David, Tuesday 11 July
David is a modern city of reasonable size. The streets are clean; the city feels safe. I book into the Hotel Iris on the cathedral square: a good clean room with air-con and hot water in the evening, but not in the morning. I need a new headlamp. I draw a blank at the local Honda agent and ride sixty kilometres to the Costa Rican border. This stretch of the Pan-American Highway is four lanes with a centre division. Imagine the frontier town of Paso Canoas as one big shabby shopping mall. I find a lamp and two replacement mirrors. Back in David I photograph my bike among a dozen of its twins outside a Domino Pizza Parlour and then dine for three dollars at a good Chinese restaurant.
To Panama City, Wednesday 12 July
David to Panama City is 450 kilometres on the Pan-American Highway. The highway is mostly two lanes across cattle country of rolling hills and big shady trees. Crests of hills add interest for Panamanian drivers of flash 4x4s. Why wait to overtake a truck when you can have yourself an instant adrenalin fix from a near-death experience?
A downpour threatens. I park under the tin eaves of a warehouse pretending to be a dance hall. A mechanic is dropping the gearbox out of an old truck parked on the curb. The driver or owner watches. The rain hits and they sit with me at the bar in the empty dance hall. A woman of immense curves serves us cold sodas. She wears a black leather skirt that almost covers her rump. We three men could shelter comfortably in her cleavage. The mechanic jokes with her. The owner or driver of the truck doesn’t joke. His livelihood depends on repairing the gearbox and whether he can afford the parts. His three children are at primary school. His father died in a road accident and he supports his mother and grandparents.
Guidebooks warn that Panama City is dangerous – even by daylight. My destination is the Hotel Caribe on Central Avenue, a big American-style high-rise that is easy to find and has a garage for the Honda. The elevator takes forever. A Panamanian family with two children wait. They are joined in the elevator by a black pimp dripping gold, the pimp’s late-sixties American client and an overpainted retirement-age street whore.
The night manager is a young fair Spanish immigrant. The Spaniard complains that Panamanians can’t run anything. They need foreigners. I could call him racist. I prefer to bargain the room rate down from thirty to twenty-five dollars. The bed is great. The TV controller doesn’t work. Nor does the light in the bathroom. I am too tired to complain and I am mad in the morning at finding the Honda moved and punctured.
I can read the watchman’s thoughts: Hey, the old fool is going to have to pay to have it fixed.
Yeah, but I’m not paying you.
I push the bike up the ramp and around two blocks to a puncture-repair shop. We remove wheel and tyre in time for an electricity cut. Result: I waste the morning – if wasting is being directed to a street stall that serves a great breakfast with two cups of coffee for eighty cents and finding a perfect hotel with a hot-water power shower, air-con, cable TV and a good restaurant for sixteen dollars.
First impressions of Panama City? Cabs stop so you can cross the road. And I haven’t been mugged.
Panama City, Thursday 13 July
The old part of Panama City dates back to the 1670s. Rather than Old Panama, it is called Casco Viejo, ‘the Old Compound’.
Old Panama exists. It is a collection of overgrown ruins out of town towards the airport.
The buildings were beautiful before they were torched by that great English hero Henry Morgan.
The buildings were beautiful before they were torched by that vicious murderous English pirate Henry Morgan.
My paternal family are English, Italian and Hispanic. My great-grandfather, Ramon Cabrera, was a Spanish terrorist. He built his terrorist band into an army, won battles and became the Marques del Ter, Conde de Morella. I must make a speech in Morella on 6 December in celebration of his two-hundredth anniversary. Doing so, I will glorify a terrorist and become a criminal according to the inane laws proposed by the present British government and passed by Parliament. The British government is sadly short of historians. Most are lawyers. Historians would have known better than commit British troops to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Casco Viejo is a slum undergoing gentrification under government guidance. Streets have been paved. Official buildings gleam. Buildings awaiting resurrection have been given a coat of pastel paint. Brass bell-buttons sparkle beside new doors on buildings already resurrected. The doors are lined with steel. Police patrol – some on pushbikes and wearing shorts and biker helmets. The first upmarket restaurants have opened behind closed doors (to protect the electrically cooled air). The poor sit on doorsteps.
I enter a store in search of a ballpoint. The goods on sale are in one half of the room: a few Panama hats, black waistcoats embroidered with golden animals. A grey-haired lady has collapsed on a sofa beside a cutting table in the remaining part of the store. Her husband sits at a worktable trimming silk lining for a pair of evening slippers. The lady is overweight and has difficulty in rising. I apologise for disturbing her.
‘It is the heat,’ she says, and wipes her forehead on her forearm. The heat and she has a headache.
I have been walking an hour. My feet ache and I agree as to the heat.
She pours me a glass of water from a plastic jug.
I would be rude in not drinking – possibly unwise in drinking. Travel is full of such quandaries. I drink and sit in a wicker chair beside the worktable and write up these notes.
Casco Viejo, Friday 14 July
I return to Casco Viejo district late this morning. Yesterday I discovered a comedor that sells fresh, unsweetened pear juice. Today I drink two glasses. Later I sit with two women on a bench in the cathedral square. The women are schoolteachers. They ask whether I enjoy their country and what I enjoy.
I speak truthfully of the friendly openness I encounter and of the beauty of the countryside. Pleased, they ask whether I have visited the church with the golden altar. The altar is a survivor of Henry Morgan’s vandalism/heroism.
I reply that I have and that I have walked the streets and squares and that Casco Viejo will be very beautiful once it is all restored.
‘It will be for tourists,’ the younger of my companions says. ‘That is what the government plans. It will be too costly for ordinary people, for the poor.’
This teacher is in her fifties, a thin, somewhat severe woman, black, her hair dragged back in a tight tuft.
Mention of the poor starts the elder teacher talking of the US invasion of Panama in 1989. She is a plump, white, motherly woman in her sixties, hair dyed a golden brown and set in youthful curls. She cradles a transparent plastic portfolio on her lap. Her fingers are chubby; she wears a gold wedding band together with an engagement ring set with a fragment of green stone.
We sit facing the cathedral. The two white towers gleam in the sun. The plump, motherly schoolteacher is reluctant to talk of people. She talks of the apartment buildings in the district that were destroyed in the invasion: although not luxurious, the buildings were an improvement; the district possessed a true feeling of community.
She repeats the accusation levelled by the Bocas truck driver: that Noriega was easy to arrest. There were many opportunities. He travelled out in the country, walked in the streets.
‘So many people died.’
She speaks of her neighbours, an entire family. All were killed. The grandmother was seventy-three (my age). The youngest child was only six, a girl. The teacher says that none of the houses of the rich were damaged, none of the rich were killed, none of the captains.
The younger teacher nods agreement. ‘The captains knew,’ she says. Her husband was second-in-command in Colón (a cop?). On the eve of the invasion, he sent one of his men with food and instructions that she wasn’t to leave the house.
‘It was against the poor,’ the motherly teacher insists. Poor people weren’t important. Artisans died and poor people who sold fried fish on the street corner and on the beach at weekend. ‘Very flavoursome,’ she assures me, ‘Fried with chilli and with garlic.’
Memory of the fish is a trigger. She weeps, and yet her tone of voice remains calm, almost wondrous, as she talks of her sister who had lived on the top floor of a building. ‘They shouted that everyone must come out into the street or they would be killed. There was so much blood in the elevator and bits of bodies, hands, legs, a head.’
Her sister died two days after the invasion. ‘It was the shock.’
Her friend, the thin teacher, passes her a handkerchief and she wipes her eyes.
‘They lied,’ she says. ‘They killed more than 5000 people. They buried them with tractors. They are hidden there deep down in the area that is called Arenal. It was Henry Ford and Arias Calderón. They wanted to do it.’
In the evening I talk with a successful Panamanian businessman in his fifties, a computer expert. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘There were thousands killed.’ And, yes, it would have been easy to capture Noriega. The invasion was unnecessary.
He cites the booming Panamanian economy as the reason for the invasion. The canal was due to be handed over to Panama in ten years. The US was losing control. The invasion was a warning to Panamanians of their inferior status.
The Pentagon named the invasion ‘Operation Just Cause’.
I have not met a Panamanian who agrees.
Miaflores, Saturday 15 July
The Panama Canal is what the US did best. The project demanded absolute support of a government ruthless in pursuit of a benefit to the US. It demanded great vision and determination, brilliant planning and design, a massive workforce and vast finance.
Miaflores dock is a short run from Panama city. Entrance is eight dollars for an adult, half price for pensioners. The museum is fascinating: clear explanations, great models, aquarium tanks, cabinets of insects.
I sleep through much of the promotional film in the theatre. My spectacles fog each time I leave the air-conditioned building.
Something nags – I don’t know what.
Realisation takes a couple of hours. The canal is the only garbage-free zone in Central America. Grass is mown between the roadways and rails. Windows shine. Workers are professional. They know their jobs and have no need to shout.
The restaurant is good. Prices range from reasonable to luxury: eight or nine dollars for hamburger or chicken with rice, fourteen dollars for Thai sea bass steamed in banana leaves, thirty-five dollars for San Blas crab.
I buy bottled water and a pack of peanuts at the ground-floor caféteria and watch the ships go by.
Most people watch from the fourth-floor deck. Don’t. Looking up at the ships from ground level gives you their true immensity. I witness the highest-price transit ever to pass through the canal. The ship, MSC Fabrienne, was built to the maximum permitted size. She carries 4500 containers for a transit fee of 246 666 dollars.
From ground level, the hard hats at the forward bulwarks resemble a scattering of M&Ms. A lone pelican sits on the lock gates. Frigate birds float overhead. Low cloud closes in and rain hides the conical hills.
Panama City, Monday 17 July
Panama City is splendid at providing contrasts. The old quarter of Casco Viejo commands the western end of the shore; the ruins of Panama Viejo mark the east. I entered the city through a hinterland of slum tenements as grim as those on the outskirts of Havana. My hotel is in a mid-market district for both foreign tourists and Panamanians visiting from the provinces. Internet cafés abound, restaurants are reasonably priced and streetwalkers appear at night.
Turn left up a block and you find traffic-congested streets of pavement stalls and supersaver stores. I buy three lightweight short-sleeved shirts at one and a pair of chinos.
Turn right and you head into a land of pristine high-rise cathedrals. Money is god in this BMW banker territory of dark suits, polished shoes and respectable ties. Cops are the streetwalkers. They linger at every entrance and on most intersections. Pavements are swept, shrubs are barbered, grass dividers shaved and watered. Even the poor are neatly dressed – money, however dirty, demands clean servants. Panama is a laundry for dirty money.
I meet with a retired police captain in Casco Viejo. He was born in Casco Viejo and lives there now in a house that belonged to his father. He was a lieutenant of police at the time of the invasion. The US army arrested him and held him in jail without charge for five months. The US army arrested all the officers of the police force and of the defence force. The city was undefended and was ransacked. Is this a familiar scenario?
Panama City, Tuesday 18 July
The Darien Gap divides Panama from Colombia. No roads cross the Darien. Thick jungle and mountains are the territory of indigenous people who object to strangers, narco-traffickers, Colombian guerrilleros (narco-traffickers) and Colombian paramilitaries (narco-traffickers) fighting the guerrilleros for control of the drug trade. The standard route is by sea through the San Blas Islands to Cartagena. Or you can fly.
I decide to try the Pacific coast. Why? To be different.
Perhaps I should ask myself why people avoid the Pacific route. Instead, I study maps, read a couple of guidebooks and talk to a few fishermen down at the fish market.
Boats leave the Fiscal wharf near the fish market for Jaque, eighteen hours south down the coast. From Jaque canoes run down the coast to Jurado in Colombia, four to five hours of unsheltered sea passage. Jaque has an immigration post so I can book out of Panama. Jurado has nothing. Certainly not a road. So I need a second canoe or launch from Jurado to Bahia Solano, where I can book into Colombia.
How big are the canoes?
I ride to the Fiscal wharf this morning. The wharf is roofed to protect cargo. It is a slum and it stinks. Oswald is a big black immigration official with a big kind heart. He has elected himself my transport counsel. We walk down the wharf. The boat that can take me to Jaque lies alongside. It is forty feet long. The hull is of rough planks. The deck planks are rougher. Dockers manhandle sections of mahogany tree trunk from a small hold. A wheelhouse or cabin sits on the after deck. A can of paint passed the boat some years ago and forgot to stop. Even a casual inspection gives pause for doubt: What keeps it afloat?
I enquire of Oswald whether there is another boat.
‘Next month, maybe,’ Oswald says.
I say, ‘Oh.’
I repeat the ‘oh’. Then, ‘This maybe-boat: how is it?’
‘The same,’ says Oswald, in whom I sense compassion.
‘Oh,’ I say.
The captain of the hulk inspects the Honda and quotes the fare.
Oswald expects me to negotiate. Negotiating is tough when the alternative is a maybe. I agree the fare. I have betrayed Oswald.
Oswald, a football fan, watched the pathetic effort of the English in the penalty shootout against Portugal in the World Cup. He condemns English footballers for lacking courage.
Not negotiating places me in the same category.
I am not doing well.
Panama City, Wednesday 19 July
This is my last piece on Just Cause. I interview a respected journalist at the offices of the leading Panamanian newspaper. This is his account: Have no doubts – Noriega is a vile man. A group of defence force officers arrested him on 3 October 1989. The officers telephoned the US embassy. The embassy refused support. The officers were at a loss as to how to act. A majority of the group fled to the Canal Zone. Noriega persuaded the remainder to release him. Noriega had nine of this group shot the following day. The US invaded Panama on 20 December 1989. The ‘Just Cause’ was to arrest Noriega. A minimum of 1000 Panamanian civilians were killed in the invasion. The city was ransacked.
The journalist describes the US soldiers as country boys, young, ill-educated and inexperienced. They often fired from panic. The blame for the killing of civilians and for ransacking the luxury stores at the airport by US soldiers lay with incompetent officers.
For Panamanians, the invasion remains an essential ingredient in Panamanian–US relations. I suspect it is considered of very little importance in the US and that few North Americans recall or ever knew or bothered to learn the details.
‘Just Because’ was the Pentagon joke name for Operation Just Cause. George H.W. Bush was the US president. The US army estimated Panamanian deaths at 516, while an army internal memo put the figure at over 1000. An independent commission of inquiry (US) put the figure at between 1000 and 4000. Some 15 000 civilians were displaced – most were working-class. Widespread looting bankrupted many businesses – insurance companies refused to pay, naming the invasion an act of war. A great museum was ransacked. This was to arrest one man. Shades of Iraq.
Hugh Thomas (although a Protestant, a good historian) writes of Cortés’ conquest of Mexico: To a good general, history is as important as geography.
US generals and the Bush family either disagree or are too lazy to do their homework.
Let me give the last word to the Panamanian journalist: The gringos have never thought of us as equals or important.
Panama City, Thursday 20 July
I visit the boat and captain at the Fiscal wharf. The captain has the charm of a tent-peg mallet. I wait ten minutes before he acknowledges my existence. Meanwhile I talk with a Coona woman shipping yams. Coona are the indigenous people of the Darien. She has returned recently from both Jaque and Bahía Solano. She assures me that both places are pleasant and safe (most places I visit, safety is a given). She provides the name of a Jaque boatman for the trip to Bahía Solano. He sails on Tuesdays or Wednesdays so I will be stuck in Jaque for five days. The Coona woman paid seventy dollars from Jaque to Bahía Solano. I suspect she is a tough negotiator while I have proved a walkover and I own a bike. Bike fare always exceeds people fare.
She tells me that there is no road out of Bahía Solano: if there were a road, only a suicide would travel it.
‘You said Bahía Solano is safe.’
‘The town is,’ she says.
So I require a boat south from Bahía Solano to Buenaventura, three days, if and when there is a boat. I do some basic maths and dislike the result. I also dislike placing myself and my negotiating ability at the mercy of boatmen in Jaque or Bahía Solano.
I park in Plaza Herera. The pear lady has fresh pear juice in the icebox. I sit at a computer and email a query to Kelvin at the Black Sheep hostel in Medellín: can I fly the Honda up from Bahía Solano?
I pour myself a second glass of pear juice. The pear juice woman reminds me of a Cuban, the owner of the longest-surviving private restaurant in Santa Fe. Both women are short and square; they dress identically: baggy grey T-shirts, baggy jeans cut off at mid-knee; they wear their hair short-short and they walk with their elbows out (not, as with Blair and Bush, to appear manly but to bypass ample bosoms and ample hips). I tell her the problems of Bahía Solano.
She warns me that Colombia is dangerous.
‘Not Bahía Solano,’ I reply.
‘All Colombia,’ she insists.
I drink my pear juice and check the BBC website for new destruction meted to the Lebanese by Israel. I recall Lebanon as more beautiful and less crowded than the South of France. I recall the warm company of kids my own age, of laughter and great food and dancing through the night at cafés up in the cool mountain air, the lights of Beirut spread below and the arc of the seafront. My recollections of Lebanon are ancient, over half a century old.
Kelvin brings my knowledge of Colombia up to date. I cannot fly the bike from Bahía Solano to Medellin. I am committed to a three-day boat trip from Bahía Solano to Buenaventura. How often do the boats sail?
My mind is jelly. I must think. I write a letter to my grandson Charlie Boo. Charlie Boo is four months old, a good age for a sage. I explain that the trip is in four stages and that the first three destinations have no road communication with the outside world. I describe the disaster of a boat and the unfriendly captain charged with my wellbeing on the initial stage to Jaque. Then I search for a rationale understandable to a four-month-old sage.
What is my purpose?
To travel through Colombia.
Buenaventura is in the south of Colombia. I will have to ride a vast northerly loop to see anything of the country.
I want to sail. Why did I buy a bike?
Because I am afraid of seeming afraid if I chicken out.
Hardly a sensible rationale.
Nor am I a competitive traveller. I don’t give a damn whether I am the first outsider to visit a place or the five-billionth. I travel because I enjoy travelling. I visit places that I expect to enjoy. I desire the travelling to be enjoyable. Leapfrogging down the Pacific coast in a series of doubtful boats and canoes at an unknown price conforms to none of these parameters. Call it off. Switch to the Atlantic coast. Ship self and the bike to Cartagena.
Late evening and I sit outdoors at a café in the company of a young American botanist who works out of Jaque. He says that Jaque is safe but not that safe. He keeps a low profile and keeps each visit down to an absolute maximum of two months. Longer and he could become too tempting a target for kidnappers. Only a lunatic would attempt travelling in Colombia’s Choco Province, of which only Bahía Solano and Buenaventura are safe for a short visit. Bahía Solano is bearable if you have a reason to be there. Buenaventura is a dump.
I feel good at having made a sensible decision. I head back to the hotel. While preparing for bed, I drop my top teeth in the sink. The plate was repaired in Mexico. It snaps in three pieces. One piece disappears down the drain. I sit on the bed with the two remaining pieces cupped in my hands. I am a writer and I turn for consolation to my laptop. The battery is flat. I plug in the charger. Nothing happens. I feel old and stupid and very alone. I want to go home. Help.
Resolute, Friday 21 July
I have been drifting. I need to take control. First I must find an orthodontist. I am up at seven and consult the receptionist. The receptionist gets the giggles over my teeth. She consults the hotel owner while I gum a plate of scrambled eggs. At half past eight I sprawl in a luxurious dental chair at the Clínica Rojas Pardini. My mouth is full of gel.
Travellers (and particularly their families) from England and the US doubt the quality of Latin American medical practice.
The heart specialist I consulted in Guatemala years ago was Johns Hopkins plus standard extras.
The orthodontist overseeing the mechanic taking an impression of my mouth is Boston plus standard extras.
At half past nine I am equipped with a fully re-seated set of top teeth. The dentist is kind to pensioners – or enjoys the concept of my trip. He tells me to pay the dental technician fifty dollars.
I feel back in control.
I leave the bike for a total overhaul at the Honda agent, Promotos.
I cab across town to Electronico Chino, where a Chinese genius repairs the charger for my laptop.
I hit the internet and discover a German sailing association that owns a schooner, Stahlratte, that makes the run through the San Blas Islands to Cartagena and back.
Perfect. I call their mobile. They take bikes. They have a Japanese biker booked on this coming trip. The fare is 500 dollars, to include food, wine and the bike. The yacht is at Porto Vinir in the San Blas Islands. They sail Monday for Cartagena. A Coona launch leaves Mirimar at midday, Saturday, for Porto Vinir – fifty dollars for a bike and rider. Mirimar is eighty-five kilometres east of the Colón highway. No problem. I head to the nearest bank and stick my plastic in the ATM.
Stick plastic in an ATM and you get money. Or you get a message. I get a message to call my bank. I try two other banks and the ATM in a casino before calling the UK. A woman with a young voice answers. I tell her my card is blocked.
She consults whatever requires consulting and says, ‘No, it isn’t.’
‘It is,’ I say. ‘I’ve tried it in three machines at three separate banks and at a casino.’
‘Well, it’s not blocked,’ she says.
‘Why can’t I get any money?’ I ask.
‘Possibly the system is being updated,’ she suggests.
I try to sound neither desperate nor infuriated. ‘How long does that take?’
‘Not too long,’ she says. ‘You can try the ATM again in the morning.’
‘I have to pay for a boat ride in the morning.’
She says, ‘Well, that’s all I can suggest.’ It is a Saturday summer morning home in England. She will finish work soon and sit with a boyfriend in the sun outside a country pub.
I will worry through the night.
My best option is to ride down to Colón early. I will be closer to Mirimar. If the ATM refuses my card, I can talk with the local bank.