2019/04 Panama trip - Journey to Soberania |
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Dear All,
This is the story of our trip to Soberania national park in what used to be Panama’s Canal Zone. The park is famous for its wide variety of bird species, but we had signed up for a combined Birds and Mammals package, hoping to see something of everything.
We had originally intended to go in February, a good time to escape BC’s winter and enjoy Panama’s dry season, but my residence card didn’t arrive until March. The end of April is the beginning of Panama’s “green season”, and may be damp, but the good news was that we’d save about $3000 over February’s prices.
Now that I had the card we were trying to squeeze a year’s worth of travel into nine months. We were packing for Panama while I was booking a trip to Scotland and England and trying to organize a trip to Minnesota, all complicated of course by having to work around the medical appointments that are required to keep us moving.
Monday April 22nd
It was cloudy, cool, and drizzly, a good day to be heading out, but it was a shame to be missing a lot of the spring flowers though. We were on a similar schedule to last year’s trip to Costa Rica, flying overnight on Aeromexico to Mexico City and then taking a morning flight to Panama City.
It should have all been routine but something always changes; in this case our Jetset parking area had been converted to up-market valet parking, and we were now in the value lot, further out. The lot’s number plate recognition didn’t work and the machine took over a dozen scans to read our booking code. We supposedly could get to the airport by bus or train, but found that there was no bus. The train was free but we had to “buy” our free tickets from the machine. Then the gate closed on me and I found the ticket only worked once and I had to go get another. But the stairs to the train we needed were outside the gates so we had to exit and buy more free tickets. Then we got off a station early! Luckily we had plenty of time.
I’d printed our boarding passes but they were large and unwieldy so Aeromexico gave us normal card passes and we dumped the paper ones. Then Sandie found that her new one had been smudged by their printer and was unreadable, so she got stalled going through Security and eventually had to pull out her tablet and find the email and get that scanned instead. After a few repetitions of this she was relieved to finally get on the plane.
Tuesday April 23rd
Things improved. At breakfast time, in Mexico City, we had to go through Immigration into Mexico, and the official seemed a bit miffed that we planned to emigrate within hours without sampling the delights of the city, but he gave us the necessary stamps and entry visas. By early afternoon we were landing at Panama City, where, as expected, it was hot and humid, around 32C, 90F.
We didn’t need any currency. Panama nominally has its own currency, the Balboa, but it is pegged to the American dollar and although it has its own coins, the banknotes are all American. The Balboa is named after Vasco Nunez de Balboa, the first European to cross the Isthmus of Panama and view the Pacific Ocean. No relationship to Rocky Balboa.
We had a scheduled pickup at 3.30pm; nice to have two hours leeway for a connection, but not when you arrive a little early! Luckily our driver was an hour early. He’d come in a large van but we were his only passengers. He had little English and although I can read some Spanish I don’t speak much so it was a quiet trip.
Tocumen Airport is to the east of Panama City’s impressive array of skyscrapers, and we were avoiding the city and its traffic jams and taking back roads through what looked like an industrial wasteland, with shacks and businesses mingled. I noticed an autorepair shop under a bridge with all the equipment kept outside. The roads are narrow with the road markings long gone but the locals seem to remember what they once were. I never understood their rules for roundabouts.
We joined a four-lane tollway and the scenery improved with tidy houses and some beautiful gardens. We passed the Rod Carew baseball stadium. Carew was the Minnesota Twins’ first baseman and best hitter when we came to Minnesota, and now I know that he originally came from Panama.