PANAMA CITY

June 8, 2017 SouthAmerica

Panama City is ideal for sunsets in muggy air and seeing banana trees and screeching black birds called torcacita colorada. New to Panama City is the Trump Hotel on the oceanfront, a 70 floor luxury block with nice designs, a modern room that perhaps feels too much like sleeping in a marble bathroom, and balcony with a canyon view of the sea between the tower buildings. Their rooms are modern- balcony, ocean view, 28th floor, big bed, walk in glass shower with frosted panes, marble floors, overall cream and white. Dinner at the poolside Azul bar with long line of high bar stools facing travertine panels and under bar glowing blue lights, cityscape view of the night coast, the atmosphere right in with Miami Vice. We chat up the waitress, a young girl in blue shirt and white shorts and smiling happily with braces about the best brand of beer in Panama. As we drink Balboa cerveza, and then later Atlas beer, we discuss how Panama City appears like a combination of Vancouver and Miami, but then the next day we learn better.

Argh mate, hoist the colors, the Spanish port is ripe for plunder…we visit the historic district called Casco Viejo, a tight place blending styles from Spanish and French quarters; balconies with wrought iron and thick shuttered tall windows- the shutters commonly askew on the hinges, peeling paint, and collapsing buildings. It seems that nearly 40% of the structures have the outside walls being supported by iron beams, the floors and ceilings have long since rotten away. Gutted buildings, from fires, and who knows what other human designed poor decisions. Some shady characters beneath the tropical sun, the depths of their shadows we will never know, for it is their nature to be shadowy. Blacks sleeping at the street corners, police and military directing traffic, school kids in uniforms, elderly North Americans being herded about in tour groups, local Indians in colorful skirts, and the cart vendor selling flavored shaved ice in plaza beneath a tree in the shade. We accidently wander down another side street to discover a weathered church with tan sandstone facade built in 1648 and its open doors with scaffolding inside reinforcing the high ceiling and a single person inside kneeling at the altar.

The historic section of Casco Viejo paints in pastels an unparalleled image of decay mixed with redevelopment. The streets are being repaved with bricks. The ancient buildings cared for with supports. Many signs advertise that a particular building is for sale, only it is a crumbled three-story wall guarding behind it sprouting forest. Next to what appears to be a structure that should have fallen decades ago is a four-story cement building, moldering, peeling, festooned with balconies waving laundry and occupied; it is amazing that people are living in the building. Then suddenly adjacent a complete renovated building with clean paint, crisp shutters, new tall wooden doors, that collectively announces a boutique hotel or fine art gallery. Then across the street another multiple floored hovel or a building with the doors and windows cement-block barricaded. The contrasts are enticing, and these narrow previously pirate infested streets are clear from Starbucks and other soulless franchises.

Then we walk eastward into modern decay clustered slums surrounding the historic centre. Here begins regular stacked concrete housing with small balconies all waving drying laundry, and kids and woman hanging out looking over the street, men sleeping on the sidewalk, or working sitting at a wooden stool as cobblers. A Latino man pushing a cart stacked high with bananas, hole-in-the-wall stores selling aluminum pots, little shack kiosks crammed full of electronics, the rumbling thunder and dark sky to the east which is being combed by the glass and cement skyscrapers, the huge ocean vessels heading up the canal, it turns out that Panama City has adventure of many kinds, and most represent collective time, a pastel scratched ceramic tile.

A yellow taxi ride out north of the city first places us on the highway, going by rows of shocking poverty stacked in decaying cement apartment building. The cramped and desperate nature of the scene, well, one would and should not go walking about there alone, and definitely not during the nighttime. The trash and dense cramped living conditions made clear the Panama’s yearly 11% growth in wealth is truly only being channeled into the wealthiest people’s pockets.

And then the scene looking over The Canal. A multiple storied building with observation decks all open to the now cascading tropical rainfall. Watching the gates open and close, the water transfer of massive ships laden with material goods. It’s not enough; they are building a second canal besides this old one. Panama exists as a place to bypassed, it is a shortcut, and one worth stopping at to see what is really going on.