Bikeless and Beyond

Hoo hah!

The meat of last week was spent idling away by the picturesque poolside of Bambu hostel in David. My intentions were to get to Boquete to rock climb, but the Fates had other plans. A storm from the Caribbean was fouling up half the country with endless rain. It is said that the best way to make God laugh is to tell him your plans. And how! This whole thing started as a bike trip to Nicaragua, yet somehow I no longer have a bike and am flying to Cartagena, Colombia first thing tomorrow.

Selah, kimosabe.

Bambu hostel

All doom and gloom elsewhere, but the sun was shining strong at Bambu. Some people splashed around in the pool. Others lounged around in hammocks drinking Balboa or strumming a guitar. Clarisa the resident housecleaner, an absolute dynamo of a girl overflowing with a post-adolescent peppery sucrose energy, taught Ricky and I some games with dominoes. Later we exchanged language, each sharing valuable profanities in our native tounge. At sporadic intervals she would suddenly hop atop the closest object and dance with herself, eyes closed, the whole world dissolving around her liquid sway. She showed me how to merengue but I couldn´t keep up - rusty gringo hips not built for latin groove.

It must have been around three in the morning. I was fast asleep in a hammock in the backyard when I awoke to the sensation of a weight upon my chest. Oh shit. I saw this on the Discovery Channel. The Demon Dream. Old Aborigines folk tale. You think you´ve woken up, but its just an illusion. The demon sits there, leering, slowly squelching the very essence of life from your body as you lie there paralyzed, helpless. The lucky ones wake up at the last possible second, gasping and coughing in the dark. The others, well, no ones ever lived to tell the tale.

I squinted my eyes, peering through the darkness. It was a girl. A latina. Where did she come from?

I stared. She smiled. I waved. She kissed me - a patient, passionate kiss tasting of rum and bubble gum. Then she stood up, rocked my hammock softly, and disappered into the dark with a whispered ¨ciao.¨

I rolled over and slept like a baby.

Onwards! It creeps up like an itch and quickly eclipses all. I had come a long way and my inertia was potent. My Australian millitary rucksack, once a rich green, had faded to a sickly yellow-beige. But I had become lazy in David - sitting around like an ape all day, getting soft around the edges. Everyday I sit here I get weaker, and every day Charlies out there in the bush he gets stronger. It was time to go. I exchanged my bicycle for the lodging and a formidable beer tab and took off. I considered hitchhiking at first, to jumpstart the grand combustion of Adventure, but ended up at the bus stop anyways.

Fat women sat around tending tables of sweets. A legless old man stared off, eyes full of sorrow, from a hand-powered bicycle. Solemn Chiriquis in vibrant garments held the hands of skinny children. Someone rifled through a garbage can.

I wanted to give them all of my money, each of them, and dissapear starving and mad like Knut Hamsun. But not one of them asked for anything, not a penny.

Eventually the bus arrived and everybody loaded up. The scenery for most of the Pan-american is a hybrid of mid-western grasslands, distant cloud-topped mountains, and the impervious streetside palms. The Chiriqui province has a reputation as the Texas of Panama. The general assumption is that we are the shit and should probably suceed from the nation on principle alone, but what the hell? We´ll grace the country with our presence anyways.

The people around me slept. Movies played on a small television hanging from the ceiling starring people like Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damm. The driver joked over the radio with another driver the entire time, making funny voices and saying things I could not comprehend. He made sure to honk at every single woman we passed.

We rolled into Panama City late in the night. It´s like Miami, they say, except more English is spoken here. The full moon is tonight, and in some circles thats a big deal. As for me, I´ve got a mission to accomplish. A mission from Bog!

¨The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.¨ -H.S.T.

written by  chaddeal on February 9, 2009 from Panama, Panama
from the travel blog: The Great Pan-American Synchronistic Cycle Extravaganza Unlimited
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