Writings By Location| Panama: A Test of Endurance | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
The entire ordeal lasted about an hour and 45 minutes. It could have been a lot worse (I've heard of people being detained for four hours, and we weren't even strip-searched.) However, we were wrong when we thought it was over. About 10 minutes into the country, the bus pulled over, and someone came on board to inspect our passports again. Just what the hell are they scared of in this country?!
What they really should have inspected was the speedometer. At one point, the driver got out of the bus (probably to pee in the bushes, who knows), and I saw out of the corner of my eye that the speedometer was having little epileptic spasms every five seconds or so, leaping from zero to 40, even though we were still at a standstill. Once the bus got moving again, I saw that the same behavior continued. You have to figure, though, it doesn't really matter how fast we're going...just as long as we can stop when we have to.
For the next five hours, we both drifted in and out of sleep, waking only around 2am when we stopped at a terminal that we later determined to be in the city of Santiago. At long last, around 5:30 in the morning, we got to Panama City. We collected our luggage, grabbed a cab, and chose the first semi-expensive hotel on our list, hoping we could safely check into it at this time of day. To our surprise, it was only about four blocks away, and sure enough, they had 24-hour service — even a doorman! (Our first on this trip, and at only $40 a night, that's pretty impressive.) We got a room and went to sleep for a few hours to reset our internal clocks.
And dammit, we still don't know who "Tuna" was. It'll probably be months before I'll be somewhere I can rent it to find out, not to mention muster up the courage to actually ask for it. Talk about a real endurance test.
Postscript: Five days later, we're leaving from Panama City's international airport. We checked in with our airline, and paid the $20 per person exit fee, plus — I love this — a $5 per person "security fee". Does this mean I'm paying for the privilege of being strip-searched because I don't have a return ticket. I wonder, what if I refused to pay it? Would that mean I wasn't entitled to security, so I'd just have to go straight to the gate?
We left the ticket counter with fourteen stapled scraps of paper between the two of us, including boarding passes, copies of our ticket receipts, receipts for our exit fee, receipts for our "security fee", security forms, baggage claim checks, and some stuff that I think was propaganda, but we lost it. Then, seeing no line at immigration, we proceeded to the booth so we could go check out the duty free shops. This was, naturally, a multi-step process, requiring us to first get a stamp on the receipt for our exit fee — Ink, STAMP...ink, STAMP...shuffle, shuffle...ink, STAMP...ink, STAMP. Then we followed the ropes to an immigration agent, whose first question was, "Where is your embarcation card?" Think we had one? Of course not. So were sent back to the airline counter for more paperwork and more delays.
By the time we finished filling out the cards, an entire school of little children formed a line about 30 feet long in front of the receipt stamper and immigration window. However, we're nothing if not fast learners: we just went straight to the window in front of them all. Ink, STAMP...ink, STAMP. No questions asked.
Panama. Gotta love it.
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