PANAMA-ON THE WAY

For this tourist, Panama is a mixture of promise and purgatory. Impressions are of a place where things are neither started nor finished but where events happen and then move on. Monies move through the banks, massive ships move through the canal, vessels from other countries are re-flagged and re-registered here but then all go on to other destinations.

Panama City's downtown has small sections with bright, shiny banks, offices and restaurants but many other structures in the city remain gutted, despite the various re-building and shoring up projects going on. The guidebooks we have (written a couple of years ago) mention these same buildings as being in the process of being finished. They're still in the process...

The "through traffic" provides a good deal of money for the economy but one senses the Panamanians have made a conscious decision not to get too sentimental or excited about their relatively new wealth just yet. Panama doesn't even bother to print its own currency but instead uses US Dollars. And in fairness, over the last 40 years, the country has seen a number of coups, nationalisation of its banks and a somewhat capricious invasion by a northern superpower; it's understandable why the people haven't developed a faith in "long term thinking" !

This lack of faith extends to their tourist and leisure industries. For a country that has tremendous natural attractions, many areas are either under (or strangely) developed. Towns and villages have bars and eateries that only seem to open at whim.Of the places that are open, almost all of them shut down by 9:00 or 10:00-and this is the so called high season... Another example would be the Pacific beach town at Las Lajas where we stayed for 2 nights. The beach is pristine (the longest in Central America) but the choice of accommodation was very limited. One could choose either a very expensive American style hotel, or from 2 other places that were essentially shacks with so little on offer that staying beyond a night or two wasn't appealing. In the“cabina” where we stayed, each time water was required, we had to ask the manager to turn on (and then turn off) a diesel generator to produce it; not for hot water (there was none) but for any water...

There is something about Panama's "inbetweeness" that conjours up images of the America that existed on Route 66 and other long byways before the Interstate highways came along. The people who lived in the small towns along those roads had an innate distrust (even dislike) of outsiders yet needed their business to survive. In Panama, these attitudes, and the country as a whole, may be starting to change though. There is an election campaign going on that's generating a good deal of enthusiasm (always a good sign for a democracy). And, in some parts of the country, a concerted effort is being made to attract retirees from the US and Canada. It will be interesting to see in a few year's time if the Panamanians choose to develop their country as a destination where people from outside would like to live or return to, or whether they will prefer to remain a country that collects tolls as people pass through...

Brett