Category: Panama trips

After a pleasant stay in the fresh mountain air of the Lost and Found eco-hostel, it was time to head back downhill into sticky, hot David. Lacking a car, I tried flagging down one of the small buses that zoom between Bocas and David to no avail. A white pick-up acting as a collective taxi stopped though. I said, “How much to David”? The driver yelled, “Three Balboas! Lets go!” Ok! I threw my pack in the back and hopped in to share the ride with two silent, dour-faced fellows in the back and two talkative guys (driver and co-pilot) in the front. I never found out why those guys in the back looked sour; they weren’t exactly open to conversation. Maybe it was because they didn’t like partaking in a race. Can’t say that I did either although I admit that it was pretty memorable. Although the race wasn’t official, we were certainly trying our best to beat the bus to David. I was reminded of the similarities between the words “fearless” and “reckless”. Our driver was both; he would zoom past the bus, then the bus would zoom past us, playing vehicular hopscotch all the way down the mountain. Never mind that it was a two-lane road with solid double lines. Ha! Those yellow lines don’t count- we are exempt because we are in a race! So what if the race is private; we are racing nonetheless! While we sat in the back silently contemplating trials and errors in life such as choosing to take a collective taxi for example, our driver and copilot laughed like mad, honking at and waving to a kid in the bus who just as recklessly stuck his head out the window to laugh back at them. Ha ha ha!! Isn’t this great?!? Who needs a carnival- Lets all risk our lives as we zoom down the mountain! As a curious side note, while the scenery blurred by (reminiscent of how our lives were flashing before our eyes), our driver never ceased to talk on the phone; he kept answering it with a shout, “Hwua!!” while simultaneously honking the horn at all passersby. Old barefoot woman?- HONK!! Farmer on a horse?-HONK!! Young nubile Panamanian girl?-HONK!! HONK!!, the copilot pitching in with a, “HHEEEEYY!!” that would have even made the most effeminate of Neanderthals grunt in admiration.

Somewhere near the town of Gualaca (which oddly enough sounds a lot like “Guacala”! meaning disgusting), we (miraculously) slowed down to pass through. This slow-driving was an all too short respite in our wild ride and was still replete with driver and copilot window yells. It was also fiesta time in town so it was no surprise when we saw a pick-up full of beer-drinking fellows just outside of Gualaca. What WAS a surprise (to me at least) was that we deftly pulled up next to the party truck (on our two lane road) and while both going about 50mph received a can of beer in a highway hand off. Having become used to the extreme taboo that drinking and driving is in the USA, I assumed that our co-pilot was going to drink the beer. After all, HE was the one who got the hand-off; it seemed like he deserved it. Nonetheless, he was merely one more link in the hand-off chain because he opened it and gave it to our trusty taxi driver who upon completing the play, didn’t waste any time in guzzling it down. He followed this up by tossing the empty straight out the window! I could barely keep from laughing at the absurdness of this situation especially because my co-travelers were as nonplussed as ever. I mean did they even see what happened? Was this an everyday Panamanian taxi occurrence along the Bocas-David highway? I don’t know because I wasn’t about to get any answers from those glum riders. As that was the only beer he drank, I did not demand that we stop and instead concentrated on looking forward to arriving in David. Even those expectations were cut short, however, when our taxi sputtered to a halt somewhere along the busy Pan-American highway. Maybe the white collective pick-up just got tired of all that bus racing between Bocas and David.

We waited for a bit on the roadside in the hot tropical lowlands before someone in a small SUV stopped. After some futile attempts in tinkering around with the engine, our driver convinced him to tow the taxi to a nearby repair station; along with us inside of course! Off we went, getting towed down the Pan-American highway, all sorts of traffic zooming past us, the driver and copilot once again laughing like mad-hatters as we came close to bumping into our erstwhile tow truck. On one small hill, the tow rope actually broke! No matter!- it was retied  and onward we went heading towards David. The last step to the repair station was probably the sketchiest because we had to take a left turn off of the busy highway. As we slowly turned into the repair shop, for a moment we were sitting in the lane for oncoming traffic, our only hope being that tow line that had already broke once! It felt like trying to start your engine on railroad tracks with the train horn signaling imminent doom. Ok, it wasn’t exactly that frantic, but it certainly wasn’t comfortable either. Reaching the parking lot of the repair station, we jumped out of the taxi onto sun-drenched gravel; I with relief, my fellow passengers with the same dour and non-plussed appearance. I almost told them, “Hey! We aren’t playing poker here!- show some emotions! I mean, we’ve just come down the mountain partaking in some unknown race and almost dying several times in the process!”, but while I was paying the driver they disappeared into other taxis. Finished with the wild ride, I immediately flagged down another taxi (a car) and finally made it to the Purple House in David without any further racing or beer drinking.