Tipico Panameño

    After arriving at our Hotel Coral Suites in downtown Panamá, we headed to the rooftop pool and surveyed the city skyline. It was the perfect juxtaposition to the view yesterday from the top of La Iglesia Santa Maria in Taboga, a 16th century church - the first in Latin America. We were let into the darkened church by the caretaker who lives next door and thought the tour was over then but she motioned us to a small door, which could have been the hatch by which they dispatch heathen foreigners who enter churches for sightseeing but was actually a tiny door leading to a tiny spiral stair leading to a tiny bell tower. The view was breathtaking, and also heart stopping. I hadn't known myself to be particularly claustrophobic or afraid of heights, but the tiny crumbling steps in the tiny pocked adobe staircase made my size 7 feet feel like boats in a bathtub. I snapped two photos and descended fast as I could.
    Today's accomplishment was an exploration of Casco Viejo, the old town section of Panama City, full of colonial buildings and ancient churches. Yesterday, we marveled at the engineering feat of the Panama Canal.
    We continue to enjoy great food - tender shredded beef in the ropa vieja, tasty arroz con pollo and a local alcoholic drink called seco that is made of distilled cane sugar. We ended the evening by having dinner at a  Vietnamese restaurant where there were more Vietnamese people than Panamanians, and if we thought deciphering a Spanish menu was complicated, we found one that was in two languages, neither of which we really understood. Thank goodness for a strong sense of adventure and a bad case of 'ignorance is bliss'.
    Hasta mañana!

View from the bell tower at Iglesia Santa Maria

Another skyline, Panamá City

Old town Panama - Casco Viejo

Pelican Paradise

    Just for good measure, Duane started his day - desayuno, breakfast - with an El Panameño plate that included bistek y chiles con tortillas - strips of beef stewed with mild peppers, onions, in a piquant gravy, served with what I'd rather call corn cakes than tortillas. In my world, tortillas are flat as steamrollered pancakes and floppy enough to roll up. The Panamanian tortilla is more akin to a hockey puck but loads more delicious - crispy on the outside and soft within!
    The morning's activity was a refreshing and calming motor boat ride all around Isla Taboga, which didn't sound like a very long trip, but turned out to be a little over an hour which took us from the settled and civilized habitable area to the far side of the island which was a pelican/bird sanctuary that was prohibited to be developed for humans.
    Though it isn't actually "pelican season" where they gather, breed, feed, etc., we saw quite a few of the majestic and enormous birds, perching on rocks, roosting in trees, and flying half a foot above the water, soaring in search of fish to scoop with their incredibly elastic beaks. The boat belonged to Tomas, because Geni and Steve "know a guy who knows a guy" with a boat and Tomas was willing, despite a busy day of property management for his expat employers, to take four Americanos for a water circuit of his home.
    Once a hideout for the infamous pirate Morgan, the far side of the island is rocky and wild with jungle... or was it forest? One simply doesn't always know all the words for things in a foreign place. Captain Morgan (I'm assuming his military rank) used a cave on the island as a lair during his exploits, and the cave was accessible by a narrow inlet just wide enough for a rowboat. We did not venture any closer, although a more adventurous me would have wanted to pull in to the inlet, step foot on the sandy shore and wander into the cave that looked so intriguing. But all I got was a photograph, which as photographs go, will never capture what the human eye can witness.
    The beaches here are renewed daily by the tide, which rises 18 feet over the course of the day. An entire sandbar where a hundred people stretched out on chaise lounges under colorful umbrellas was completely under water by evening. The beachgoers had ferried back to the mainland long before then, leaving some of their money which the Tabogans were happy to accept.
    I bought a vanilla helado (ice cream) which was soft-serve ice milk and perfect for cooling, while Duane marvelled at the $1 cerveza... that is, until he came across another kiosk offering 75-cent cerveza! Paradise, indeed.
    We kept the heat of the day, to which we are slowly becoming acclimated, at bay by taking a dip in the cool ocean then walking to Geni and Steve's to lounge in a crystal clear pool. The beach here is strewn with so many beautiful seashells and so much seaglass that I felt no need to grab every one I saw. I did pick up one small cobalt blue sliver, though, that upon closer inspection had the remnants of the words New York embossed on it. What a long way that little shard had traveled to be tumbled smooth by the waves and end up in my hand. Walking on the beach, to my tender feet, was like walking on yards of legos - ooch, ouch, aahr...
    As the sun set, we ate a meal of sea bass in coconut passion fruit sauce, rice, shrimp and - my new favorite fried snack: patacones. Patacones, a popular Caribbean/Panamanian item is plantains, cut in hefty slices, smashed flat like a cookie and fried then lightly salted - pure delicious! After our meal, we strolled along the avenue from the hotel to the vicinity of the dock, where people still gathered in the cool evening, talking, laughing, and enjoying life. Same as in our small town. Wherever I wander, I always seem to find more things we all have in common than things that make us different. It's still one big small world.

A vista of Isla Taboga from the water

Waterfall on pristine side of island

Getting ready for the boat ride, our hotel in the background

Well, hello, Taboga!

Painful walk for a tenderfoot

Car, planes, taxi, ferry, truck bed and we've arrived!

    After a practically 24-hour travel day that included a drive from home to Newark airport, two plane rides with one delay, an early morning taxi ride through the dark streets of Panama City and a fast ferry to Isla Taboga, we arrived on the quaint island that is home to a pelican sanctuary, and home-away-from-home to our dear friends Geni and Steve.
    Isla Taboga, in addition to the pelicans, is a colorful, self-contained microcosm of a community. With very few cars available (or needed), we hitched a ride from a man with a pickup truck at the ferry dock. Geni and I climbed in the cab and Duane and Steve got the truck bed. We were loping along nicely down the cobbled street (singular, if you ask) when a couple of thuds told us that something had fallen out. There in the street a hundred feet behind us lay Duane's suitcase... a bit banged but intact!
    We visited the small market - about the square footage of the cereal aisle at Wegmans - and bought some local beer and water. Streets of small, sturdy and bright-painted houses reminded us of being up-country in Sri Lanka, complete with religious shrines, chattering bird calls, and stray dogs and cats. I am sure we saw the incarnation of Gallo del Cielo, the famous fighting rooster, who was sequestered in a cage of chicken wire - evidently to keep him from killing everything in his path.
    Whatever travel weariness we'd acquired began to melt away when we stepped into Geni and Steve's crystal clear swimming pool on a warm cloudless day. The garden was awash in color - hibiscus, crotons, and dozens of other names that I have yet to learn. We were awash in sweat because where we live it is below freezing.
    The Hotel Vereda Tropicale - our place for the next two nights - had comfortable rooms, somewhat steady WiFi, and a magnificent, unblocked 180-degree view of the oceanfront... stunning! Our first night in Panama gave us travel-weary explorers a delicious dinner of sea bass (plentiful here, and called Corvina), garlicky langostino (giant shrimp!) and by the time we got to our beds... we were OUT!

Gallo del Cielo

Peachy double hibiscus

Pool time in Isla Taboga

Back In Black (and White)

    Three days into the new year, it suddenly occurred to me, while leafing through my old-year office date planner, that I missed paper. My digital planner, synched between smart phone and two desktops was efficient, repeatable, offered semi-effective reminders and didn't cost anything to use, but it was also flat, impersonal, and soulless.
    Immediately, I began dreaming of what to do: go back to a simply-bound, classic Moleskine planner, get a rainbow of brand new colored pens and get to work scribbling my days! Would I regret turning my back on efficient in the stead of quirky? Would I ever look back on the color-drenched cacophony of activities I was about to begin? Would it help me stay on top of tasks, events and appointments?
    I'm certainly not the first to contemplate this! There are dozens of articles on the reasons to switch off the digital and return to the analog. Some of the most compelling reasons include: you remember better when you write something by hand; having a tangible work surface gives inspiration; and my own interpretation... colored pens are fun!
    My digital planner had no room (without being frighteningly awkward) for random notes about how a particular thing made me feel. Emoji can be sadly limiting in this way. Though my writing has sunk from quite nice to somewhat/mostly legible, it was still my own - unique, reflective, and fluid.
    It had been more than five years since my last Moleskine! Five years had passed with no small journal of life's banal and powerful events on my office shelf. Five years where efficiency reigned without a daily nudge to fill in the white space with some of the soft stuff that makes a life.
    So, I resolved to employ a paper planner for the year ahead, using colors to separate and organize, but leaving room for random bursts of different hues just for fun. A good part of the process that I'd missed was the ability to flip pages and gauge what was ahead, as well as the nostalgia of looking back at what had already taken place.  But perhaps the most special byproduct, for me, would be the white spaces that my compulsion for completeness wouldn't leave be. If there was a block of untouched page, I would have to tag it. With words or a pitiful drawing or a big happy face or sad face, for that matter.
    I can always tell when I plunk down hard-earned money for something that I am committed. So I waved buh-bye to my digi-cal and embraced the sort of journals used by Van Gogh and Hemingway and more than a few Silicon Valley innovators. Far from being a Luddite, I would rather converse with random strangers than play Candy Crush, have realized that a snail mail note gets tacked on the fridge the way an email never would, and that sometimes the long way getting somewhere is worth the effort.  If it means I will make time to write more, then I am prepared to buy my inner-child all the crayons she wants.