by Randy Denmon
So here in this jungle, the people may decide that inundating some villages is a good trade-off for being able to have their children born in a modern, clean, electric-powered hospital, or building a new sewer and water plant that would benefit the whole community. They should have the right to make that choice.
Meanwhile, back at mile 120, we pulled into the one of two possible charging points, Santiago District. I didn’t see much, a few hotels, minimal standards. We might get a charge, might not.
With almost 140 miles of battery left, we decided to push on to Penonomé, a little bigger and 60 miles on. Two hours later we rolled into town, stopping at a nice hotel on the city’s edge.
I was promptly told that no 240- or 120-volt power was for sale, rent, or use. We found two other hotels, one decrepit, but the other with window units. The rooms were all on the second floor, but the ACs had 240-volt sockets I could use. I explained everything. We could run the cord out of the room’s window and park on the street. Ten minutes of begging and pleading, waiting to see the owner. They didn’t like the idea. The more I implored, the more unwavering they got.
We checked the GPS and maps. It was only ninety-four miles to Panama City. We had about eighty miles of battery. We might make it if we drove slow enough, but that was cutting it too close, especially with what we’d seen that morning, but a good 120-volt charge would get us there. It was about three. If we could get plugged in by four, we could add about thirty or forty miles to our batteries by daylight.
I went back to the first hotel. Inside, I tried again, sweet-talking the cute Panamanian manager. Doom was the theme. She needed to pitch in, or else. “I just need a standard, two-prong plug.” I pointed to a lamp, walked to it, and put my hand on the socket. “I’ll buy two rooms and pay for the electricity.”
She sought the assistant manager’s eye, conversed in Spanish, and then called the owner. Shortly the hotel electrician arrived.
“Okay,” the manager said. “But you can’t plug into the hotel. Pablo will make a plug in the parking lot.”
Outside we went. I watched as Pablo rigged up a 120-volt plug at the base of a light pole, but his antiquated old voltmeter, only a needle gauge and two wires, their ends stripped bare, read no power. Pablo’s eyes got big when I pulled out my bright yellow, digital Fluke voltmeter. He looked at it as if it was some type of space machine from the future, but it too said no power.
I showed Pablo my fifty-foot, 120-volt extension cord. Even in the States, I have trouble getting the Tesla’s adapter to go green with 120-volt power and cords longer than this—there’s just not enough juice. We stretched the cord out to a maintenance room beside the hotel and got it plugged in with a few feet to spare.
Checking the car’s charging gauge, we were powering up, but minimally. We’d make it to Panama City with twenty-five or thirty miles to spare!
I turned to the manager, smiling. “I’ll take a room.”
She smiled back. “Two rooms.”
Possibly we’ve been too adamant about this capitalism thing to our southern friends.
We checked in. I scanned my inbox, again full of strange emails. One came from my fiction editor in New York. The subject line read: “What the …?”
I did a little googling. The EV blogosphere in the United States was now filled with the news and stories of the two “coon asses” who were almost to Panama in an electric car. I emailed Bill, Marcus, and Mike Dunckley the good news. We’d make it into Panama City, the end of the road, tomorrow. I’d send some good pictures of the car at the canal.
Saved by the Marriott—Again
I looked up at the pre-dawn sky. Without the contamination of city lights, the stars shone gloriously. The night sky had changed considerably over the past few weeks. Overhead, Orion sparkled, the mythical Greek hunter’s belt now almost directly overhead. To the north, I barely saw Ursa Minor, hovering over the horizon. I couldn’t even see the North Star, probably hidden behind some trees. Here, it would be rather easy to calculate our latitude of only eight and a half degrees. How much fun the calculation might be if I had my sextant or even a protractor and could find the horizon. Am I a dork?
Anxiously, I looked to the east, waiting for the crimson glow of twilight. The internet at the hotel was good, and I’d spent much of the night answering requests from the States for information about our trip, some in the press. I’d typed out a one-page summary and sent it off to several people, and also uploaded a half-dozen of Dean’s videos and fifty or so pictures to a file-sharing site.
After several requests, Dean also made his Facebook page public.
Somewhere in the last three thousand miles, I’d lost the newer of my two pairs of glasses, the older pair requiring more squinting as I uploaded the data. Along the way, I’d accidentally reset the Tesla’s trip meter that not only logs miles traveled, but more importantly, total kilowatt-hours used. The data was lost to history, the latter possibly of some scientific value, a real-world field test of the car’s energy consumption over third-world terrain.
My best calculation was that we’d driven about three thousand direct road miles, but that didn’t include all the side trips to get a charge (some of these significant), wrong turns, etc. We were likely well over the three-thousand-mile mark. And we had only ninety-four to go.
The EV blogosphere was still fluid with inquiries about who these madmen were who managed to get a Tesla charged every day against such a daunting third-world backdrop. People were even researching me, posting my education and professional credentials. Beside the hotel’s front desk, I found a set of scales. Wow—I’d lost nine pounds. Could this be an annual event to relieve me of loathsome exercise?
The night before, I’d booked us into the Panama City Marriott. Why not? The Marriott has thus far been good to us. This was a first for the trip, actually knowing where we were going, and getting a reservation. I hoped it wasn’t premature, or a bad omen.
The eastern sky turning rosy, we packed up and pulled out of Penonomé with 128 miles of battery to go the 94 miles. In the calm of morning, I couldn’t help but think that the world was watching, at least a lot of the electric-car world anyway. A single thought rammed into my brain. Do not have a wreck! Do not screw this up—especially now.
I had my work cut out. This morning, we drove almost directly east, into the rising sun. And as morning traffic increased, it didn’t take long to realize that Panamanian drivers suffer from the same Central American affliction as everybody else. They’re in a hurry to transfer their wealth, minus the cost of the undertaker, to their families.
We drove through the Scarlet Martinez International Airport, right under the middle of the runway via a new tunnel opened only three months earlier. Before that, the Pan American Highway actually crossed the tarmac! I was a little disappointed that the new tunnel was open. We had dodged everything else on the trip. Looking out for a landing Airbus would have been only too fitting.
The airport, once the Río Hato Army Air Base, was one of the focal points of the American invasion in 1989. In the first action of the conflict, the Air Force bombed the base, followed by a dramatic air assault on the airport by the US Army Rangers, who parachuted in. A battle ensued, but by morning, the Rangers had prevailed, capturing the airfield and 250 prisoners.
By nine, we were stuck in traffic in the Panama City suburb of Balboa. Dean tried to find the Marriott with the GPS without luck. We tried to plug in the address, but that too was hopeless, hitting another snag often encountered while traveling in Central America. Places rarely have addresses. Occasionally, something out on a solitary road will have a conventional street address with a number and road name, but that’s the exception. Typically, addresses only give a general intersection of two major roads. Here’s the address for the Panama Marriott:
52nd St. and Ricardo Arias
Av. Ricardo Arango
Ciudad de Panamá, Panamá 832-0498
The GPS had no clue what that meant. I make maps, and had a map i
n front of me, and I didn’t know what it meant. I went out of my way later to have this translated. It means the Marriot is on either 52 St. or Ricardo Arias. That’s just one street, but somewhere around the Marriott, around Avenue Ricardo Arango, it changes names. In American lingo, find where 52 St. changes to Ricardo Arias. That should be near Avenue Ricardo Arango. Then look around. The Marriott will be close. Close is open to interpretation also.
Now a veteran of Central American navigation, I did make it a point while booking the room to study some pictures of the hotel so I knew what it looked like—in this case, a long, thin, fifteen-story building with an art-deco façade, topped with a big, red Marriot sign.
Correlating the map and GPS, we did find a park within a mile of the Marriott and punched it in. At a terribly slow pace, we crossed the Bridge of the Americas. The one thousand-foot steel arch rose four hundred feet above Panama Bay.
To the left, we spied the one hundred-year-old Mira Flores Locks on the Panama Canal. The wonder of the world, a grid of concrete cutting the green backdrop, it looked like a model toy from the bridge. To the right, dozens of ships sat patiently in the bay waiting their turn in the shimmering, immense blue water. Ahead, the modern, shining skyscrapers of Panama City, the closest thing we’d seen to a modern metropolis since Houston, rose from the sea to the heavens.
I’m not sure the GPS even knew we were in Panama City. We took three or four wrong turns, but eventually found ourselves on the Avenida Balboa that runs north along the Pacific. We drove right by the statue of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, still staring out over the Pacific five hundred years after he crossed the Isthmus of Panama to be the first European to look west and see the blue waters.
We took a few more wrong turns in the web of one-way streets and taxis. I’d never seen so many taxis, 80 percent of the vehicles. The little yellow machines scurried everywhere, adding to the anarchy. Panama City was not laid out on a planned, symmetrical grid like Manhattan. It was more like some scaled-up parish seat in Louisiana, built around snaking bayous. Two steps forward, one back, we continued like a headless chicken another ten minutes before we saw the Marriott, poking up through the tendrils of skyscrapers. We made a few more trips around the neighborhood, the building getting no closer. It actually seemed to get smaller.
I saw the Crowne Plaza, pulled in, and got some directions from the bellboy. As he talked, I presented a piece of paper, the most reliable means of getting directions south of the Rio Grande, and made a scribbling motion. “Mapa.”
Only one more wrong turn and we pulled into the Marriot, with twenty-four miles left in the tank. I checked us in and explained our situation. Soon, I was downstairs in the underground parking lot. The Marriot had a three-prong, NEMA 10-30, 30-amp socket, exactly like the one for my drier in Louisiana that I often use to charge the car. The socket sat right beside a parking spot, no extension cord required.
A few tips later, one of the hotel’s vans was moved, and we were charging at 22 amps. I reached in the car’s console and pulled out the address of the shipping company.
One of the bellboys pointed. “Down the hill. Take left on 52. One kilometer.”
Grabbing the paperwork, off I went. Thirty minutes later I still hadn’t found the shipping agent’s office. Now perspiring in something akin to a Louisiana summer, I studied the map and asked for directions, but in fifteen more minutes still hadn’t found the office. I employed an old tactic, tested true all over the world. I waved down a cab, hopped in, and handed the driver the address. We made a few rights, then lefts, through two traffic circles. Five minutes later, he pulled over and pointed to a building.
Inside, I found only a bank. Fifteen minutes of walking and asking put me back at my original location. I went into two offices, questioning and again asking. In a travel agency, an elderly lady finally drew me a map. Behind a building, I walked through a gate, around a corner, up an elevator. An hour and a half after leaving the Marriot, my clothes now soaked, I entered the shipping company’s office.
One young woman spoke terrific English. She was a blonde with an accent that sounded like she was from Lima, Ohio. I couldn’t believe it when she informed me she was from Uruguay. After a little back and forth, she finally understood my problem.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, walking off. “I’ll talk to the manager.”
Five minutes later she returned. “We don’t do this.” She handed me a piece of paper. “But here is someone who specializes in this.”
I looked at the card.
Mario Alvarado
Metropolitan Movers
507-392-2731
Panamá, Rep. de Panamá
I dialed the number.
Mario answered, his English good, but not great.
I explained the situation.
“Yes, yes, I do that all the time,” he said. “Please come by and see me next week.”
Next week? “No, No,” I said. “I need to see you today.”
“Let me give you my address.”
Fear filled my mind. No way I would find anything here. “No, I am at the Marriot. You know it?”
“Yes, in town?”
“Yes. Can you come by today? I have the car. You can look at it.” I looked at my watch. “At three o’clock.”
“Okay.”
“Call this number when you get there. I will come down and meet you in the lobby.”
An hour later I sat in the lobby awaiting the call. Before the trip, we’d planned to drive on to South America. How far, I didn’t know. Only the northern countries in South America—Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru—have the same power grid as the States, but I’d heard that shipping a non-Panamanian car to any of these three was very difficult.
In my mind, we’d done enough, but if we could find a quick ferry or ride around the Darien Gap, I was open to going on, especially since the world had not ended when I left the States. Somehow, it appeared that everybody and everything back home still managed to operate smoothly in my absence.
Almost on time, my phone rang. I found Mario in the lobby, and we sat down at a table. I presented all my papers.
Of mixed descent with common black hair and big brown eyes, he was taller than most Panamanians. Dressed in casual slacks and a cotton shirt, he looked educated and professional as he studied the papers for a few minutes.
“How about shipping the car to Colombia or Ecuador?” I asked, sipping some bottled water.
Still flipping through the papers, he groaned. “This is very difficult—but it is possible.”
“How about shipping to the States?”
“This is much easier. No problem.”
“How long will that take?”
Mario looked over the papers. “You have all the paperwork, including this. Very important.” He held up one of the papers I’d paid the border hawker twenty-five dollars for (he may have actually been a good little businessman instead of a crook). “I have very good relationship with Panamanian customs. Everything is smooth. I cannot make any guarantees, but we may be able to have the car picked up here in ten days.” He put his pen to his chin. “Where do you want the car shipped?”
“Houston.”
“Okay, no problem. Then another ten days to two weeks to get it to Houston. This is all contingent on the shipping schedule and availability, of course. I have no control over that.”
I leaned back in my chair. I wanted to smoke the last of my Central American cigarettes. Twenty to twenty-five days! And this was optimistic. If shipping to America was “easy,” South America was out of the question. Two weeks to pick up the car? Where would I keep it for two weeks? Would I be here another month? All kinds of terrible scenarios rushed through my mind.
“I will prepare an estimate for you,” Mario said, holding up the papers. “Can I have these?”
“Yes.” I nodded. “They are copies.”
“I will get you the estimate first thing Monday morning.”
Monday morning. What day of the week was it?
I looked at my phone. It was Friday afternoon. “I need the estimate and details today or tomorrow.”
Mario smiled. “It is the weekend, but my company has expedited service, seven days a week. There is a small fee, of course, but I can have you something tomorrow.”
I scratched out my email address on a piece of paper. “Yes, please. Email is the best way to get me, or my phone. Please email me today or tomorrow.” I stood up, extended a hand in a terminal gesture. “One other question. Can you store the car? I don’t have anywhere to keep it.”
Mario put the papers in his briefcase, then stood. “I will talk to you tomorrow. No, we don’t usually store cars. We only come get them once customs is ready. I will check and see if I might find somewhere to store the car.”
Shipping turned out to be much more complicated than I ever expected. A little internet research turned up Mario’s company’s web page. It looked formal and legit, but was in Spanish. I did notice a few logos of Western clients on the page.
The bigger problem was the time. In a perfect world, I would have loved to stay in Panama for a few more weeks, possibly on the beach drinking rum, flirting with the local girls, writing this book, and then drive on south, our dreamlike break from the world going on and on. But I lived in the real world. If we were going to be away another month, it needed to be driving.
I looked over my shoulder to Dean, lounging on the couch and watching TV. I knew he wanted to push on. Always had, but he didn’t have a job or the title to the car in his name. “South America is out. It’s too much trouble, and more importantly, will take too long. Mario said it may be three to four weeks just to get the car to Houston. Looks like we’ll be headed home in a few days.”
Dean moaned and groaned. “You’re making a mistake. One you will one day regret.”
I turned back to the computer and typed out an email to Bill, Marcus, and Mike.
Hey guys: we made it. We’ll likely be home in few days with the car to follow in a few weeks. We will try to get some good pictures around the canal tomorrow. Best, and thanks for everything, Randy