This story involves a Trump supporter from Florida, a dark and scary taxi ride and the subsequent stranding of an innocent young woman in Panama City, Panama…
…It was midnight and a wall of damp heat blasted into my face as I stepped out of Tocumen International Airport. I paused to absorb my new surroundings and figure out how to get to the hostel I had booked online. Suddenly, a loud American voice boomed over the low chatter of the Spanish-speaking taxi drivers.
“AMIGO! AMIGO! THE CITY? YOU COMPRENDE?? NO, Panama Ciiity. Seeyoudad.”
I turned to look at the source of the terrible Spanglish. An older American gentleman in his late 60s, dressed in a floral shirt, was having trouble explaining where he wanted to go to a local taxi driver. The driver was a young man who, despite the frustrating circumstances, remained reasonably calm. The driver spoke as much English as the American spoke Spanish. The exchange went on for a little longer and the American man’s voice became louder, higher and faster. He looked away from the driver, exasperated, and spotted me. Granted, I had not been at all subtle about observing the spectacle.
“Amiga!! AMIGA! YOU GO CIUDAD? THE CITY? Oh you’re from Panama. PANAMIA? PANAMIA? PANAMA CITY?! VARS TO EL CITY?!”
I nodded my head, still laughing inside at what I’d just been watching.
“Hi. No I’m not from Panama and yes, I am actually going to the city.”
“OH great. It’s GOOD to finally hear some INGLES! Ha-ha-ha. Hey, you wanna share the cab? It’ll be $15 each instead of $30.”
My backpacking budget head told me this was a sensible option to take.
“Ok sure, sounds good.”
“GREAT! Well then, AMIGO, AMIGA, LET’S GO!”
We followed the driver to the car and loaded our bags onto the vehicle. The American man sat in the passenger seat at the front and I climbed in the backseat. The driver double checked the exact place I wanted to be dropped off, which happened to be relatively close to the American man’s hotel. He said he’d drop me off first. The driver then decided he wanted to increase the price to $20 each and I couldn’t be bothered to argue as I would still have been paying more if I had taken a cab alone. At this point the American man was still kind of funny, replying to the price increase in a really dramatic voice (“Suuure, suuure, go on then.” Imagine in a Caitlyn Jenner-esque voice.)
The driver started the engine and the American man started the conversation. He was very friendly, to be fair, and after a few failed attempts to engage the driver in a conversation (the language barrier was just too solid), he turned his attention to me, in the back of the car. I found out he was from Florida and in Panama for business. He asked about what I did, my university, etc., all the usual pleasantries and nothing particularly out of the ordinary. The topic then moved onto politics and the recent US election. He started chanting “Trump! TRUMP! El presidente! Trump!” in a really animated way that was in no way ironic. It was pretty soon after this that the figure of the Trump Tower in Panama City loomed out of the darkness ahead of us, which is where he suddenly became REALLY excited.
“LOOK! Amigo, amiga!! Look!! The Trump Tower. It’s shaped like a sail. Wow. Amazing.”
(The Trump references were the ‘scary’ part of the taxi ride – the ‘dark’ part was because it was night)
We finally got to El Machico Hostel after what seemed like an age. I gathered all my belongings and climbed out the car, wishing the taxi driver and the American man a good night.
“Kid, I wish you had a business card or something.”
Although I’ve never been called ‘kid’ before, I kind of liked it, like I was a young cowboy in a Western movie or something.
“Yeah, that’s a shame.”
I was secretly relieved to have so swiftly escaped the uncomfortable situation of being locked in an enclosed space with an avid Trump supporter. Too swiftly. I checked into the hostel and they asked for my passport. My stomach dropped as I realised I’d left it in the backseat of the taxi, the taxi that had driven off into the night about ten minutes beforehand.
Luckily for me, the staff at El Machico were the kindest, most helpful people I’ve met yet on my travels. Damien, the owner, immediately got on his motorbike to go to the hotel that I thought the American man might potentially be staying at, in case he could catch the taxi still there. Unfortunately, I’d only briefly heard the name of the hotel at the beginning of the ride, and I hadn’t memorised the correct one. Damien came back and said there had been no recent check-ins and that they weren’t expecting any more people to arrive that night. He then asked his friend, a driver for the hostel, to take me to another hotel down the road but again, no luck. We went back to the hostel and I blamed El Presidente Trump for all my troubles, making me rush out of the cab without checking my things.
What made matters more urgent was that I was meant to be in Portobelo by 11am in order to sail through the San Blas islands to get down to Colombia. I then had a flight from Cartagena to Guayaquil, and another flight from Guayaquil to the Galapagos Islands. I was meant to meet my friend Jackie, who I’d met the previous year in Colombia, who was flying specifically from New York to meet up in the Galapagos. If I missed my boat, I’d miss the plane to Ecuador, and new flights to the Galapagos for the days preceding the 25th of December were, as you can imagine, through the roof.
I decided I had to get some sleep and hope that the passport would turn up in the morning. I woke up at about 7am and there was still no sign of the passport. It was becoming clear that I would miss that boat, lose the deposit I paid for the trip, and also miss the subsequent flights that I’d bought.
I went to the British embassy, a short walk away, and started the process for getting an emergency passport. I had to obtain a police report to declare the passport lost or stolen, and then come back to the embassy with a form filled, a police report and passport photos. I went to the police station on Avenida San Francisco that the embassy had suggested and they told me they couldn’t file police reports. They were really nice though and hailed a cab to take me to another office (a branch of the Ministerio de Justicia?).
I waited there for two hours and then an employee in the office, Vladimir, took me in an official police pickup truck to another office where I could actually get a report. It was quite fun zooming through the streets of Panama in an official vehicle, sitting next to men in uniform and pretending like I was someone important rather than a silly passport-loser. There were, however, many confused faces staring at me when we stopped at traffic lights, so I guess I am more of the latter than the former.
What made my passport situation so much more bearable were all the amazingly sweet and helpful people around me trying to make my life a little easier in whatever way they could.
Vladimir, from the Ministerio de Justicia, was another one of these kind souls. When he dropped me off at the third office, he said that he really wanted to help me find my passport and that he could drive me to the airport on Saturday to see if I recognised any of the drivers (he couldn’t go on a weekday because of work). He made sure I took his number down and told me to give him a call whenever I felt like going to the airport. It was really above and beyond the call of duty and made me feel a little less alone in such a big city.
I braced myself for another two hour wait but surprisingly, I received an official stamped police report approximately five minutes after I’d stepped foot inside the office. I then took a bus to the airport with the faint hope that I might see the driver again (I was told drivers often do the same routes and the ones that hang around outside the airport might frequently be there).
I took a diablo rojo, ‘red devil’ bus, back into the city at about 9pm. An intensely fun experience coupled with the feeling of resignation that you get when faced with your own imminent death. However, the red leather interior, bouncy seats, feathers and pink fur, disco lights, disco ball, soundtrack of earsplitting dancehall (the type where the MC interrupts every 10 seconds) all served to distract from the driver’s crazy speeding and accelerating. The screeching of the tires and consequent smells of burning rubber also provided a nice release for me for what had been a stressful day. Everyone on the bus was so helpful in telling me when my stop was coming up and I was thankful for all the people that I’d met in Panama City.
The only annoying and unhelpful people I’d encountered the whole day were the men at the police/tourist police station in the airport itself. They were so incredibly patronising, treating me like I didn’t understand or know anything at all, and telling me that I’d never get my passport back (well they were wrong). Luckily, they were in the extreme minority.
The next morning I took all my relevant papers into the embassy to file for an ETD (Emergency Travel Document). I then went to get some errands done, making the most of being in such a large city for the first time since I’d left Houston over a month beforehand.
Coming back from the supermarket, I had a friendly and chatty driver who was asking me all sorts of questions, like if I’d ever been in love. When I turned the question back on him, he said yes, 6 times, and that 4 of them had died from cancer and the other two were in prison. I definitely wasn’t expecting that response. He then went on to say that he turned his life around, studies law in his spare time and will qualify in three years, owns his car, is an evangelical Christian now and keeps a copy of the Bible in the car with him, underneath all his homework for law. The journey back from the supermarket was made very long after a few wrong turns took us up to the highway, and a complicated one-way system in the city. However, he still only charged me around $2 and wouldn’t take it when I tried to give him extra. Another lovely Panamian person? Tick.
I still needed to get a visa appointment at the US embassy on my British ETD. The ESTA that was valid on my passport couldn’t be used for the new emergency document so it was an entirely separate process (and set of fees) in order to be able to fly home to Texas and see my family at the end of my trip. This was all adding up to be very very expensive, and I had no choice but to keep checking Skyscanner in the hopes that flights to Guayaquil and the Galapagos would come up that wouldn’t set me $1000 out of pocket. I could get a visa appointment without having the ETD in hand, so I looked online for a slot. The earliest was the 27th of December, and then after that it was another 3-5 working days before you could collect your visa. I resigned myself to the fact that I would potentially have to spend both Christmas and New Year’s Eve alone in Panama City, instead of in the Galapagos for Christmas and Quito for NYE. Three weeks in Panama! What was I going to do?
At 4am on the 17th, Raouf, one of the staff members at El Machico, woke me up and told me that the driver from the airport 6 nights ago had just come by with my passport. Impressed by the driver’s memory, I thought that meant I could cancel the ETD and use the old passport again. Unfortunately I found out the next morning that this wasn’t the case and I still had to get a US visa for the ETD.
I began (obsessively) checking the visa portal website. You could only make a change to your appointment time a maximum of three times, so click-happy wasn’t the best tactic. On the 18th of December, my 7th day in Panama, I checked the portal again, not expecting much, but to my surprise, I managed to snatch a slot that had come up for the next day. It looked like I could potentially leave Panama to fly to Ecuador on the 22nd, if the US visa was ready in exactly three days. I dropped off my ETD at the embassy and booked myself onto an island in the San Blas for two nights. Although you have to use your passport to get into the autonomous Guna Yala region, fortunately, I could use my old passport as the security checks by the Guna guards were just visual. Just before I left to San Blas, I bought a flight online that would take me to Baltra Island in the Galapagos, changing at Bogotá and Guayaquil on the 23rd. For $730 one way, it was one of the cheapest options I’d seen yet.
Everything fell into place from here. The US visa was ready for me by the time I returned from the San Blas islands. A costly mistake, for sure, with all the flights missed and purchased, the visa and ETD fees, the taxis to and from the US embassy (it’s a trek), but one that will probably only happen once in my life.
I also had a great time in Panama! See my posts on what to do in Panama City and my experience of the San Blas islands for inspiration.
