the rippled water.

As we were preparing to leave the restaurant, another boat of eight tourists arrived and within minutes two Argentine women were standing in the waist-deep turtle cage laughing while grabbing at the terrified reptiles as they squirted from one side of the jail to the other. The women's friends filmed this while flicking cigarette ashes into the water. Among the entire boatload, only a young Australian woman named Ness exhibited any disapproval.

"This is horrible," she said, dangling her legs from the dock 20 feet from where the Argentines played stupidly with the turtles. "I thought we were going out to explore these islands and snorkel and have a real experience." After this unfortunate side trip, our day improved. We snorkeled shallow coral beds swarming with psychedelic fish, and after lunch hiked barefoot through hilariously muddy jungle to a remote, rough-hewn beach, home to a colony of tiny, dark-orange frogs.

Later, with margaritas flowing on a waterfront deck, our one regret was that we could have tailored a perfect day-Bocas del Toro contains scores of quiet islands and pristine beaches-had we known to hire for ourselves one of the entrepreneurial boatmen plying the docks along Bocas's main street instead of signing up with a standard tourist excursion (we had booked our trip at a fishing/snorkeling/diving business).

Like so much of Panama, Bocas (the town) is expanding fast. Once just a single, muddy main street smattered with pensiones, a couple of restaurants and a dive shop, the business district has quickly crept up side roads and into the hills, and has increased markedly in density, say locals and repeat visitors. Calle 3, the now-paved main drag, supports a procession of backpackers and, just as I saw in Costa Rica seven years ago, vacationers can be spotted following locals through leafy paths to view land for sale.

Not until I reached the modest cabin in the cold, hard rain of dusk did I realize how menacing I must have looked. Clad head to toe in dark-toned rain gear, I was soaked and muddy and clutching a small log, a prop to help communicate to whoever lived here that I desperately needed dry firewood (what is that Spanish word?) to heat my quarters.

Courtney and I had just finished a four-hour, rain-drenched hike through the high jungle of Parque Internacional La Amistad, a 157-square-mile park straddling the Costa Rica border and containing seven of the world's 12 classified life zones.

We were in the hills above Guadaloupe, an agricultural village in west-central Panama, and hiked from 6,625 feet above sea level to about 7,300 feet, chilly altitudes made chillier by the relentless rain. Upon our shivering return, we found one lone log in the bin that was supposed to hold our night's warmth. The welcome sheet for the place promised ample dry wood (strike one) and the two guides who had led us to the forested hut were mysteriously absent from their hovel next door (strike two). So I grabbed the log and set out toward the only other people we'd seen all day.

Realizing how scary I must have looked, I set the firewood down, removed my hood and knocked on the cabin door. Four bewildered faces answered and I think even the swaddled baby wondered why this really wet guy stood in his doorway in the pouring rain at nightfall.

But-base hit: The father was a caretaker of the scattered cabanas, and directed his teenage son to lead me to a sheltered wood pile. Minutes later, I was weaving down the quarter-mile, rain-slicked path in the dark with a 90-pound Santa sack over my shoulder and the father's apology echoing in my head: "My son cannot accompany you; it's too cold out."

Though not as high as the nearby Baru volcano (Panama's highest point at 11,408 feet), the steep, jagged hills of Amistad nonetheless snag most passing rain clouds, providing an ideal incubator for a loamy cocoon of green tinged with red bromeliads, orchids and orange blossoms. In sunnier times, we were told, the park is a bird watcher's Eden, replete with hundreds of species, including the bright and wildly plumed quetzal. Though as skittish as most jungle birds, quetzals reportedly abound in these hills and at times even leave the forest to flit around Guadaloupe. But because they hate the rain, it was not until we were speeding out of town in a taxi that we saw our only quetzal. It was silhouetted against the white sky under a picnic shelter on the side of the road.

"You'll see those everywhere," said Gwendy, a friend of mine who lives in Panama City, as we drove past a car wreck, the loser's bumper lying on the ground. "And the big problem is that drivers aren't allowed to move their cars until the cops show up, which sometimes takes hours."

This policy, coupled with brazen Panamanian drivers and a proliferation of road work projects, clogs Panama City with more traffic jams than I have ever seen. The silver lining on this congestion is that most backups are physically short and usually brief, more like rush hour tangles in downtown Washington than a 20-mile stall on I-95.

With a few pockets of exception, the city is a morass of incongruous architecture-a corrugated tin supermarket next to an apartment building adjacent to a strip mall abutting a string of quaint homes. But tucked among this confusion are fabulous restaurants, modern necessities (including ATMs) and opportunities for some enlightening excursions.

My three days in the capital included the canal transit, long hikes in two legitimate jungle parks within 15 minutes of downtown (one so large that guides are recommended), a blur of affordable (!) fresh seafood meals, and visits to both of Panama City's former locations, Casco Viejo and Panama Viejo.

The latter, neglected for too long by the government, was partially overrun by residents of a neighboring slum and is now an uninspiring set of early 17th-century ruins, worth a look only for incurable historians. But Casco Viejo, which became the city center in the 1670s, is home to museums, historical buildings (including a dungeon-turned-restaurant and the presidential palace) and a pulsing barrio of 18th-century wooden houses, flower-covered balconies and street life. It's hard to tell restaurants and bars from homes and stores because so many doors are open, freeing music to the streets.

Peer a little harder and Casco Viejo looks like the French Quarter of New Orleans with a bad hangover; peeling paint, listing houses and tattered clothing reveal the economic hardship of the residents. But what they lack in dollars they reap in spirit: Neighbors chat and laugh across balconies, kids play soccer in the streets and food vendors roll by on bicycle carts. You could spend hours here by yourself without feeling lonely.

Just watch out at night; almost all tourist resources warn that bandits ply Casco Viejo after dark. Even my cabby cautioned me to leave before nightfall, and he used a Spanish word for mugger that I had never heard before: ratero.

So as the shadows filled the narrow streets, I walked toward the newer downtown to burn calories and see more of the city before dark. My route took me through the six-block Avenida Central pedestrian mall, Panama City's tourist de force of shopping, where I didn't notice daylight fading for all the glare from the open storefronts. The frenzied street scene far outclassed the goods for sale-everything from electronics, $5 shirts and high-end hiking boots to jewelry, grains and raw sausages. So when I tired of people-watching, I stopped to consult my guidebook on the quickest way out of the area.

From the teeming crowd a woman caught my eye, a tall Latina with swaying hips and painted-on jeans angling across the mall. Without breaking stride she brushed within an inch of me and whispered Spanish into my ear: "Put the map away! The rateros are watching you!"

She was gone and I was too, striding quickly in and out of stores, my pack clutched to my chest, toward an intersection and a taxi. It was such a simple gesture, a woman warning a tourist about street urchins without endangering herself at all, yet one that may have spared me a miserable experience.

I have no clever analogy to draw between that incident and the state of Panama tourism. Suffice to say that Panama delivers adventure travel on its own terms, a product that ranges from wonderfully authentic to pitifully ignorant, occasionally both at the same time.

So go now, but travel with an open mind and don't expect anything like ease or comfort as the travel industry normally defines them. Endure the rough edges, tolerate the middling service and, by all means, rejoice in the sparkling waters, virgin jungles and tranquil towns. As more Americans follow behind you, it's unclear what will become of them.

John Briley last wrote for Travel on recreational off-road driving.

GETTING THERE: American, Continental and Delta offer daily connecting service to Panama City's Tocumen International Airport from the Washington area; fares start at $441 round trip, with restrictions. I used the consolidator Airdeals.com (1-888-999-2174) and paid $369 round trip.

GETTING AROUND: Taxis are everywhere in Panama and, for the most part, cheap. Expect to pay $18 to $25 (the local currency is the U.S. dollar) to get from the airport into Panama City but less than $4 for rides within the city (establish the fare before accepting the ride).

Flying is the easiest way to shuttle from Panama City to tourist spots, and domestic flights, though often bumpy, are affordable and generally available, even at the last minute (there are no discounts for buying in advance). Panamanian airlines offering domestic service include Aeroperlas (011-507-315-7555 or 011-507-315-7500, www.aeroperlas.com), Aereo Taxi (011-507-264-8644) and Aviatur (011-507-270-1748). Or, you can book through a U.S. tour operator with a Panamanian branch office, such as Panama Jones (1-888-726-2621, www.panamacanal.com).

Be aware that these flights depart from Albrook, the former Air Force base-cum-domestic-airport that's closer to Panama City than Tocumen (a taxi to Albrook costs about $5 from town). Sample fares, all round trip from Panama City, include: San Blas (the island of El Porvenir), $50; Bocas del Toro, $94; and David (the nearest city to Guadeloupe), $116. David is one of the only cities to offer flights to destinations besides Panama City; flights to Bocas del Toro are $40 round trip.

Rental cars are available in Panama City and David for reasonable rates (I paid $35 per day, including insurance, from National Car Rental; you can book ahead at the major firms' U.S. offices). Be very alert when driving in Panama City; aggressive driving is less of an issue outside the city, but road conditions mandate constant attention.

LANGUAGE: Spanish is the official tongue, though English is spoken in many places around Panama City and in tourist spots, such as Bocas del Toro, San Blas and Isla Grande.

WHERE TO STAY: Panama City has dozens of hotels in all budget ranges. I liked the Hotel Marbella (on Calle D between calles 49 B Oeste and Eusebio A Morales, 011-507-263-2220; rates are $36 for a double weeknights, $44 weekends). It's a modern place with air conditioning, hot water and a pleasant restaurant/bar in the lobby. It's close to numerous restaurants in a safe neighborhood.

In Bocas del Toro: The Hotel Laguna (on Calle 3, Bocas's main drag, 011-507-757-9091) has clean, small doubles with air conditioning and hot water for $56 (though this price fluctuates with demand). There's also a restaurant on the property.

In the San Blas Islands: On Nalunega, Hotel San Blas (011-507-262-5410; rooms $35 per person) is basic-thin bamboo walls, sand floors, shared cold-water bathrooms-but it really fits the island mood. I bought a San Blas package for $135 that included the hotel (three meals daily and boat trips) and round-trip air. Flights land on El Porvenir; a boatman meets hotel guests at the airstrip.

In Guadaloupe: I stayed at one of the Cabanas los Quetzales (in the forest at the park boundary, about two miles from town, 011-507-771-2182; $100 to $125 per cabin for up to six people). The cabins have full kitchens and hot water (though mine was only tepid) and are set amid lush forest. You can also stay in the village at the Hotel los Quetzales (same owner and phone number as the cabanas; $30 to $35 per double), a beautiful, fairly modern wooden lodge with a restaurant. Prices for the cabanas and the lodge include guides and horses and use of ponchos and rubber boots.

PANAMA CANAL TOURS: Argo Tours (011-507-228-6069, www.islamorada.com) transits most of the canal every Saturday (about eight hours; cost is $90, including breakfast and lunch) and runs a full transit 12 times a year ($135). You can also view operations for free from an observation platform at the canal's Miraflores locks.

WHERE TO EAT: Panama City's restaurant selection is endless. I had fantastic fresh seafood at La Coralina (Calle 6 Norte y Via Simon Bolivar; about $6 for lunch) and the more upscale Siete Mares (n Calle Guatemala, next to El Cortijo; $22 for dinner and wine). In Casco Viejo, a wonderfully low-key spot for a break is Cafe de Asis (San Felipe; dinner with wine from $14), with indoor-outdoor seating. For an authentic Panamanian breakfast of shredded beef and onions, try El Boulevard (Avenida Balboa y Calle 31 Este); it's cheap, fast and full of locals.

In Bocas del Toro, El Pirate and Buena Vista (both on Calle 3, the main strip) have nice decks over the water. El Pirate has a local ambiance, with slower service and dinners from about $6. Buena Vista feels American-the Californian owners beam in TV sports from the States-and serves great blender drinks as well as food; dinner starts at $8.

Final note: Panamanian tap water is safe to drink.

TRAVEL AGENCIES: Nabila Travel (011-507-269-5847, nabila@sinfo.net) took care of all my internal arrangements, including booking my canal tour and arranging air travel. Owner Lina Troendle moved from Boston two years ago. For harder-core eco-tours, try Eco Circuitos/Margo Tours (011-507-264-8888, www.ecocircuitos.com); managers Aida Orillac and Ana Young speak English.

INFORMATION: Panama Embassy, 202-483-1407