“I don’t see many gringos here,” my wife said as we strolled through the flower garden. It was true, almost everybody at the premier event of the summer in the mountain town of Boquete appeared to be Panamanian. With some exceptions…
They call dry season “summer” in these parts as this is the warmest time of the year, though in Boquete at 3500 feet it’s never that hot and after dark can get downright cool.
The flower show is also hitched to coffee production so there are places to buy it hot (for me) and cold (for Layne) which was a good idea on her part as we could sit upstairs and admire the action below.
We planned to have lunch and that turned out to be a mistake continuing our streak of not so great (read: awful) meals in Panama.
We shared a plate of pork and sausage with dry and stale fries and though we managed to extract two forks from the cooks we were wishing I’d brought my Swiss Army knife to eat with a degree of civility.
Pity the poor animals that died to be squandered here, reduced to the flavor of wet cardboard and gristle smeared with the inevitable and unavoidable ketchup.
The flower and coffee show is a big deal for this town especially now after the recent general strike reduced every tourist business to penury. Boquete is packed for ten days with cars filling streets all afternoon and night, every inch of accommodation is taken and we even have a Panamanian neighbor on “our” lawn, the first such local camper we have seen since Costa Rica where everyone goes away with a tent for the weekend.
Dogs are welcome at the flower show but after stumping halfway there Rusty called it a day and demanded to go home. He just stops and glares at me holding me up by the leash and his tail only goes up when I give in and turn around. I left him in the van with a fan on and the air conditioning set to go off if it warmed up. When we came back a couple of hours later he was fast asleep.
I saw this chain to prevent people parking because spaces to the public are selling for five bucks a day and everybody offers their yards for money, (“Like Fantasy Fest in Key West,” Layne says, “but less expensive”), but then I had to wonder why leave the chain up if you own the space and park your own car there? Inexplicable Panama!
Dust catchers anyone?
Maybe we should have paid attention to the locals. Later we saw a guy selling falafels and they were delicious when we sampled one. We may go back just to buy dinner to go from him and make up for our mistake. For whatever reason he refused to sell us a bag of them to go!
Shetland ponies available if you seek less altitude.
Tin Pan Alley:
I approached the cashier like a confessional but the ticket seller struggled with my Catholic humor. She did ask if we were seniors.
Old yes, I said but foreigners. That doesn’t matter said the disembodied voice and we got in for a buck twenty five each. That’s a Balboa and a quarter to you. (“Jubilados” means retired). A festival for all the senses.
This parrot is dead! No it’s not. Lovely plumage those Norwegian blues, pining for the fjords. If you like Monty Python you know.
And so we walked home, not far enough really as the festival fires up some pretty dire and very loud music heavy on the shouting and thumping bass after dark which we can hear easily aboard GANNET2. The Friday night edition persisted till four am so I got a lot of reading done under my blanket snug in bed. Layne complained a lot about it but she was breathing heavily during the worst of it. We keep hoping for very heavy rain right after sunset but so far no luck driving the crowds home.
Boquete is in a lovely setting so you can see why it is so popular with foreigners who choose to live in Panama.
A gentle amble back to the van and the sleeping dog and dinner and eventually sleep. An easy life.
Monday is the day we check to see how badly the brakes were damaged by our test drive and Tuesday is the day our electronic ABS module which prevents such problems arrives in Miami. I am hoping in ten days we can start going about shipping to Colombia because are long since ready to explore South America.
Oh and Ecuador is blowing up now, a small country that sits astride the PanAmerican Highway between Colombia and Peru. You probably have heard nothing but there is a state of emergency as the government tries to take down the drug smugglers. Not our problem ( yet!) as it will be months before we face that border.
If you want to learn more about Panana and the Canal the late David McCullough wrote an excellent and readable history of that excruciating labor.
A decade later they built the Oversea Railroad learning the lessons from the canal construction and how to deal with yellow fever. A great read.
