Here are some random observations on our brief trip to Panama.
The TACA flight from San Jose, Costa Rica to Panama City, Panama took little over an hour, which was a welcome relief from longer visa trips I’d made and a lot better than the 18-hour bus ride it would have been if I’d given in to my anger at TACA and boycotted them. Arriving at the airport we checked out some of the large duty-free shopping area that I’d read about. It was fairly standard airport fare such as spirits, cigarettes and perfumes. I’d hoped to pick up a book to read but the airport surprisingly did not have a bookstore. There were also few eateries and the whole mini-mall in the airport was a repeat of the same gift shops you find in most airports. My girlfriend shopped at a Tommy Hilfiger store on the way back but I’d otherwise recommend you do your shopping outside of the airport as its convenience doesn’t offset the fact that it has little to offer.
We took a taxi to the hotel I’d planned on staying at only to find that it was fully booked, so we let a taxi driver take us to one of the hotels he obviously had a kick-back deal with (based on his sales job on the hotel). It was nothing special and I was sure we could find a much better hotel for the price but I didn’t want to spend the time looking so we checked in.
We were considering a visit to the duty-free zone Ciudad de Colon but it was a long trip (to the other coast of Panama) of several hours and I didn’t think we’d be doing enough shopping to merit the visit so we headed to one of their famous malls (the Albrook Mall) to achieve one of our two goals in Panama (shopping and visiting the canal). The mall was large and definitely much better shopping than anything you can find in Costa Rica, with much larger selection and much better prices. We ate and headed back to the hotel.
The taxis in Panama don’t use a meter, and they use a system of zones to determine fares, but they were very fair and within the city they were usually charging $1.50 to $3 and didn’t try to “stick it to the tourists” once with us, which is very different from many cities in the region that I’ve visited. They did, however, drive like absolute nuts as apparently is the custom in Panama. The regard for traffic laws (like the direction of traffic, stop lights and the basics) is much lower in Panama than it is even in Costa Rica, and the result is a lot of really frustrating traffic jams where everyone is trying to get through an intersection at once and refusing to give an inch. I saw a bus and a car face-to-face and the woman in the car honked like mad and yelled obscenities refusing to back up and let the bus continue its turn in front of her. The bus had muscled its was into the position and couldn’t go anywhere until the woman backed up and gave it space so onlookers shrugged and indicated to her to move or be crushed. She eventually did and we all moved a half car length forward.
The drivers and traffic are cartoonish and comical from afar but frustrating as hell as you realize the roads are fine and the traffic would not be too bad if the idiots would simply understand the notion of turns. As in green your turn, red their turn. Another curiosity were the flamboyant buses. Old American school buses are common in Central America where a lot of autos that are scrapped in the US end up. But in Costa Rica they often stay yellow and there are more typical passenger buses (manufactured in Brazil) that comprise most of the passenger fleet. But in Panama the overwhelming majority of passenger buses are private (as in the guy driving it may be the owner of the one-bus company) and they airbrush the buses and put lights inside. The blacklights inside look like a cheap disco and on the outside they resemble a hippy’s airbrushed van. They were very interesting!
Panama was very hot in comparison to Costa Rica’s central valley so we only visited the old city’s ruins briefly and headed off to visit the Panama Canal. We went to the Miraflores locks and had lunch in their restaurant and took the tour. It is an underwhelming sight as you can’t appreciate the full magnitude of the canal from this one vantage point (though it’s the best) but it was interesting enough. There was a ship in the locks upon arrival so we were able to see what we needed quickly and now I have seen the Panama Canal. I’ve always wanted to, but it’s really the least interesting tourist sight I have seen.
That afternoon we headed back to Albrook Mall we were close and we have a Multiplaza Mall in Costa Rica and though I’d like to have seen the Multicentro Mall (the largest in Central America from what I’ve read) I’m not big on shopping and took the lazy route. My girlfriend shopped for clothes while I looked for electronics. I didn’t find a lot of the items I was looking for (but I’m a geek and am looking for very specific high-end stuff) so I ended up doing that boring “watch your girlfriend shop” routine.
In the mall were the oddest mannequins I have ever seen. Nearly all of them had DD chest sizes and would look like exaggerations even on porn actresses. I thought it was bizarre but my girlfriend thought my interests were not cultural when I tried to point them out to her (I didn’t need to, if you caught one out of the corner of your eye you might flinch thinking they’d explode). The populace wasn’t thusly endowed so the clothes on the mannequins were often stretched till they were nearly threadbare. I really don’t get this marketing and can’t imagine that it works well.
All in all, it was another perfunctory visa trip, and from a Costa Rica resident’s point of view I can recommend Panama for it’s great shopping but can now say with relative certainty that Costa Rica’s neighbors to the north and south are simply nowhere near as interesting to travel in as Costa Rica.