Day 13
Wednesday
Everyone got up super early because we had all got to bed so early the night before. We got up, packed, and jumped on the bus. We bounced and jounced over to Curtis Martin’s place for a wonderful breakfast of rice, beans, scrambled eggs, some sort of Costa Rican pastry, and Costa Rican coffee. He was going to show us a baby anteater he had caught the night before, but it got away before he could show us.
Flower at science camp
A beautiful series of pictures taken at Curtis Sharp’s by Yvonne
Up close and personal
Marcel chillaxing (a new word coined on tour), before being summarily dumped to the floor for taking more than his share of hammock time
As we left, we came to a place in the road where the bus had to ford a creek. As the bus nearly stopped to slowly ford the creek, Benjamin hopped out the back door of the bus, ran to the side where there was a concrete pillar about six inches square laying across the creek. He ran across and waited on the other side for the bus and hopped back in.
Benjamin running across pillar
We saw lots of beautiful mountain scenery on the trip over the rough, dirt mountain roads.
Paradise
When we got to the border between Panama and Costa Rica, we went to the Costa Rican immigration office and filled out a customs form and got our passports stamped. Then we went back to the bus and got our luggage. As we were standing near a large Panama sign, Michael went down the steep embankment to stand next to the sign for a picture. He slipped a bit and grabbed the sign. The sharp metal edge of the sign sliced his finger open, requiring attention from Brianna, our stand-in nurse.
Michael standing with bloody finger by Panama sign
We next walked across the very unusual bridge that spanned a river and linked the two countries. It had railroad ties spaced at standard RR intervals for it’s base. Then it had RR tracks running down the middle. On either side of the tracks were rough-hewn planks for vehicles to drive on. At portions there was a small metal walkway for pedestrians, but some places there weren’t. At those places we had to walk on the planks. I was the only one with a suitcase—everyone else had packed their stuff for the night in their backpacks. However, my backpack was full with my laptop and my CamelBack water bladder. So I took my little green roll along suitcase off-road. It was sort of an amusing site seeing me pull it along the dirt streets, bouncing over railroad ties, clacking along metal walkways, jumping concrete barriers, etc.
The bridge
A view from the bridge
Ancient-ness! And close to home-ness.
The Costa Rica side of the border was a very cursory check—they didn’t even look at our passport pictures before handing them back to us after stamping them. The Panama side was even more lax—we gave all our passports to Leo, he took the stack in, and they went through and stamped them all en masse. They did, however, spring a surprise $5 entrance fee on us. While we were waiting for our passports to be stamped, a cute little boy came up and was wanting to shine our shoes. That didn’t work very well because most of us were wearing sandals. However, he did shine the black dress shoes Urie was wearing.
Little dude shining Urie’s shoes
Ministerio de Desarrollo Agropecuario? Ministry of Farming Development? Interesting name for a customs building
The instant we stepped into Panama, it was like stepping into a poorer version of the Latin section of America. American styles of clothes walked around on the streets, and the military and police looked serious, American-trained, and wore American fatigues and combat boots. It wasn’t hard to tell that Panama spent the last century as an American satellite.
I was going to say at first that I would be more scared to make this man angry at me than some of less well-trained Policia I have seen, but the more I think about it, the more I think that this very deadly young man would be much more professional than some of his less skilled counterparts
We then piled 13 people into 12-passenger vans—we left the bus in Costa Rica because our driver didn’t have a passport—and headed for the small town of Changuinola, Panama. The vans dropped us off and we waited while Leo negotiated the price back down to what they had quoted him on the phone. After a long wait, we finally went into the worst hotel room I have ever been in. The name of the hotel was deceptively The Willy Suite—which we took to be “The Really Sweet”. The carpet had ridges running through it. There was a concrete step up into the bathroom on which we kept stubbing our toes. The A/C’s remote control was missing so we had two climate control options: full blast A/C or unplug the A/C. The toilet’s handle had to be held for 5 second to flush. The hot shower knob was missing and we had to scrounge for a Leatherman to turn the hot water on. The hot water worked in the evening, but there was no hot water in the morning. In either case, we had to wait about 3-4 minutes after we turned the hot water knob on for any water to come, much less the proper temperature water. The water from the faucets was unsafe. The room we were in had 7 guys—4 on two double beds, 1 on a single bed, and 2 on a mattress on the floor. The double mattresses barely had a shoulder width per person and you could feel every spring that was in the mattress. We opted to turn the A/C off for the whole night, though the less prudent argued against us. I was not interested in getting sick, or in re-adjusting my body to A/C and being miserable in the heat the next day. I was one of the people that took a shower in the morning and thus got a cold shower. I am not complaining at all about the SMBI people that got it together; that was the only thing available. However, on the positive side, the hotel only cost $6.60 per person.
Hotel Willy Suite
Hotel Willy… Interesting
We went and ate in a small hole-in-the-wall restaurant—I had arroz con pollo (rice with chicken), but Chuckie opted for rice and cow stomach. I next went to an internet cafe right across the street from our hotel and spent several hours doing blog posts. We next headed to Changuinola’s “Gran Terminal Central de Transportes” and gave an hour-long program on the front steps. We had a decent sized crowd, including two patrolling federales (National Police) in military fatigues and several radio and TV reporters. The reporters interviewed Urie and asked him a bunch of questions. We were quite a rarity in town—I saw about 7 other gringos in my whole time there. People seemed to really enjoy the music.
Lunch buffet
Chuckie and his stomachs–the cow’s and his
The internet cafe’s population had a very high density of Mennonites
The program at Gran Central
Part of our audience across the street
The interview
After that we roamed town shopping and eating supper. We found a sweet little Christian restaurant that had Bible verses on the wall and Christian songs playing. We heard several recognizable praise and worship songs playing in Spanish. As the lady was trying to explain to us what the ice cream flavors were, we came to a white one. She said “No! No!” and made prohibitory motions with her hands. Her stream of Spanish trying to explain this flavor finally came to word we knew: “Liquer”. She obviously could tell we were Christians by our sisters’ head coverings and wanted to make sure she at least communicated the ingredients of that flavor. When Chuckie was going through the line and he figured out what it was, he pantomimed drinking and then a wildly flailing drunk. It looked quite hilarious and the abuelita (grandma) serving us laughed and nodded. That Christian restaurant also was marvelously cheap—55 cents for a cup with two scoops of ice cream, $1.50 for a huge plate of food, and 30 cents for drinks. We had an awesome time hanging out at the Christian restaurant just relaxing, drinking Fanta, and eating ice cream.
Eating pizza at the Christian restaurant
It was a funny sight to see the two deans sitting so far apart at such empty tables. We were joking that we should come over and give them relational couseling since they obviously were not speaking to each other. I took a picture and Anita happened to be walking through the picture shaking her finger at them, which really added to the picture.
Excitedly eating a new discovery. I was kind to the ladies and omitted some of the more… expressive… pictures.
Much fabric shopping was done in that small town… many new cape dresses with a latin twist shall henceforth show up on the American Mennonite scene.
That night we retired to our beds to the tune of very loud salsa latin music and drunken shouting. This was the background noise for several hours. After that, they switched to an American dance beat. At one point, we heard a loud shouted Spanish argument from the lobby. At another point, Joel and I were sure we heard some of our ladies’ voices talking, so we got up, got dressed, and checked to make sure they were all right, but we had apparently been mistaken.
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