I had no work this week because it is Semana Santa, so I decided to go to Panama. I was originally intending to go after work on Friday, but I was invited to play indoor soccer with some of the Costa Rican employees. After the soccer game there was a party for two of the employees who are leaving. My soccer playing is very rusty, but I really enjoyed playing despite the amount of sweating I did. It was extremely hot this weekend, with temperatures going to 40 degrees every day. Luckily there is little humidity but it still incredibly hot.

On Saturday there was another party so it wasn´t until noon on Sunday that I finally set off to Panama by bus. It is 3-4 hours to the capital, San Jose, which is at a higher altitude, so it was about 5-10 degrees cooler. When I arrived it was pouring rain. This was the first rain I had seen since I arrived in Costa Rica. I was planning to catch the 15 hour overnight bus to Panama City but the bus was full. I needed some money for Panama so I found a Scotiabank. Strangely, Scotiabank is the major foreign bank in Costa Rica. Panama uses American Dollars, so I took out a bunch. I left the bank and was walking down the street when I heard angry shouting behind me. I turned around and there was a group of guys, one with an aluminum bat and one with a large rock, and they were running towards me. They ran by me and chased down this bus. They started yelling at someone inside and bashing the bus. I guess they have something against buses. Later a taxi pulled up beside me and told me I was in a dangerous area and he had a good hostel to go to. I thought he was just trying to get an extra tip , but he didn´t want any money at all and the hostel was a real good value.

The next morning I found a 9 hour bus to David, Panama which is close to the Costa Rican border. The entire bus route was along the Pan-American Highway. After it leaves San Jose, it continues to rise into the mountains until it reaches the highest point on the entire Pan-American highway, right below the Cerro de la Muerte, the Mountain of Death. Apparently, in the rainy season, this highway is very dangerous, and there are a whole lot of gravestone crosses on the side of the road. The highway then quickly winds back down to sea level where it got very hot again. It followed a large river and I think I saw my first crocodile in the river. The were a lot of banana plantation and also pineapple farms near a Del Monte factory.

We arrived at the Panama border, which was very hectic. Another bus carrying a soccer team from Mexico arrived at the same time, so the line was huge. I got rejected at the border twice, once for not having a return ticket and once for not having a tourist card, but luckily the bus employees helped me out. The first thing I noticed about Panama is that the roads are way better than in Costa Rica. In Costa Rica, the Pan-American highway is two-laned and full of potholes but Panama had a much better 4 lane highway. We arrived in David just after dark and I decided to continue on to Panama City. It was another 6 hour bus ride and we arrived at about 2:30 in the morning. The bus station was huge and provided service across the country. The station was very clean and modern and there was a large mall across the street that was as fancy as any mall I have been to in Canada. After I left Panama City I saw on the news that there were huge crowds of about 200 000 people in the station at the start of Easter Weekend.

Unfortunately the only guidebook to Panama I had was a nature guide so I didn't really know where to go. Panama City is on the Pacific side so since I was at the bus station I decided to take a bus to the Atlantic along the Panama Canal. There are not too many places in the world where you can buy a $2.50 bus ticket from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The Caribbean side has a small city called Colon (Spanish for Columbus) which seemed very poor. The bus terminal was extremely rundown and was a stark contrast to the Panama City bus station. I ate some real good cheap breakfast and headed back to Panama City. The return bus also gave me a short tour of Panama City before it returned to the bus station.

The one place in Panama City that my guide mentioned was the National Metropolitan Park so I took a taxi there. The park is a chunk of preserved jungle inside the city limits and it was quite fascinating. There were huge parades of leaf cutter ants everywhere and when I passed a pond, a bunch of Jesus Christ lizards scampered across the water. There were also many different kinds of butterflies and birds and the trail ended with a great view of the city skyline, the Pacific, and the Panama Canal. The Panama Canal was also interesting. There were hundreds of huge boats congregated out in the ocean waiting to enter the canal and it looked like Panama City was under siege from a foreign navy.

Seeing that I was lacking a guidebook and since I wanted to avoid the Easter Weekend rush, I decided to head back to the western end of Panama where there is an interesting volcano. I'll talk about this next week