June 2022 (uploaded much later though). Panama City
The strangest thing landing in Panama City. Looking out the plane window, I see a long line of glittering lights in the distance below beside a big pit of black. I wonder about the black pit, then realise we must be flying over the ocean and moving towards a coastline. Panama City is on the sea, I remember. I sleepily watch a small red light flitting just beyond the wing and am just thinking this must be another plane flying to somewhere else as we arrive, when I feel a sickening thud that shakes my existence and makes me realise we’re on tarmac. It turns out the ‘coastline’ I’d admired was actually a row of runway lights and the black pit the concrete runway itself. How this all happened I’ve no idea, but it seems we are in Panama.
Once through the sleek and organised airport we speed along new roads and I start to think about Panama’s style: meticulous, un-showy, immaculate, unexpected, just like the runway. D keeps telling me that the absolute opposite is true, as we glide into a long causeway with dramatic skyscrapers looking skeletal and the colour of wasps nests. “Wait for the real Panama” he tells me ominously, as we leave the impressive skyscraper tunnel and enter a calm town of french-styled pastel-coloured shuttered and balconied buildings, some of the most idyllic I’ve seen. We taxi calmly through quiet streets lined with low lighting and palm trees. “The noise is unbearable in Panama City” D loudly insists whilst I fantasise aboutsiting in a tranquil bar we’re gliding past at that moment. The noise never comes, since this is a strange city. Like many, its perfect centre is conserved (Casco is recognised by UNESCO) and almost eerily impressive. Havana made by Disney.
We eat in an overpriced American-style restaurant. Beside us are two American men with two Panamanian girls wearing black lace netted clothing and smiling enthusiastically at sentences it seems they’re struggling to understand. As the quartet stand, and we see more of the girls and the men’s hands, we realise the former are sex workers on duty. I feel disturbed by the men, by the quick dinner that is a prelude to a long night, but the square is lovely: willow trees with long feelers hanging down and birds croaking and squeaking within them, the same ragged crow-type ones you find in Mexico City. The heat is tropical: a big envelope that sits hot and heavy on your head. Everything is consistently inconsistent with D’s description. Even the one sole beggar doing the rounds, a meth-addict with rake thin bowed legs in cut off denim shorts, is polite, kind, speaks perfect English and removes herself swiftly with a small bow of thanks when we say we have no change. There are cats in Panama, and no dogs. Black and white cats that fight in the streets and lounge along pavements. Now and again a ruinous shelled out building lurks unexpectedly between its pretty neighbours, overflowing with piles of cats.
We meander to the sea shore at night and look out at the oceanic the sky rumbling with deep flashes of lighting. It streaks across the clouds, outlining their shapes, and we become static and addicted to guessing when and where the next will appear, faces up and throats exposed. A woman on the beach analyses us briefly over her shoulder, then lifts a crack pipe to her mouth and calmly lights it before settling cross-legged on the sand to smoke. We leave her to the night and trip over a couple of cats on the way back to our apartment on the Cathedral square. Here, D’s prophecy comes true. In his way, he has found the only part of the city that has noise. Unable to relax we chase street corners to locate the source of the noise and are surprised to reach a church that looks firmly closed. Curious more than hoping to join the party, we try the big wooden door and iron handle - both closed - and realise the sound is in fact being absorbed from a raunchy bar on the opposite side of the street. We enter the bar for a moment, before finding the sound unbearable and instead head to the rooftop to watch lighting as it sighs and snaps across the sea, just as the woman is doing on the beach below.
Everything points towards seeing the canal. I set off in a taxi to the Miraflores canal dock. A monster of a boat is plonked in the lock, waiting passively and slightly arrogantly as the water eases it neatly into the ground. A few little machines zoom up to the monster, fussing and buzzing around it to make sure their master is safely catered to. I am curious to watch as the monster swishes through the lock and is released to sail, glacially, away into the open ocean. As it goes, I notice its rump is stamped with a familiar name: ‘Inverness’ — my home city in the highlands of Scotland.
Every Panamanian seems to be a well-informed amateur historian. Without invitation they speak of Americans, point out the huge military base on the way to the canal, tell us the reason such-and-such street is called such-and-such, and anything else we’d like to know. As I write this, I’m sitting in the oldest hotel in Panama City. I know this because upon asking whether they had a cafeteria I was given immediately given a potted history of the hotel instead, which was apparently built in 18-something and has stairs that were designed to exactly replicate the ones on the Titanic, and that some sort of big historical event took place on the bottom step. It’s almost all too enthusiastically said to understand. A coffee eventually is offered as a stopgap before an invitation to a full tour, including of the swimming pool and a bedroom, because “porque no?” Says Brian, my now-tour guide. I am happily listening to a pianist in a dark blue suit and mangy cap play to the bit empty balconied set of floors and the bright rooftop above. I’d rather stay put.
There is a family on the corner of the street where D’s flat is. Again, they are the only source of noise I have come across so far. Last night, after the rain, I wandered to get some lemons, ginger and honey from a shop to cure D’s furious cold. Two elegant policemen in elegant sloping caps stand beside a roped off area. I cross and look in at the house with its boombox music inside as I pass. About four men are sitting on white plastic chairs and saturated in pink neon light. They get excited as they see me, which makes me quicken my step. The scene is something like the image of pensioners relaxing in a retirement home that has accidentally been mistaken for a VIP sadomasochistic club section. Outside the women and children sit on the pavement, a huddle of about six. One boy kicks a ball about and a few others are skipping. It is as though this oasis of real life has slipped through the nets of UNESCO’s immaculate preservation plan, and I suddenly see the rest of Casco as slightly false, in its pastel pinks and blues. Indeed the cordoning off of an enormous hole in the street, guarded by the elegant policemen, exacerbates the feeling of this. Cobblestones pour into the hole and an orange cone sits guarding it, looking a bit sheepish.
On the other side of the street is a man happily guarding his shop and looking as though nothing out of the ordinary has happened. One of the women from the chaotic house has a newborn baby plugged to her breast. When I return the baby is fast asleep with milk dripping out the corner of its mouth. Some hours before I had walked past to see the baby’s father utterly enraptured by it, looking into its still closed eyes, telling it stories, completely cut off from anything else around him. Now that man was inside the sitting room club with a beer whilst his baby accustomed itself to the pumping music its parents lived within.
I found the lemons and everything else in a large grubby shop. Strip lighting and lots of tins on precarious freestanding shelves. A green net bag of lemons tossed onto the floor. No proprietor seemingly in sight until I heard desperate shouts of “Li! Li!” From the open door, which summoned a meek and anxious Chinese girl into existence. I asked the apparition if she had any ginger and was rushed over to a cardboard box underneath a big pile of fly-covered papayas. Shouts of “Li!” continued from the door, whilst I was frantically shown various clandestine roots of lumpy ginger. “Este esta muy bueno, este no…” Li whispered to me As I selected one Li ran back to the till in a panic, carrying my ginger root. She looked over my shoulder, harried and panicked as a couple rolled some enormous barrels into her shop. I wondered what was going on, and wandered back home to care for my patient.
On day three we go the jungle, which appears quite suddenly about fifteen minutes outside of the city. Keen to walk but hearing there are jaguars, we are taken by our driver to a park, which turns out to be a mass of grass intercut with a zoo of sorts. One poor jaguar paces back and forth in its cage, mouth hanging open, enormous shoulder blades sagging. We move on quickly and are taken instead to a place where we can tear through jungle — albeit on a tourist-safe marked out path. We later hop on a boat and travel across the water. Covered in weed and with manatees apparently lurking beneath, we are content above the brown still surface. The glimpse of an indigenous settlement peers round the corner of a particularly bushy hillside. To think of its contrast with Panama City only twenty minutes away, the rows of big abandoned American condos lining the roads, the vast ships dragging through the engineering feat of the canal, is unnervingly reassuring. Surprising and slightly surreal, as Panama has been from the start. The alligators that swarm beneath the restaurant we have lunch in draw attention from some very loud children.
Back in the city, we accidentally visit the oldest diner to have served Coca-Cola in Panama, conveniently now sharing it’s space with a dentistry practise, and I buy a Tenant’s Lager ceramic bottle once drunk and tossed away by a canal construction worker in around 1904. After the passing of no doubt many hands I feel honoured it has been sold to me, a Scottish Tenant’s Lager fan, by a furious bedraggled man — the eternal and universal archetype of the antiques dealer reluctant to sell any of his treasures and who hates any customers taking them away. The night is short because of the cold and we return to the apartment where I read a little whilst D sleeps off his cold. In the morning we open the balcony doors looking out onto the back of the cathedral and are met with hot steady tears of tropical rain.