Writings By Date| Panama: A Test of Endurance | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
At that point, I started to walk away, but something told me I was giving up too easily. So I went back and tried to explain, again, that I had left something on the old bus. He started to go on, then turned around and got back off again, making a gesture to some unseen person, then went back to overseeing things. I waited, and watched as the package loading finished, then some money changed hands from a guy carrying the packages to the official, and immediately over to another guy driving the pickup truck. I'm not sure what I had just witnessed, but I was beginning to get the idea I should wrap things up quickly. (Fortunately, the bills were small, so it can't be that bad.)
Finally, a couple of minutes later, the patrolman pointed me to another man, whom I recognized as our driver. I took a deep breath, and repeated the one sentence I could speak in this situation. ("I have a shirt on the bus.") "Si; un bolsa?" he replied. Yes, a bag too! Now we were getting somewhere. He then nodded, and motioned at the bus, indicating (and saying, though I wouldn't have guessed it otherwise) that it was on the other bus. And my (sweat)shirt, I asked? Yes, that too. I thanked him, and was so relieved that, without realizing it, I patted him on the shoulder. Hopefully he won't be offended by that.
I trotted back to Erin, who was patiently waiting for me in the next country over, at which point we went in search of a Coke, figuring relief from the heat and stress was a worthwhile tradeoff for having to pee on the bus for the next six hours. We sat and waited for about half an hour, watching young men sell barbequed meat from a small grill on top of a barrel.
Finally, the bus arrived, and we retrieved our luggage for the journey through customs. the process was slow, since the customs agent was going through every single bag, at least partially, and examining some things pretty closely. after some amount of time — we started losing track by now — we heaved our 455 pounds of crap onto the table, opened everything up, and showed the agent our passports. Before the customs guy even eyed our bags, he looked at the passports and shook his head disapprovingly. Now what? He said that we were missing a stamp. We showed him the tourism card — no, we need a stamp on that. We showed him the $1 stamp, but that wasn't it either. He motioned us to follow him, with luggage in tow, of course, and he led us back to the immigration window, now for the third time.
