Transportation between cities is via minibus. All you have to do is flag down and jump on a bus that has a sticker plastered to the front window declaring its general direction and final destination, and get off when the bus accelerates through your preferred destination. Fare on these generally runs about $1.50 per hour (not sure if that was the local price or the gringo price). A three hour ride would run about $4.50. Not a bad deal, considering taxis in Panama want to charge you $5 to travel 5 miles.
The minibuses can get laughably crowded, depending on what time of day you ride and whether or not school is in session. I learned from a Peace Corps volunteer I met in the mountain town of Santa Fe that Panamanian kids are out of school just about as often as they are in. In the month of November, she told me students were out of school for close to a dozen days, not including weekends, due to national and local holidays... Hard to retain the philosophy of Kant and learn logarithm functions, let alone basic literature and multiplication tables when you're out of the classroom more days than you're in one. Needless to say, the Peace Corps volunteer was frustrated at the local schooling system..
We were lucky enough to ride on a few minibuses with television screens, dvd players, and kickass soundsystems. The most popular dvds that were played were, of course, Latin music videos in which there is a strict paradigm that the artists must follow: a moderately creepy looking man, a beautiful woman who is either angry at or indifferent toward the creepy man, a long enduring courtship in which the man fluctuates between being passionate and being lazy, and in the end, a heavy makeout session between the man and woman. There were certainly some variations on this video: some were filmed outside, others were filmed inside. Some were filmed depicting a poor bartender pursing the hot waitress. Others depicted a highroller with superfulous bling pursuing an indifferent gringa on the beach. But rest assured, in the end, they always got the girl. Much different from a 17 hour bus ride I took in Argentina, during which we watched a dvd complication of Steven Seagal's greatest hits dubbed in Spanish..
The small town, or pueblo, of Santa Fe. This was one of the cleanest towns in Panama I saw. There were signs posted throughout town asking its residents to refrain from throwing their food wrappers and unwanted Fanta bottles out of the windows of minibuses. And yes, that is a regular occurrence. Finish a bag of Doritos, and rather than throw it in the garbage bucket in the front of the bus, simply open your window and throw it outside..
While talking to the Peace Corps volunteer I met, I learned that a Canadian mining company was moving into the area for a mining project. They have officially stated and publicly posted their plans for their project, which include displacing thousands of local campesinos away from the land they've lived on for hundreds of years. They also made aware the fact that after they've begun their mining project, the water in the local river will be unsafe for drinking. This is all small print on the flyers in town. The large print declares that minerals in the ground are dangerous, so the mining company should come into the area to take them all out of the ground and send them back to Canada (seriously). Obviously, this is not a unique event, but rather one of hundreds of projects throughout Latin America with parallel plans of action. And people wonder why guerilla movements develop in the rural hills... The next night, we had a great conversation with a local elementary school teacher. We asked him about the mine and he shook his head. I told him it was the same where I live, in Montana and Alaska. He asked us to spread the word of ecotourism in Santa Fe, so that gringos can come to the region and see how beautiful it is, generating sustainable revenue to the community and potentially raising a voice of opposition to the proposed killing of the local watershed. So, at his request: visit Santa Fe, Panama. It is beautiful, quiet, and slow paced. Great vistas, waterfalls in every direction, and plenty of tropical birds. And apart from us, we only saw four other gringos in our entire stay in the area: a Belgian who runs an absolutely gorgeous guesthouse named Hostal La Qhia, an American real estate agent who is trying to prevent irresponsible land sales and keep land in the hands of locals, a Peace Corps volunteer, and a journalist from East Germany.
Morning view from the hammock in front of our hotel room in Santa Fe. We stayed at Hotel Santa Fe, run by a helpful Colombian lady with the assistance of her goofy little puppy YaYa. The food was great, but it was a bit pricey for what we were looking for. If you're in Santa Fe, continue up the road toward the town center and follow the La Qhia signs to the tranquil compound of private rooms, dorms, hammocks, and garden run by the friendly Belgian lady.
Wandering around up a dirt road outside El Valle de Anton, we unexpectedly came across the entrance to Chorro Macho, which loosely translates to: Manly Waterfall. I can't remember the exact name of another waterfall near town, but it loosely translated to: Little Girls Waterfall... We attempted to swim in the pool beneath this waterfall, but the pool was small enough that it was much more of a soak than a swim. And a soak in cold mountain stream water isn't the most ideal soak... Walking toward this waterfall with a friend we met from Brooklyn, we saw the only toucan of the trip, the only massive iguana of the trip, and a sizeable troop of leafcutter ants.
Linnaea and Garrett, a guy we met in Panama City who runs a non profit for children with cancer in the Brooklyn area, walking through one of El Valle de Anton's quiet residential streets. Much of this town was filled with retirees from Panama City. If you're in El Valle, it's worth looking into getting a guide to go rumbling through the jungle and on top of the ridges of the surrounding volcano caldera. He'll probably show you the animals that we never saw...
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