Bocas del Toro, Panama

Imagine.......a group of islands in the Caribbean with sunshine nearly every day and beaches of pure white sand and turquoise water. When I arrived I was filled with wicked delight that I was in a place this beautiful in February, when my home town is gray and drab and existing at 32 degrees. I love traveling!!

Today was full of new, delightful and challenging experiences. First, I learned how to travel by bus and found how surprisingly cheap and easy it is to navigate the Costa Rican bus system. We left our hotel in San Jose at 8 am this morning to catch the 10 am bus to Sixiola on the border of Panama. It was $9 for the five and a half hour bus trip. I found myself sitting next to a Tico biologist and in my broken Spanish began asking him about his family. With hesitation he informed me that he had a daughter that lived with her mother on the Pacific side. After a moment he added that he had two daughters that lived with their mother in the north. And after another moment that he had fathered a son with a woman he was currently going to see in BriBri. I smiled and tried to hide my look of astonishment that a skinny biologist had managed to accomplish all of this in between study and scientific pursuits.

We arrived in Sixiola around 4 pm and walked across the bridgethe border into Panama. I found myself nearly skipping across it I was so excited and thrilled over the idea of walking into another country. For $5 we received our entry visas and then we were met by the scam artists of Panama. Two young men had met us as we came off the bus and walked us across the border. When we had received our visas they suddenly began telling us that we needed to hurry to catch the last taxi out of town or we would miss the last water taxi to Bocas and would have to spend the night in Changuinola.

I felt my guard go up instantly. When I found myself stuffed in a pickup truck with six other people having paid $10, and watching our money be split between the four guys who had managed to get us all to agree to this ridiculous situation...... I felt a split second of rage. How dare they get the better of me! Then I burst out laughing. How many times a day do you think they manage to convince the gringos that this is the last taxi?

After an hour in the back of the pickup, we arrived at the water taxi, paid our $4 fee and found ourselves speeding across the water to the islands as the sun began to go down. We arrived in downtown Bocas in the midst of the last night of the celebration of Carnival. Up until this point I had been gleefully enjoying the moment and not thinking too much about what the next would hold. I was struck with sudden seriousness when I found myself alone in the midst of a loud crowd and was told that all the hotels and hostels were full for the celebration. One side of me felt momentary panic, but the other smiled and said "This is exactly the kind of experience you've always wanted, now what are you going to do about it?"

After an hour of walking from place to place I landed on two options, a honeymoon suite for $80 or a small, dirty hotel room with no water for $15. I opted for the hotel room, asked that the sheets be changed and the bathroom cleaned, and slept on the cleanest side of the bed with my sweatshirt for a pillow and a chair against the door in case any of the drunk people in the hall decided to investigate my room in the middle of the night. My last concious thought was "I can't believe how happy I am to be living this. But thank God I'm exhausted enough not to think about what might be in this bed."