by John Higham
We had also picked up a Spanish phrase book, which was only marginally better. I opened it up and started to browse through it randomly, coming to a section called “Trouble with the Police.” It had such useful phrases as: “These drugs are for personal use.” “Can I speak to a lawyer in English?” “Can I pay the fine on the spot?” “You are being charged with murder.”
We made it our goal to not need these phrases.
My Spanish teacher’s name was Javier. “How long will you be staying in Panama City?” Javier asked.
“A few days. Just long enough to make arrangements to go south.”
“South? Through the Darién Province to Colombia?”
“That’s the plan, although we are having difficulty finding a route description.”
“You cannot do this.” Javier was emphatic. “The Darién Province is rugged and there are no roads. More important it’s a wild and lawless place. People turn up missing there all the time.”
The description of no roads was frankly a powerful attraction. However, two guidebooks and now Javier were starting to spook me.
• • •
“We are going.” I was getting impatient. “How can we spend time in Panama City and not visit the Canal Zone?” The Panama Canal is not only cool, there is a lot of important history tied up in it. It was, in effect, begging for a Science Moment. I was eager to go, but Katrina and Jordan had just received a new shipment of books.
“But I’m in the middle of a chapter!” they exclaimed in unison. I decided right there that books were overrated. At least a nice sitcom comes in thirty-minute chunks. Books, on the other hand, always have the next chapter.
On our way to the Panama Canal’s Miraflores locks, I told the kids what everyone knew about the canal. “The two oceans are only 50 or so miles apart, but a ship going through the canal saves thousands of miles compared to going the long way around. The coolest part is that the two oceans are at different levels so boats that go through the canal have to use water elevators. Which is what we are going to see.”
Out on the observation deck I was mesmerized by the Miraflores locks. I could have watched the ships transiting through and being raised and lowered for hours. I tried to leverage a discussion of the locks into a Science Moment, but some people just don’t get emotional about great engineering. Deflated, I accepted that in the eyes of a nine-year-old, Archemides’ principle of flotation just wasn’t as cool as the glowing lava of a live volcano. We left the observation area and headed for the canal’s exhibits. I was in for a nasty shock.
“Dad, you are wrong! The Pacific and the Atlantic are at the same level. It says so right here!” Jordan was pointing to one of the displays with a description that stated most emphatically that the two oceans were at the same level, and that a common misconception about the canal was that the two oceans were at different levels.
In the space of only a week or so, two long-held and cherished pieces of playground folklore went poof. Next thing I would be informed that F no longer equaled ma, or, shudder, a human’s mouth really is dirtier than a dog’s behind.
However, as with most things, a simple answer is not always the most accurate. Months later, I read online that the maximum tidal range on the Pacific side is from +11.0 feet to -10.5 feet, and that the tidal range on the Atlantic side is no more than 24 inches. By comparison, the mean sea level at the Pacific end of the canal is on average about 8 inches higher than at the Atlantic end.
Suggesting yet again that things are rarely what they seem.
• • •
We went to Flamengo Island for a day of sunshine. The island is connected to the mainland via a manmade causeway. There is a good cycle path all along the causeway and you can watch the ships sail under the Bridge of the Americas on their way to or from the Canal. It was a beautiful summer day and we were doing nothing in particular.
“Katrina,” I asked, “what book were you so interested in that you didn’t want to come out here and enjoy the sunshine?”
“It’s called Secret of the Andes. It’s one that Mom bought before we left and is about the Spanish conquest.” Katrina was quick to point out how evil the Spanish were, wiping out an entire culture.
“Not so harsh, Little One,” I said. “Things aren’t always what they seem. The Spanish thought they were doing the right thing.”
“How can you say that? They were so mean and downright evil!”
“Perhaps, but they were also mothers and fathers who loved their children. If you had asked them, they were doing God’s will, taking resources from a wild people and distributing them to the righteous. The United States did basically the same thing in the 19th century with the American Indians, moving them from their heritage lands to reservations. Many Indian nations died because the United States wanted their land. The nations that survived still lost their land and were moved to places no one else wanted to live.”
Katrina gave me a slack-jawed look. I knew I had hit my mark. Even Jordan was paying attention.
“We can look back and judge the people of history and what they did, and a lot of it looks pretty stupid from our perspective, because we ‘know better.’ But really, we are tomorrow’s stupid people because we don’t know what we don’t know. Future generations will understand things we can’t even comprehend now. From their perspective, we will be ignorant and they may judge us just as harshly as we would the Spanish conquistadors.”
Walking along the causeway from Flamengo Island back to the mainland with ships exiting and entering the Panama Canal, I had Katrina and Jordan’s attention in the manner I had thought would be mine every day of our trip. I turned the conversation to a Science Moment without alerting the kids to it, explaining all sorts of things supposed “learned” people did hundreds of years ago, such as the practice of “bleeding” a patient, that we think are pretty stupid now.
At the apogee of my smugness for gaining the kids’ rapt attention in such a lovely setting, I was walking into a first-rate example of how I can be pretty stupid in the here and now.
When we reached the mainland the nice pedestrian sidewalk along the causeway just sort of evaporated. We pulled out our map and made our way through El Chorrillo, a poor neighborhood that took the brunt of Operation Just Cause when the U.S. invaded Panama in 1989. We hadn’t been there a 120 seconds before two people came rushing up to us, telling us we weren’t safe.
“Um, sure,” I replied, and kept walking. We were, after nine months on the road, seasoned travelers. We thought we were being spooked into hopping in a taxi we didn’t want. Within seconds the police showed up and were pretty clear that we should leave. Immediately.
A taxi driver whisked us away. “That neighborhood is not safe for you,” the driver told us. “Most parts of Panama are safe, but there are places you should not go. A missionary couple went missing in Darién just a few days ago. They will never be seen again.”
That was the third strike against going south overland.
The next day I asked my Spanish teacher, Javier, about the neighborhood we found ourselves in and if we were really in danger.
“Yes,” Javier replied, “the people in that neighborhood are hungry and have been ever since the United States left the Canal Zone.”
“That doesn’t make sense. If they were better off when the United States was here, why are they mad at us?”
“They are not thinking clearly as you or I. All they know is their hunger and that you are well fed.”
Javier went on to explain that the entire middle class in Panama collapsed when the United States left. He used the example of his friend who was a butcher. “My friend made $2,000 a year when the United States still controlled the Canal Zone. But since they left, he can no longer find work as a butcher. He now makes much less doing odd jobs as he can find them. Many in Panama preferred the United States being in control of the Canal Zone. The promise was that the citizens of Panama would prosper when the United States left, but the opposite has occurred. Of c
ourse, you will never read that side of the story in any newspaper.”
I went on to explain how our experience in El Chorrillo helped us realize that going overland to Colombia through the Darién Province was probably not a good idea. “So we will be extending our stay in Panama City until we can find a flight south.”
“Then you must experience Carnaval. It starts this Saturday. We have the best festival in all of Central America! It will be a delight for your children!”
• • •
“Carnaval?” September said, when I returned from Spanish class, passing along Javier’s recommendation. “I dunno about that … Carnaval can’t be very appropriate for the kids.”
“I said the same thing, but he swears it is for kids.”
Carnaval is, of course, the four-day-long festival that is celebrated before the beginning of Lent. It is celebrated in the streets with a daily parade and dancing until the wee hours of the morning. It isn’t the first activity that comes to mind when thinking of something that is kid oriented.
I had a mental image of Carnaval: There would be a crush of people who had been drinking too much, and essentially naked women gyrating in the streets. Brutal, yes, but I would risk it for the sake of the kids’ cultural enrichment. Everyone we had talked to always used one word to describe the festivities. Wild. Okay, fine. Wild what? We were about to find out.
September gave each of the kids a business card with the hostel’s name and address on it and two dollars so they could get a taxi home if we got swept apart by a sea of unruly partyers. We then bid adieu to the new stack of books in our hostel and set out to discover what the fuss was all about.
The police had set up security checkpoints so that the only way to the festival was to pass through them. They checked us and our backpacks for weapons, then let us in. Once through the security checkpoint, we were almost immediately offered the chance to buy a bag of confetti.
This was a bit unexpected. Gee whiz … I didn’t really feel the need to throw confetti, so I politely declined. The vendor gave me an amused look, like he thought I was a bit of an idiot.
People were milling about with their kids and pushing strollers. We ventured into the throng, heading in the general direction of the music. I took note of the police in their olive-green fatigues and oversized weapons strolling up and down the street ensuring the peace.
No sooner had I started to wonder when we would see the scantily clad women, than we passed a middle-aged woman holding hands with her husband, who was pushing a stroller with his one remaining free hand. They looked a little too old to have kids in a stroller, so I assumed the child in the stroller was their grandchild. The woman looked at me and gave me a smirky sort of smile. Just as I returned a quizzical look she took a handful of confetti and threw it in my face.
I was stunned, rooted to the spot and sputtering in confusion. Where was that blasted confetti vendor when I needed him?
This repeated itself about five more times in the 60 seconds that followed. Clearly adult males are the preferred targets and it was pretty obvious I was unarmed. Plus, I was a genuine gringo, which was probably a triple-word score or something.
Even though September and the kids weren’t the focus of aggression as I was, soon enough they too were targeted. Within a few minutes after entering the battle zone, we had all been plastered with handfuls of confetti. It didn’t take us long to formulate a plan of retaliation.
“Okay,” I said to Katrina and Jordan. “Here’s what we’ll do. People want to get me and Mom more than anything and you can dart in through the crowd easier than we can. So you kind of hide behind us, then when someone gets us with confetti, run after them.”
For 20 cents a bag, we could keep Operation Blitzkrieg going for a long time. We just kept feeding Katrina and Jordan bags of confetti when their munitions supply got low.
As can happen with this kind of play the tactics quickly escalated. We hadn’t gone through too many bags of confetti before the Super Soakers started to come out. Jordan, armed with a bag of confetti, had crossed enemy lines. The target was a woman in her sixties who had dumped a bag of confetti over my head. Jordan had locked onto his target when she suddenly grabbed him and held him while two of her girlfriends, both also in their sixties, doused him with their Super Soakers.
I watched, mouth agape, as the scene unfolded. I was worried that Jordan was going to return from his mission in tears, but when he did return, all he wanted was a Super Soaker and revenge.
I could understand that.
A vendor was ready with high-capacity water guns, preloaded and ready to fire. Suddenly Jordan was transformed into a little Rambo.
With his Super Soaker at Carnaval, Jordan was going to get revenge for every pat on the head, every pinch on the cheek, and every poke in the ribs that he’d received in the previous nine months. His target was anyone over 30, and he could strike with impunity. He was in his element.
After several street battles where Jordan could avenge all wrongs inflicted on the family, we made our way back to the hostel.
Not much more than 24 hours later we would be receiving a 1:45 a.m. wake-up call so we could catch our 4:00 a.m. flight to La Paz, Bolivia. We didn’t know it then, but in La Paz we would be walking into a Carnaval war zone that would make Panama City look like a stroll through the Hundred Acre Wood.
www.360degreeslongitude.com/concept3d/360degreeslongitude.kmz
Red Frog Beach has quite a background. Of course there are two sides to every story, but the locals feel strongly that favoritism and corruption gave the developers the license they needed to build here. All I know is what I saw.
22.
Please Pass the Armageddon Pills
February 27–March 6
Bolivia
Just keep your head down and make a run for it,” Arthy, the owner of our guest house in La Paz, advised. We had met him three seconds earlier and it seemed we were already trusting him with our lives. Reviewing the situation from inside our taxi, we could see that the odds weren’t in our favor. It was the third day of Carnaval and a huge parade was in progress. The crowd had already been whipped into a frenzy.
The only way to the guest house was through the crowd and the parade. Our taxi driver gave us a sympathetic look and a gentle shove out the door. What else could we do? Wait for the crowd to go away? Our experience with Carnaval in Panama told us that wouldn’t happen until the wee hours of the morning. We dove for daylight between a group of Quechua traditional dancers and a brass band, and raced across the wide street, pulling our suitcases behind us. At the halfway mark the crowd realized fresh meat had just been delivered.
At first it was just one water balloon. The barrage that followed was not unlike what happens to a chicken being pecked to death by its peers. The first little peck is totally harmless. But then the other chickens sense blood and a mob mindset ensues. Totally defenseless, we were pelted with all sorts of mayhem from water balloons to spray foam to buckets of water dumped from the second-story balconies above.
We arrived in the reception area of our guest house covered in foam and soaked completely to the skin. We spent the rest of the day drying our clothes, nursing our wounded dignity, and plotting revenge.
Jordan’s Journal, February 28
Today me and Katrina went out and got bigger squirt guns and a bucket full of water balloons. After we were done throwing water balloons, having water gun fights, and being squirted with foam, we were soaked even though we wore our rain jackets. Today is the last day of Carnaval. It was a lot of fun.
At 12,007 feet, La Paz is the highest capital city in the world. Having flown in from Panama City at sea level, we were making a huge change in our environment. It took three days to recover from the effects of altitude sickness: fatigue and insomnia (is there no justice in the world?), headaches, nausea, and loss of appetite. Even after three days when we started to feel “normal” again, a flight of stairs would still leave me clutching my chest and gasping for air.
The entire greater La Paz metropolitan area, and by extension, the corner of Bolivia into which it is stuffed, is the highest of almost everything imaginable. Bolivia has the highest commercial airport, the highest capital, the highest salt flats, the highest ATMs… You get the picture.
The statistic that we didn’t see quoted was that it has the highest people. Chewing coca leaves in Bolivia is as legal as chewing gum (unless you are doing your chewing in Singapore). A casual glance up and down the street confirms that everyone in “traditional” dress is chewing something, and I don’t think it’s Wrigley’s.
So what do you do in La Paz while recuperating from altitude sickness? You go to the Coca Museum, of course. A staggering percentage of Bolivia’s economy is based on the cocaine industry, and the Coca Museum proved to be fascinating, albeit in a disturbing way. The Coca Museum explains anything and everything about the coca leaf, from its uses among indigenous peoples more than 500 years ago to how to chew it, how to refine it into cocaine, and how to smuggle it out of the country. Did you know that Dr. Sigmund Freud was the first documented user of cocaine? Or that the successful outlawing of the active ingredient of cocaine in Coca-Cola in 1914 was the beginning of the lobbying efforts that resulted in the U.S. Prohibition Act in the 1920s?
One of the most titillating “facts” at the Coca Museum was that the Coca-Cola company imports over two hundred metric tons of coca leaves every year into Atlanta, Georgia—not to use the active ingredient that gives the coca leaf its infamous reputation, but as a flavoring.
This “fact” is according to the Coca Museum in La Paz, Bolivia. I found this information a bit difficult to believe—if the Coca-Cola Company is really using coca for any reason, you would think the general public would go nuts. Half of the population would be trying to snort Diet Coke and the other half would be bombing vending machines. However, for the record, if this news breaks—I’m a Diet Pepsi guy.