After a long flight with stop overs in Atlanta and Ft Lauderdale, we finally made it to Panama City (not to be confused with Panama City Florida) at 1.30am. Thanks to our streetsmarts aka Lonely Planet we had free airport transfers to Hotel Marparaiso - only slightly more than a hostel, it saved us being stuck in a Spanish speaking airport in the early hours with our limited Espanol.
Wanting to get amongst it early, we smashed through our free Continental breakfast (2 bread rolls, coffee and an orange juice) and set off for a trek around the city coastal path. Needing a map to maximise the day, we focused our journey on finding the IPAT or Panamanian Tourist Info Centre. After getting lost through the heavy part of the city and suffering under the 32 degree heat, we stumbled upon the Mercado de Mariscos (seafood markets) Shit yeah.
In the restaurant $12 got us a 2 whole fish and rice - pretty damn awesome. Downstairs in the markets, huge pargo (red snapper) to Corvina (sea bass) were on sale for $2-3 pound. King prawns 20cm long for $5. Giant Caribbean centolla (crab) for $5 a pound. If you’re stoked on certain produce downstairs, you can buy and take it upstairs to the restaurant to cook for a little extra. Over lunch we needed to re-group. We needed to get to the tourist info centre and a spanish school while seeing the interior of the city. Jimmy had a basic map, so we put it to use and set off for round 2.
Something we learned on day 1 was Panamanian's have a pretty unique way of giving directions. This was both to our advantage and disadvantage - we got shit lost, but walked through the majority of the interior city and by the end of the day have most of the streets wired. Panamanian’s don’t use maps or use street names to base their knowledge of their city. If we wanted to get to Gran Morison Shopping Centre, the local would direct us by the major street (Ave Espania) the shop on the corner (Nike Store) then use shops as location pins (Sony Store, then Grocery Store, use the overpass, then left past the 2nd hand electronic store. Locals have limited knowledge of streets (calles) as most of them aren’t marked anyway.
Took us a couple of hours to find what we through was the Tourist Info Centre, but on the 6th floor of an office building turned our to be Autoridad de Tourismo Panama (Panama Tourist Authority). Arriving at reception and using our western innocence on a quest for a map, we were shown through the Tourist Authority office to the desk of Jenny .... - Regional Coordinator of the Panama Tourism Authority. Strangely excited to meet us, Jenny unloaded a wealth of knowledge and list of personal contacts around the whole country. Also gave us the inside word that Panama secured a WCT Surfing event in 2011 at Sanata Catalina, and gave us the contact of a local event organiser. After exchanging emails and cell phone numbers (frothing) we set off for round 3. Find a spanish school.
More getting lost (at one point we found our way wandering the halls of universidad internacional (International University) collecting smiles from the local chickas and more getting the city totally wired, we eventually found the spanish school in a street banging with bars and restaurants. Getting a few prices and assuring the chicka we’ll get back to her, we hit some more beers and got back to the aircon of the Marparaiso.
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