Our trip to Panama - Overview and takeaways
Here's what we did, broadly, on our trip to Panama:
1. Spent 2 days in Panama City, recovering from the red-eye flight and adjusting to the heat and humidity.
2. Rented a car and drove north to Gamboa, the rainforest. Went birding and did nature things for 2 days.
3. Drove South to Santa Catalina, on the Pacific, and spent a day on the beach.
4. Drove to David. This was just to break up the drive to Boquete. We just needed a place to get dinner and sleep.
5. Boquete for 2 days. This is high in the mountains, in the cloud forest. We did hikes, wandered the town, stayed on a coffee plantation, enjoyed the cool air.
6. Drove to El Valle. This is a neat little town in an old volcano. Also fairly cool. We did some hikes and looked for birds. We would have liked to stay 2 days but were nervous about getting back to the city so stayed only one day, and went back to Panama City for one night before our flight in the early afternoon on our last day.
Some takeaways:
I would recommend a visit to Panama. It was pretty easy to navigate.
Driving really wasn't that challenging- yes, the city at rush hour was stressful, but driving the Pan American highway (highway 1) was easy. People actually seem to drive more sanely than in the States. We were overall very pleased with driving in Panama and glad we had a car.
The money is American dollars. Easy to figure out. Most places take credit cards.
We felt safe the whole time. There are lots of police, especially on Highway 1. But none of them were carrying large machine guns. We had to stop at a few police checkpoints, and we were waved through immediately, we didn't even talk to them. We had no worries or fear about the police. We also really didn't see any people around in the streets that worried us. Nobody, even walking in the city at night, even in the tourist spots, nobody ever came up to us to ask for money, or say drunken things to us, or anything. Nobody ever bothered us in any way. All the people we walked by were just going about their lives and did not notice or care about us. Even driving through the cities, or out in the rural countryside, we didn't notice anybody begging, living on the street, panhandling, or in desperate poverty. Panama is a country that is doing well economically. People have jobs and places to live. Houses out in the rural countryside had newish cars parked in their driveways. Children playing in their yards in the jungle looked well-fed and well-clothed. The Peace Corps is still active in Panama, and we read an article about towns that still don't have reliable water, but overall, it felt like it would be a good place to live.
As tourists, we spent a lot of time in touristy spots. One thing I really really liked was that the other tourists there were not just all busloads of North Americans or Europeans. Many of the other travelers, maybe most of the other travelers, were from Panama or Latin America. It was really great to think that Panamanians were visiting the special places in their own country. And that tourists from Spanish-speaking countries wanted to spend their tourist money in Panama. It felt less corrosive that we were there as white, global North tourists, because we knew that Panamanians were also enjoying these places.
Panama is also a very racially diverse country. They have more than 100 years of history of people coming to Panama from all over the world - France and the United States to build the canal, formerly enslaved people from all over the Caribbean to work on it, and all the people from every country you can think of that have come through the canal since it was finished. This means that by now, Panamanians are all colors- from very very light skinned to very very dark. People you interact with do not wonder about what someone as white as me is doing in a place like that. Everyone is in Panama. It felt very welcoming and normal- we only stuck out because we walked around in pants with binoculars around our necks, not because we were White.
Take a trip to Panama!
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