Today, the weather wasn’t very nice (what! you don’t talk about the weather when you got nothing else to say?)
Most of the morning was necessary to plan our next stops in Panama. Because going along the Panamericana is swift and easy, but if we want to get somewhere more remote, it’s quickly a lot more transportation time. So if we go somewhere remote, we want it to be cool 🙂 .
We were thinking about spending a day or two in the peninsula on the pacific side (oh yeah, we forgot to mention that we saw the pacific for the first time in Panama City!). But even if there would be really cool beaches, it would means taking several buses and the accommodation there don’t seem so cool. And it’s more for surfers, and for us, surfing is mostly done on the web 😉
So we’re going directly to the west of the country, a bit north of Chiriqui, to dive a bit into nature, and then we’ll go to Bocas del Toro, were we’ll still get those nice beaches 🙂 . We should have internet connection everywhere so we’ll be able to update the blog, even though it probably won’t be lightning fast :p.
This afternoon we took a walk near our new hostel, which is in the more recent city center, in the middle of tall buildings. As we’ve already said a couple days ago, it’s quite weird to see all these different towers next to each other with no apparent harmony between them.
We also tried to get our hands on the Lonely Planet Central America on a Shoestring, a guide for travelers with a small budget like us, but couldn’t find it even though we went to most places in town that should have had it. We did manage to do our other task of the day : get more cash. And so we discovered that Panama is a bargain if you’re rich and trying to hide your billions, but for the poor travelers trying to get a couple bucks from the ATM it’s 5.25 dollars bank fee (just on the panama side) each time ! Ah, we do love capitalism…
Another discovery of the day was realizing how much we miss stuff like pedestrians crossings or bus stops ! For the former, they are mostly inexistent and if you find one, you probably won’t have a street light for pedestrians, even on the biggest avenues. For the latter, despite some noteworthy efforts to improve public transportation (one subway, new buses with electronic badge system…), the bus stops are sometimes hard to find and very far apart. We also noticed that most streets don’t have a proper sidewalk. It really feels like a town for cars and not pedestrians.
That’s all for today. Tomorrow we’ll spend most of the day in the bus (we do have to cross the country), so we might not have a lot to tell you guys (well that’s simply not true, we do always find a way to fill the articles even when there’s nothing to say, just look at today’s article! :p )
P.S : it’s game time (it’s been a while) : 2 cats are hidden in the middle of Panama City’s architecture. Can you find them?
