Sunday In Boquete

We awoke this morning to fresh breezes, blue skies and bright crisp wintry sunshine. With no sweating, insects, or humidity, this is Panama’s dry season at last, enjoyed in an alpine town perched in a valley swept by downdrafts of air shaking tree limbs and sending leaves flying. 

It’s the sort of morning your dog sits on the floor of the van whining piteously wondering why you aren’t ready to throw off your blanket and come out to play.

That is a question to which there is only one answer so out one goes onto the empty Sunday morning streets to see what we can see together. 

Suburban America at its finest, mowing the lawn with the added weekend cliché of elderly Americans nearby gearing up in spandex for an energetic bicycle ride! Boquete is more like suburban America than anywhere we have been thus far, so if you want to emigrate and remain culturally at home this is the place for you.

I quite like this town which quite aside from the mild climate has all the trappings of home, bakeries, restaurants, brew pubs and barbecue. Signs are in English and gentrification is as usual pushing locals to the margins. And yet there is a certain energy here that I am learning to enjoy.

And you know how people in Miami using Spanish as their primary language drives Anglo Americans mad with irritation? Around here English is the language and Spanish is an after thought! I find the irony delicious. Mind you I also find Spanish language predominance in Miami irritating but both here and there not even trying to learn the other language is very limiting. 

There is something very appealing about the way Boquete drifts between cultures, and this week Tuesday is a national holiday, Panana loves national holidays, and the town is filled with the usual gringo residents plus a bunch of youthful backpackers but also Panamanian couples and families who are filling up hotel rooms determined to enjoy town as well. 

Panama isn’t a country of architecture and colorful poverty. There aren’t dogs on the streets, beggars or massive Spanish colonial churches. Boquete is a small prosperous town busy recovering from the effects of the recent shut down across the country. Shop keepers have much lost time to make up after the road closures and protests that took six weeks to shut down the country’s largest and most ecologically destructive open face mine. 

I am not much in the mood to recount our not quite settled mechanical delays. All the parts installed are working, bushings bearings brakes and rotors are all properly installed (I think) but now we have a a brake pump controller that has shown up on the computer indicating incipient signs of failure. Sigh. 

There are six of these available in the US and after much phone calling and struggle we found Jerry Ulm the Ram dealer in Tampa willing to help out. They say they will have one on Tuesday and ship it to our shipping agent’s Miami office to be forwarded to us. We may have it in ten days. I hope. Jerry Ulm has helped us out previously when we had an alternator problem in Florida so I think we may be getting ready to accept the dealership as our mechanical  support in future. It says something when the dealer outperforms the independent shop. 

We still have some housekeeping to do this week including going to the customs office in the city to extend our vehicle permit for another thirty days, get the ever present laundry done and our mechanic wants to spend Tuesday going over everything to make sure the brakes are correct and the wheels aligned and so forth. It is frankly pretty boring stuff but the idea is to be set up for South America of course.  

Our Canadian Land Rover friends Hugh and Sue broke their suspension on a rough track but they kicked it back into place as you do on older less delicate machinery and they are shipping to Colombia next week. 

Not us, but strangely I’m pretty zen about these delays. South America will be there when we get there and Layne is being extraordinarily zen about the outflow of money to make these repairs. So it could be worse. A lot worse really as we could have had these issues in some remote place in the road. Instead I think Layne is organizing a cinnamon roll hunt later and I might have to stalk some Kansas barbecue in town.

Tough life waiting for parts. Happy Sunday! 

Picture Post

As I post these pictures we’re going to the mechanic to figure out our next move. I’m of a mind to ship out next week as planned and send out wheel bearings from the US to our shipping agent in Colombia. She gave us her mailing address so I need to find a victim in the US to receive the parts and ship them on. 

Meanwhile here are a few pictures of our various drives around Davíd, Panama’s second largest city. It’s named for King David in the Bible and was founded by the Spanish in 1602. 

Its population is around 83,000 and it’s a busy place.  The dystopians say it’s wealthy and by my own observation there are lots of cars, few motorcycles, fewer bicycles and almost no horses used for transportation. That’s kind of my yard stick to judge the standard of living. 

The tourist people will play up the history and architecture but this is really a dull hard working town with no interest in tourists. We had no plans to hang around as long as we have but this town has a lot of what you might need. The stores are packed with consumer goods comparable to the US. 

Anyway here are a few street scenes of a town that’s pretty clean, pretty tidy and pretty dull! 

I’m glad we had our mechanical problems in Davíd, the perfect place to make repairs but I’ll be glad to move on. 

Shopping for shrimp. You can eat out here pretty well too, barbecue and Chinese advertise everywhere. You can buy marrow peas riadside (“Guandu”) to make peas and rice Panama style. It’s a long complex operation to clean and boil them so eating them when cooked by someone else is recommended! 

American brands are everywhere. 

If you want local food you look for “comida criolla” or creole food. I had a local lunch specialty that immediately put me in mind of Indian fry bread. It’s called “Hojaldre” (hoe-all-dray more or less) and it’s fried dough. The eggs and vegetables gave it some flavor. I’d describe it as a bit Grenadian if you recall a recent post about odd foods. 

Christmas presents going home?

Boquete is hot at the moment as often as it’s cold and gray and windy so the locals say it must be summer. 

If today goes well we are planning to drop GANNET2 off at the container terminal in a week. They say the food in Colombia is exquisite and the people are lovely. I hope we shall see. 

Mechanical Woes

I wish I could start the new year with some fun photos of fun activities of fun in the sun. Instead…

Tuesday morning saw us back in the shop trying to get GANNET2 roadworthy. It’s a slow process with hurdles appearing where none are expected. Which is normal enough with vehicles and mechanicals and especially a long way from home in a country that has never imported Promasters. 

However the good news is the spares I bought in Panama City at Servicios Carlos, home of Fiat,Renault,Peugeot and other euro brands fit perfectly. Cheers Gianni!

So now we have new front end tie rods,

… and control arm bushings to keep the front end tracking properly. 

All of which is lovely to see and has stopped the steering wheel wobble when braking. From this:

…to this: 

However as usual the walk in the park stopped dead when I went for a test drive and the Electronic Stability Control idiot light came on. That indicates the computer onboard isn’t measuring speed and force at the wheels to allow the van to compensate for any over activate acceleration of breaking to prevent a roll over or slide. Obviously you can drive with automatic braking or electronic stability and years ago we all did without these sophistications but it’s a bit nerve wracking to know you could have them but don’t have access to their safety features. 

Gruesome roads, foreign impenetrable driving customs and congested traffic in a five ton van make every electronic aid available highly desirable.

Add to that some of the worlds highest altitude roads ahead with impossible grades and mountain zig zags and Mrs B has stated unequivocally the expedition requires fully functional brakes. Me in the peanut gallery does not disagree. Here’s the problem and it’s our wheel bearings which are starting to fail. The replacements we bought for a Fiat Ducato van do not have Automatic Braking System sensors incorporated. This means none of our electronic brake assists work. I am driving 1950s style in 21st century traffic.

Yup normally sold for $350 and I need four of them and they are unobtainable in Panama. I thought wheel bearings were just caged ball bearings that let wheels go round. I had no idea they play this important role in supplying speed and braking information to the car’s computer.

So as you can tell I’ve learned a lot this past couple of days and weeks. More than I want to know and undoubtedly more than you want to know and I apologize for the lack of content in the subject of paradise in the tropics and all that social media stuff. This is the other side of that. 

The thing that irks me is I am a knowledgeable mechanical theoretician and I knew this stuff needed to be replaced soon as we approached 100,000 miles.  When Kip in Ohio my trusted mechanic assured me everything was fine I should have found some other place to replace this stuff before going to Mexico. Kip is a mechanic not a traveler and he failed totally to grasp my need for preventative maintenance. I knew better and should have acted on my knowledge. I am not good at wrenching but I understand the principles involved after a lifetime of driving and breaking down!

All these parts are wear and tear items. Online websites will tell you most wheel bearings need to be replaced around 100,000 miles and ours have been subjected to stressful driving…

So now what? On Friday after Marco has cleared his backlog of cars needing service he will run a computer diagnostic and see what’s what. Whether we wait here for the bearings or have them sent to Colombia to meet us there is a subject we will have to hash out. Our shipping process starts on Monday with a meeting with a vet and getting police clearance to ship our van. Whether we delay or go anyway is up in the air.

I wish it wasn’t so but this is the state of the journey at this point. I trust normal service will be resumed before too long. 

Panama Memories

Layne and I spent the summer of 1999 sailing the west coast of Central America. We had a 34 foot Gemini 105 catamaran and traveled with with two large dogs as we spent two years traveling from San Francisco to Key West because I had the dream and Layne had the grounding to get the details sorted out. 

We rented out our home in Santa Cruz, Layne took a leave of absence from her law firm and I quit my job driving a truck and off we went. We arrived at the Panama Canal in August 1999 after a year harbor hopping Mexico and Central America. 

The hand over of the Panama Canal was scheduled for noon on December 30th 1999 and we wanted to transit well before that date as no one quite knew what the new Panamanian administration would be doing with small pleasure craft, vessels that cost more to transit than we paid. Panama was counting down the seconds until the US flag came down in front of the Canal Administration building and a big party was planned across the country. 

A way of life was ending and the signs of withdrawal were everywhere. The United States created Panama in 1903 with the complicity of some wealthy families in the renegade province that belonged to Colombia. The idea was to annex a slice of land to build the canal as a reward for making the Colombian province its own country.

Except it wasn’t really. The new country was cut in half by the canal a zone exclusively American where cabal employees live outside and apart from Panama, a zone where locals were not allowed. Panamanians could cross the canal at two points and at limited openings a constant reminder there country wasn’t all theirs.  

The treaty of 1977 restored sovereignty but it wasn’t until 1999 that the United States finally withdrew. We moored our boat at the Balboa Yacht club and started the process of preparing to transit the canal.

To drive through the old Canal Zone last week was a reminder of that past even as we were stuck in traffic trying to leave the city on the Bridge of the Americas over the canal. 

The administration building is still there, the US flag is gone as is the monument to George Washington Goethals who supervised construction of the “Eighth Wonder of the World” and became the first Governor of the Canal Zone. Below is the shell of the shopping mall under Ancon Hill where to our astonishment there was a Blockbuster Video Store with all the latest hit movies and which accepted our California membership cards. I don’t recall what hits were showing in 1999.  

In 1999 the boundaries of the canal zone were still visible with duplicate streets on either side of the sagging fence that had marked the border of the state within a state. The border had gone by then but the scars of separation were still visible. 

The peculiar style of Zone architecture stands out and we inched slowly through these places where we had walked nearly 25 years ago. 

It took about an hour to inch up into the Bridge of the Americas so we had plenty of time to reminisce about our 40 year old selves as we recalled our office visits to get our boat measured, to hire line handlers and recycling lines to secure our boat in the huge locks.

It was a jolt after a year of total freedom to come and go as we pleased to find ourselves at a bureaucratic roadblock and to be obliged to ask for passage cap in hand on someone else’s schedule. The American bureaucrats still oversaw the process which was efficient impersonal and not terribly interested in our needs. Panama immediately hiked the transit fee to a flat $500 in 2000 and made it clear small boats no longer shared equal billing with big ships. 

I wouldn’t have minded an ice cold Coke at this stage of the traffic jam but dared not lose our place in line. I did notice the name of the store with its bod to the past. 

Nowadays small boats are no longer measured for transit but we had to submit to an arcane measuring system that calculated the capacity of the vessel to transport cargo. It’s an obscure measurement particular to the canal and our Admeasurer was a pleasant man whose name I forget but who is probably recorded in the photo album where I store these pre-digital images. 

His plan was to take his pension from the outgoing American Administration as offered to all employees and stay on in the job when the Panamanians took over and carry on as before. He was quite content and no wonder! 

No dinghies were allowed to land and we had to honk our horn to attract the attention of the free launch service offered by the Balboa Yacht club. The club house had burned down but this was the only place you could stop in the Canal to prepare for transit so the club services continued uninterrupted! Many boaters complained of slow service but we made sure to tip a dollar every time they came out to us and we never kept waiting when we needed to go ashore. 

We paid our transit in full, the sun I cannot recall but it was inconsequential, a couple of hundred dollars maybe and we advised we would be staying at Pedro Miguel Boat Club and pausing our transit after we got through the Miraflores Locks. On the appointed day our Advisor arrived. 

He was a young Panamanian pilot in training and he advised us what to do in the transit. It was nerve wracking of course and somewhat awe inspiring but we got it done. 

Emma napped on one of the long lines we had to rest in case we needed to tie up directly to the walls of the chambers of the Miraflores Locks. You had to have four line handlers and four 125 foot lines for the transit. We had a mixture of friends and hired professional line handlers onboard. 

Debs was Layne’s dog and he was the alert member of the family while Emma slept. 

We had to hurry up and wait our turn to get into the locks: 

We left San Diego in October 1998 as part of the Baja rally to Cabo San Lucas and we got this aerial photograph of our boat  as a result. 

And a year later we were tied up in the middle of the canal for a few weeks while Layne flew back to California her leave of absence transformed into quitting with no plans to return. 

Pedro Miguel Boat Club was a recreation center for canal employees and open to small boats in transit. The Panamanians wanted  nothing to do with it and forced it to close. They opened a new marina near Portobello but we did get to enjoy the club in its waning days, a unique experience. 

It was a weird island of what we had left behind when we took off across Central America, an oasis of the familiar in an alien landscape, sailing talk, traveler talk among people who understood each other. 

I sent out emails from Internet cafes along the way but at Pedro Miguel they had an Internet connection all their own. Pretty modern in 1999.

Emma and Debs had the run of the place except the clubhouse and it was a break for them also to be in a compound without other dogs where they could roam at will. We had rescued Debs in Santa Cruz from a neighbor who kept him chained up so he lived being free to chase monkeys and explore the club grounds. He and steady quiet Emma were inseparable 

I for t six weeks in the club in the rain and heat of the typical Panama climate. 

We line handled for friends and I ended up transiting the canal at least three times as I recall. 

It was an experience watching ships lock up and down all day and all night from the comfort of your own home. And it’s all gone now.