I inadvertently booked my flight into Tocumen International Airport for one day later than the rest of my group. The result is that in the dead of night after 8 hours of flying coach, carrying no map and speaking no Spanish, I am fumbling and stumbling my fool way 160 km to the west of Panama City to a place where I don't even have the address. I know only that it's "near San Carlos."
After 10 o'clock I finally clear customs and surrender myself to the airport taxi sharks -- my sole transpo alternative unless I care to walk to Albrook bus terminal, many miles distant. (Cheap bastard that I am, I actually consider it.) Thirty-five minutes and $35 later, I am standing in the cavernous and all-but-deserted bus terminal, with no earthly clue what to do next.
My correct-day-arriving friends, who rented cars and are already at our Dream Destination, are expecting to fetch me from San Carlos. But Albrook terminal's San Carlos ticket window is dark and a paper sign taped to the window says: "No have bus." Not knowing what to do next, I wander aimlessly until I find an information booth ... but the info girl speaks no English. She keeps saying "Santiago, blah-blah-blah, Santiago" and I finally realize she means San Carlos is on the way to Santiago. I race to the Santiago ticket window and purchase a bus ticket, making the gate with five minutes to spare.
But the ticket master neglects to tell me the part about Metrocards.
To ride a bus in Panama, you need a ticket and an electronic Metrocard, which you buy separately and carry with you. At the gate to the buses, you swipe your Metrocard to release the turnstile that lets you out. But at this moment all I know is that for some reason this turnstile is not letting me reach the bus that I just paid three dollars and fifty cents to ride. Luckily, the gatekeeper takes pity and uses his own Metrocard to be rid of the dithering, panicking gringo-stupido.
At close to midnight our coach rolls out of Albrook, leaving the lights of Panama City behind us. An hour and a half later we pull off the highway and the conductor points to me. The next moment I am standing alone under a streetlight at a wide spot in the road with no place to go, and it is 1:30 in the morning.
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| My roadside salvation. |
No way am I sending email to the gang at this hour: everyone is probably asleep and they've almost certainly been drinking. So I settle in on the cement bus bench to wait for sunrise. What I have no way of knowing is that the Internet at our rental house is nonfunctioning -- I cannot contact my friends, nor they me.
I proceed to sit, stand and pace for the next seven hours.
Two or three times I take my iPhone out of airplane mode just long enough to send progressively more desperate emails to the group. Are they all still sleeping? Did they go somewhere? Do they just not care???
By 8:30 I'm sweltering in the tropical sun and must go in search of an Internet cafe. The first person I ask about "in-ter-net" nods knowingly and shows me to a bathroom. Finally I happen across an English speaker who points me to a side road off the highway just 200 feet from where I was standing all that time. I turn the corner and there is the actual town of San Carlos: stores, food, connectivity, a bathroom. D'oh!
At the San Carlos internet cafe I proceed to send more agitated emails to the group. The noon hour approaches and at last I get a reply: "Jeff, where are you?" My friends finally found a way to download my multiple pleas for help. Thirty minutes later I am rescued!
Here's where I am now. Worth the bother, I'd say.
