"Where's the snow, Saint Nick?" the agents asked as they gutted his big red suitcase like a dead animal. Santa smiled and gave a shrug. They found nothing and eventually stamped his North Pole passport, sending him on his way.

It was my turn next. I approached the window and yeilded my passport. The bored agent behind the counter flipped through the visa pages for a very long time. In Spanish, he told me to wait as he disappeared behind a door. When he came back he informed me that my visa had been overstayed by nearly a month. I would have to miss my flight to Panama City and produce large sums of money. I protested.

He took me to a dim back room which seemed to serve this purpose alone - bantering about overstayed visas and exchanging half-assed threats. The agent got on a computer and clicked on random icons, desiring the appearance of looking busy, somehow trying to help.

"Two hundred and fifty dollars," he said finally, as if he we reading it from the screen. He was halfway through a game of minesweeper.

"Listen, I don't have two hundred and fifty dollars, thats why I'm going home. I'm broke."

"Hmm, well. Two hundred and fifty is the minimum. I'm trying to make this easy on you."

"Right."

"What were you doing for nearly three months in Colombia, anyways?"

I was teaching English without a work visa, dancing salsa with wild girls, and eating lots of fried food - but sometimes the truth only complicates things. I had a better idea.

"Well, if you must know, I'm a writer. A professional. For a very popular travel magazine in the United States. I've been working on an article about how wonderful and welcoming your country is for tourists. After all, the only risk is wanting to stay, am I wrong? Well, I've had nothing but good experiences...so far..."

He caught my gist.

"Just give me whatever you have and get outta here. And hurry, your flight's about to leave."

I sat next to Santa and we struck up conversation. Panama would be his 80th country. He held the unofficial world record for hitchhiking, an estimated million and a half miles. He was as kind-hearted and jolly as you'd expect Santa to be.

Santa

When we arrived in Panama City Santa and Pete from New Jersey came with me to David's house, who I had gotten in touch with a few days earlier on couchsurfing.com. David lived in a elegant highrise on the waterfront. The causeway gleamed across the water and the city made city sounds. We shared stories and beers late into the night.

I woke up to Santa looming over me in his big red shirt and his Peruvian lama fur hat.

"Man," he said, "you one ugly motherfucker in the morning."

"Thanks Santa."

Pete had awoken with his eyes bloodshot and itching. I later learned that he was detained at the Panama City airport under suspicion of having swine flu. You can read the full story here:
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/20090513_A_flu_nightmare__without_the_flu.html

David and Santa

Pete and Santa

We headed off across town to Mama Llena hostel, where I was going to meet up with Katie, old Humboldt friend, and Santa was going to find a room. Santa drew a lot of attention from the locals, who HoHoHo-ed from delivery trucks and snuck pictures from across the street. He seemed accustomed to the popularity and returned the salutations joyfully.

We found Katie at a hostel in Casco Viejo and hung out for a while drinking coffee. Then off we went, Katie and I, to retrieve a car which some folks from Alabama had left with her to return to northern Pamana. The car was an old brown diesel Toyota 4-runner. At first we couldn't even get the thing started, so we wandered around barefoot in the rain for a while before finding a taxi who was willing to come over and jump the battery. The car came to life and we took off.

Katie and an anteater who says HONK!

Katie had driven a stick one time before in her life, when someone in Humboldt had taken a vial of LSD to prove a point and quickly lost the ability to operate a motor vehicle. Now she was learning all over again, on the wet roads of rush hour Panama City. The first thing we did was got lost following some bogus directions. We asked the locals and some policemen, but every single answer contradicted the others. We took life into our own hands. We read a map. In no time we were zooming through the insane traffic of the city towards the canal. By the time we breezed over the Bridge of the Americas, Katie was driving the beast like a champ and we both shared a profound sense of relief and accomplishment.

The plan, we decided, was to drive until it got boring and figure out what to do and where to stay as we went. Of course.

When evening hit we were both ready for a beer. We pulled off the road and went into a bar which shared an architectual heritage with the public restrooms you find on So Cal beaches. Shitty porn played from a TV.

Katie spotted him first.

"That one, with the baseball cap. He's the one that's going to give us a place to stay tonight."

"You're right," I said. "Let's go talk to him."

He turned out to be friendly enough. We all talked about mundane things for a while. Katie and I decided somehow to masquerade as German tourists for the hell of it, so we occasionally broke into side conversations of exasperated faux-German before resuming small talk with our unknowing benefactor.

He did indeed have a place for us, as it turned out. Just across the street. He introduced me to his friend, who looked like a toad from an old Chinese story. The toad appeared to be retarded. Or very, very drunk.

"Forty dollars," said the toad.

"Five," I countered.

"Twenty," he challenged.

"Look," I continued, "The lady and I are simple people. In fact, we're German. We don't require much. We're probably better off sleeping on the beach."

"Ten," the Toad belched irritably.

"Agreed."

The place was a three bedroom guesthouse behind a large, semi-luxurious estate which was clearly inhabited by old folks. It was unclear why the Toad had the keys to the house, but it seemed to involve a boss who was on vacation elsewhere. We rigged up the stereo and laid down our things and proceeded to drink late into the night with our two Panamanian entrepeneurs.

The next morning we woke around noon to find the Toad on the porch sucking on a bottle of vodka, still with that challenged look in his eye. We took our time leaving - went swimming, ate some mangoes, showered.

Katie and the Toad

We weren't on the road more than a few hours before pulling over at a roadside beerhut to get leisurely. Some locals waved as we sat down. They appeared to be in the depths of a methamphetamine binge. Their faces were skinny and too wrinkled for their age, their eyes hollow and frantic. They signaled the waitress to give us some beer. So we drank them. But before we were even halfway through, two more showed up. We waved a "gracias" and the dudes smiled proudly. Suckers for gringa girls, all of them.

In no time we were halfway to drunk and again somehow mysteriously German as we talked away with some people sitting next to us. They were from Santiago, nearby. The older man told me that the other was his son in law.

"A ha, and she must be your lovely daugter," I said, indicating the woman sitting near to the other man.

"No," he responded. "My daughter is at home with the kids. This is the mistress of my son in law."

"Oh, hmm. This sort of thing is not so common in Germany. You don't mind it here though?"

"Why should I?" The man asked, smiling. "Everyone has a mistress in Panama."

Katie and I exchanged some German remarks.

More beers appeared.

"Those guys," said the father in law, pointing to the meth fiends. "Gays."

"Gays?"

"Yes," he said gravely. "Gays. And robbers."

"Holy shit. What should I do?"

"Avoid the urinal. They want to steal your penis."

"Good lord!"

We realized that we would have to cut off the drinks pretty soon if we intended to drive any further, so we left the bar and clambered around on a half-built watertower, sang strange songs, and painted each others faces with the ash from a burnt tree.

The sun had long since set when we rolled into Santiago. We found a cheap hotel room and bought a bottle of rum. Election day was the day after tomorrow and all booze sales would be halted the next day at noon so as to prevent drunk voting. We wandered around town, then, seeking a taste of Friday night Santiago. We ended up at a bus station where somehow we had decided to distribute rum to everybody.

"Would you like a shot of rum?" One of us would ask a bored looking stranger.

"A shot of rum?"

"Yes, a shot of rum."

"How much does it cost?"

"Nothing."

The idea alone of free rum was enough to frighten away a few, but the tenacious understood and eagerly accepted. I produced the bottle from beneath my Colombian poncho and filled up a tall shot in my wooden shot glass necklace from carnaval. The takers were pleased and grateful. Its a long ride to David by bus, but this night the ride was certain to be a shade merrier.

What an odd notion, we realized. How simple it is to get the vast majority of an entire bus grinning stupidly for no good reason at all. We felt like sorcorers.

The bus took off but we wanted more, so we waved down a taxi.

"Listen, we're on a promocional campaign for Abuelo rum and we absolutely must distribute this entire bottle to thirsty locals before the night is through. What we need is for you to drive us down every street in town while we hand out shots. We can't pay you, but we can get you drunk. What do you say?"

The first cabbie said he didn't drink and therefore couldn't help us. A Panamanian man who doesn't drink? Lies!

But the next driver was intrigued. At first he laughed, but when I showed him the bottle the tone became conspiritorial. He had to make a run, he said, but he'd be back.

So Katie and I clambered up a watertower to get a more complete yen of late night Santiago. For me, Katie has been one of those friends that just flow into your life naturally and seem to be there for a reason. Our conversations quickly turn esoteric and seem to carry an air of secrecy. Like we're on the same vibe. We both generally suspect that there is a lot of unseen and unknown going on behind this thin film of consensual reality, and that seemingly ordinary people are in fact divine superheroes - the hot dog lady on the street corner, a flight attendant, hazy eyed old men smoking pipes in a cow field, all of us - mysterious and magickal somethings that for some large and blocky purpose have been imprisoned in life as we know - passing time, learning lessons, hammering out the edges just waiting to fly again.

So it was these sorts of things which we discussed loudly like giddy children atop the watertower as we waited for and then forgot about our taxi accomplice, who never did come.

The next day we hit the road late again and plowed through the rain for hours before reaching Bambu hostel in David around sunset. We passed several days there - swimming, hammocking, singing bizzare songs to the dogs on the porch, Katie working on her mural on the wall, me taking my old bicycle out for long rides, sometimes lurking around the city at night.

Finally Katie said she couldn't stand it anymore, David is hell. I didn't know just what she meant until we made it up to Lost and Found eco hostel in the rainforest about an hour inland. She had spent the past two months there doing a work exchange, giving the place some flair with her wild art, and generally causing trouble.

Katie's mural at Bambu

She took me on a hike through the appropriately titled "death trail", where the path crumbles beneath your feet and disappears down a cliffside like something out of Indiana Jones. I was positive I would step on an exotic serpent and die peacefully right there in the jungle like a shaman. Instead we swam in the river and jumped around on some rocks.

A few days later I got on a bus and found myself at the end of a long and hazy day in San Jose, Costa Rica. I met up with my old roommate Michelle from the TEFL school in Samara and we went out on the town. Scenic San Jose. We ended up at a bar that played eighties music all night and danced like fools while everyone else stood around looking cool.

The next day we met up with Layne, another classmate from the TEFL school, who was celebrating her birthday with her cousin in a hotel room by the airport in Alajuela. Both her cousin and I had flights at 6 the next morning, so we stayed up most the night talking and hanging around.

Well, then, before I knew it, here is was. Back in mama America. Everything looking so clean. So orderly.

People stop at red lights and follow the lines on the road.

And maybe you know how it is - for all the homesickness along the way, for all the times I found comfort in the memories of right here, well, suddenly that feeling was very far away, and the bittersweet of people and places never to be seen again surged my heart with the impossibility of it all, the beauty and the strange miracle of existence in the first place,

and I was made full
with gratitude.

written by  chaddeal on May 14, 2009 from San Jose, Costa Rica
from the travel blog: The Great Pan-American Synchronistic Cycle Extravaganza Unlimited
Send a Compliment

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Thanks for all the inspiring and perspiring blogs i will miss your journey and hope that you launch into another or flesh out this blog into a book i am sure it will sell well.

written by  mike on May 16, 2009

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It might be nice in the states but the freedom of a place beyond US borders beckons my soul w/ undeniable call in search of discovery...thanks for reminding me.

written by  Tony Fantano on August 31, 2015

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