The Bliss of the Bocas
Columbus landed there. Graham Greene made it on his third try. Now our man in Panama, Peter Stevenson, falls under the laid-back spell of the islands of the Bocas del Toro. Welcome to the Caribbean that time forgot
I stepped blinking into the Panamanian sunshine outside the tiny airport in the Bocas del Toro archipelago and had to blink again. I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. In the front yard of a house across the street from the airport exit was the charred fuselage of a small plane very much like the one I had just taken from Panama City. Apparently no one—neither the airport officials, nor the airlines, nor the resort developers hoping to turn the islands of the Bocas del Toro into a Caribbean idyll—had thought to ask the owners of the house to dispose of the wreck. I looked back at the fuselage and thought, _At least move it out of view. Or throw a tarp over it—maybe one saying something like _welcome to panama.
Graham Greene made the first of several attempts to visit Bocas town in 1976. Panama, he wrote, had “persistently haunted my imagination” from childhood, his curiosity fired by “the glamour of piracy” that “lay around Panama in the story of how Sir Henry Morgan attacked and destroyed Panama City.” In the 1970s Greene, then living in Antibes on the French Riviera, had received an invitation from Panama’s de facto ruler, General Omar Torrijos Herrera. Greene was eager to see Bocas town, at the time “a depressed banana port,” because, he wrote, “it was the furthest point west that Columbus reached off the coast of Panama, and perhaps because the South American Handbook stated with its habitual frankness, ‘No tourist ever goes there.’ ” But Greene missed the flight. A few days later, “once again we tried to take a plane to Bocas del Toro, the island which had become an obsession with me.”
These days people do go there. I went to the Bocas because I’d heard that the archipelago, with its ramshackle main town, verdant rain forests, and alabaster beaches, was a raw iteration of an earlier Caribbean tucked twenty miles south of the Costa Rican border. And I’d heard that the islands—part of the 1,793-square-mile Bocas del Toro Province—were a test case for sustainable tourism, a region where people were building ecolodges fueled by solar power and trying to integrate, rather than alienate, the indigenous Ngöbe-Buglé people. And in doing so, they were providing guests with a more genuine experience of the region. The islands’ lack of infrastructure, with no electrical grid, had protected them from overdevelopment and kept food and lodging prices low. My plan was to stay in places where I could feel the elements. To an extent. I decided against one lodge when I saw that it was “nudist-friendly.” Maybe someday, when my body is “nudist-friendly.” I settled on two small resorts on Bastimentos, a twenty-square-mile island with stunning beaches. One of the resorts was hidden on a hillside; the other, steps from a beach. Both were reachable only by boat, powered by solar panels, and known for being “foodie-friendly.”
First, though, I spent twenty-four hours in Panama City’s Casco Viejo (“Old Compound”), which by day is a symphony of gnashing construction equipment, evidence of Panama’s status as Central America’s fastest-growing economy. By night, the dark cobbled streets, furtive nightclubs, white-tablecloth restaurants, illuminated churches, and lamp-lit, crumbling facades of Spanish and French colonial buildings make the area dreamlike and enchanting. In the old city’s mix of urban chic and elegant decay, the chic is winning, for better or worse. Indeed, there are no signs of development slowing, with the economy poised to take a further leap in 2015, when an eight-year project to widen and deepen the Panama Canal to accommodate modern supertankers will be completed. The larger canal will bring in six billion dollars annually, allowing the government to upgrade the capital’s services—a $1.8 billion subway system is nearly finished—and dangle incentives to developers such as Donald Trump, whose $400 million Trump Ocean Club International Hotel & Tower rises seventy stories above Panama City.
My morning flight was in a small prop plane that took off from Panama City, arced out over the Pacific, and then headed northeast over the mainland. After an hour I saw the Caribbean Sea and, beyond the coast, the archipelago’s nine islands—dense rain forests ringed by white sand—and the surrounding array of hundreds of tiny uninhabited islets. I’d given myself two nights in Bocas town, the capital of the entire Bocas Province, on Isla Colón before heading to Isla Bastimentos. The town, which hugs the busy harbor, is just a ten-minute walk from the airport and is composed of brightly painted buildings, many on stilts, containing restaurants, hotels, and shops.
The pace was deliciously slow and seductive. I sat on the deck behind the Hotel Bocas del Toro as water taxis buzzed across the turquoise water to nearby Bastimentos and Isla Carenero. The waiter brought me another Balboa beer, and a blue-sky panorama of Caribbean beauty unfolded before me. I was waiting for that particular combination of bliss and despair which, for me anyway, can make tropical journeys so memorable—not real despair, of course, rather a melodramatic pose, rum punch coursing through the veins, a three-day scruff of beard, a whiff of revolution in the air. I wanted to not feel like a magazine editor who slumps against the smeared window of a commuter train every morning and puts his kids to bed at night. Picking up a supply of malaria pills before I left the States (“They’ll give you crazy dreams,” a friend had warned), I’d read on my evening train ride home about the stuff that could wallop you in Panama. That night over dinner, I’d recited the list to my wife. “Malaria. Dengue fever. Hepatitis A. Scorpions and tarantulas. Sloths.” She’d told me not to forget my anxiety medication.
I finished my beer and started to walk to the main street of Bocas town. It was the low low season—August—and so the street life was made up of locals and European backpackers who seemed to be mostly staying at hostels and looking happy and dusty and somewhere between drunk and stoned. Isla Colón got its name from Christopher Columbus, who, while looking for a passage to the Pacific Ocean, landed in Bocas del Toro in 1502. After that, as Panama fell under Spanish rule and then in 1903 gained independence, the Bocas were a remote backwater. Eventually their fortunes were hitched to the banana, thanks to a company started by three American brothers, which grew into what is today Chiquita. Plantations arose, and workers came from Jamaica and the West Indies, enhancing the archipelago’s Caribbean vibe. Bocas town grew to 25,000 inhabitants, with theaters, foreign consulates, and five newspapers. But by the late 1960s, the banana business had relocated to the mainland, and the archipelago lost its economic engine.
I was hungry and walked to El Ultimo Refugio, a thatched-roof restaurant leaning out over the harbor, where I ate coconut shrimp and drank cold beer and experienced the tremors of iPhone detox. Later I lay in bed, thankful for the air-conditioning until it went off with a thud. I opened the shutters and looked out. The whole town had been pitched into darkness and heat. Bocas runs its electricity off a diesel generator, and the power goes out as often as a few times a day, coming back on, well, when it does. With the hum of the air conditioner silenced, the gentle sounds of a harbor at night rose from the dark. Later, from across the water in Isla Carenero, I heard thumping music and shrieks and splashing from the Aqua Lounge Hostel & Bar, which is known for its water trampoline. A man reaches a certain, no doubt troubling, stage in life when the pros of guzzling Wicked Juice cocktails and hopping up and down on a water trampoline with women in swimsuits are outweighed by the con of having to get dressed to do so.
Action would have to wait until the next morning, when a boat with an outboard motor arrived to take me to Isla Bastimentos. We crossed a patch of ocean, sluiced through mangroves, and putted up to a wooden dock. A walkway through banana and coconut trees led to La Loma Jungle Lodge, creating the sensation of going back through time to an earlier Eden.
I spent the night serenaded by the rain forest in my hillside rancho, which was open on three sides and built of local hardwoods such as roble and laurel sourced from naturally fallen trees. At breakfast I mentioned to Steve Jacoby, who was managing the lodge with his wife, Karen Cotton, while its owners were on a brief vacation, that I’d like to visit a Ngöbe-Buglé community to get a feel for the culture. He suggested a nearby primary school, where fifty Ngöbe-Buglé children were receiving an education. Like most places in the archipelago, the school was best reached by water, and soon a La Loma employee named Kelly and I were standing on the dock. I started to climb down into a traditional, beautifully carved Central American dugout cayuco when Kelly gently stopped me. “No, you will tip over. Take this one,” he said, gesturing toward a roomy Malibu Two ocean kayak. I asked him how I would find the school. “Follow the drumming,” he said. Indeed, all morning the sound of drums, stopping and starting, had been rolling across the water and through the trees.
I got into the kayak and started to paddle, happy to be on the water, my arms windmilling the paddle. The drums got louder, and I piloted the kayak around a bend to see schoolgirls in white shirts and black skirts marching and twirling batons, as boys in white shirts and black pants hit the drums. They were practicing for an event several months away—the November 3 holiday celebrating Panama’s independence. I tied my kayak to the dock and ambled over to a restaurant next to the school. I handed a crumpled five-dollar bill to a Ngöbe-Buglé woman who seemed to be the proprietress, and she gave me a beer and we watched the kids practice. Behind the school and up on a hill was a small blue hut—the teacher’s house, I’d been told. Most of the students commute to school by cayuco.
Amanda Marsalis captures the Caribbean that time forgot in Panama. view slideshow
Only eighteen percent of Ngöbe-Buglé children in Panama are educated beyond the sixth grade. New schools like this one receive funding from resorts like La Loma. That night, the candles were lit for dinner at the lodge. An iguana had adhered itself to a nearby tree. Hilda Castillo, a Ngöbe-Buglé woman who’d prepared the dinner, had nine children, and someone said she was going to have another one. Ngöbe-Buglé men, I’d read, used to be polygamous and still measured their virility by the number of children they had. I settled into a hammock with a cocktail and contemplated the thorny question of tourism in the archipelago. The Ngöbe-Buglé are Panama’s largest indigenous group and have managed to survive on subsistence fishing and farming. In 2006, Ngöbe-Buglé led opposition to a development planned for Red Frog Beach, one of Bastimentos’s most spectacular beaches, named for the tiny poison dart frogs that live nearby. At the time, the Red Frog Beach resort was to include one thousand units divided among condos, villas, and a hotel, plus a golf course designed by Arnold Palmer and two marinas, supported by diesel generators and a sewage treatment plant. Many Ngöbe-Buglé feared that a resort of that size could decimate their fishing and hunting grounds. The protests, combined with a labor strike and the weak global economy, stalled the project. New owners took over in 2008 and have built a more modest resort: thirty-one villas to rent or buy (with plans for thirteen more), a hostel, an eighty-four-berth marina, and a zip-line instead of the golf course.
Dinner at La Loma was to be an appetizer of palitos of yuca with chombo chili aioli, followed by red snapper with a lemongrass-tamarind broth, served with coconut rice, braised red cabbage, and bele, a spinachlike leaf. Dessert included chocolate from the lodge’s own cacao farm. My meal made clear why La Loma, which grows most of what it serves, is attracting the attention of epicureans. Even so, foodies can be a fickle tribe. “We had some people from New York who’d heard about the food and booked with us, then turned around and left when they saw that our ranchos don’t have walls,” said Steve. The rain forest was chirping and squawking and croaking as the other guests came to dinner, which we ate at a communal table. Lubricated by a few tropical drinks, people started talking. Some had been hiking, others had gone by outboard to the aptly named Dolphin Bay and seen the slick charcoal backs of dolphins break the surface of the water. I suddenly panicked. Who was I? I knew, of course, that I was a reporter on assignment and, therefore, traveling incognito. This aspect of being a sort of spy appealed to me enormously. But as such, I found myself struck dumb with what to say about myself. I would just have to state bald facts: I was a married guy from New York with two small kids who had come to this phenomenally romantic spot. Alone. Without my wife and kids. Okay, that’s a bit weird. Meanwhile, one young American couple were telling the rest of us that they were angry at Barack Obama for not being liberal enough. They lived in California and talked about how they’d built their house so that the water from their dishwasher and washing machine would stream down a hill and irrigate their vegetable garden. Another couple were Swiss and were on their honeymoon, and she tried to be chatty and cheerful while he was brooding and silent. I envied him. Someone asked me what I did. “You know, midlife crisis, et cetera,” I said. That stopped them cold. Nobody wanted to hear about that.
That night the Caribbean came to me while I slept, or tried to. A thunderstorm gathered strength at sea and then walloped the coast, turning my tin-roofed cabin into a kettle drum. The lightning was so close and so bright that it cast shadows on the floor of the palm fronds outside my cabin. I woke up with sunshine flooding my rancho, at first mistaking the sounds of the rain forest—parrots, howler monkeys, toucans—for my children.
The next day I found myself floating, mask and snorkel in place, along the edge of mangroves, whose roots are sometimes considered the nursery of the sea. Enchanted, I saw baby varieties of parrot fish, damselfish, wrasses, and barracudas weaving in and out of the submerged vines. Then I saw my pale undersea stomach. Fortunately a baby octopus the size of my hand, ridiculously adorable, floated past and attracted the attention of my fellow snorkelers.
That morning I’d moved base camp to Casa Cayuco, another ecolodge—this one opening onto a beach and a vista of blue horizon. Its owners, like La Loma’s, are passionate about co-existing harmoniously with the surrounding ecosystem—people, animals, and plants. And they too are turning out amazing food. After snorkeling, I fortified myself for a nap with a few rum drinks mixed by Lloyd Smith—one half of the American couple who run the place, assisted by their two large bulldogs. Sue, his wife, oversees the kitchen, and, roused from my nap by the blowing of a conch shell, I sat down to a dinner of fiddle fern soup (made from ferns Sue had bought from the Ngöbe-Buglé kids in nearby Salt Creek village), followed by grilled grouper stacked on a rice cake in a bed of wasabi cucumber cream and topped with edamame and papaya salsa. In the Caribbean, where the food is so often disappointing, it’s clear that the Bocas archipelago is upping the ante. And as I dug into my dessert of banana wrapped in rice paper, lightly fried in coconut oil, and drenched in pineapple-rum sauce, I thought about how eating beautifully prepared, locally sourced food could be counted as a cultural experience, an infusion of virtue to round out the gloriously sloth-like days of a Caribbean escape.
Under my mosquito netting that night, a ceiling fan turning above me and a mosquito coil burning nearby, I picked up my secondhand paperback copy of Graham Greene’s out-of-print book Getting to Know the General. Greene finally got to Bocas in 1980, and at first wasn’t impressed. “We landed in a deluge of rain on a small island which seemed to be sinking back into the sea under the weight of the storm,” he wrote. “This was the Bocas I had been so determined to visit. . . . After one look at the place I was relieved to be told there was no room available.” A room is found, much to his displeasure: “I even envied the pilot who was going to return through the storm to Panama.” But the next morning, he writes, “I dressed in a state of unreal happiness to find the sun shining and Bocas very nearly transformed. The rain had somehow drained away and the little houses on stilts with their balconies reminded me of Freetown in Sierra Leone, a town I had loved.”
His words resonated with me. Bocas still offers itself without adornment, without the facade of vacationland, and its very realness was acting on me as a de-stressor. I thought about coming back, with my kids, so they could experience a place which felt removed from time and concern.
I made quick work of my breakfast and set out to walk along the shore. In the near distance were beachfront homes built by expats. I remembered what a local had told me at a bar in Bocas town: “Foreigners sometimes seem to leave their brains on the plane and do things here that they would never do at home,” he said. “Like pay the contractor up front for building them a house. You would never do that back home! Then they wonder why the guy ran off with fifty thousand dollars. It’s not that people are stupid. It’s just that they’re so enamored of the idea of this working for them that they fail to listen to their own doubts.”
I kept walking, the rain forest a few feet to my left, the encroaching tide to my right. Soon the water was sloshing up around my thighs. Each time I encountered a toppled tree on the beach, its massive root system blocking the way, I had to decide whether to clamber onto the small ledge and pass through the rain forest or wade out and around, the water climbing as high as my chest. The skies, which had been gray all morning, opened up, and I was getting as wet from the rain as from the ocean. I slipped and sloshed my way back to Casa Cayuco, where I checked my e-mail. (Yes, Casa Cayuco has Wi-Fi.) One e-mail was from Rutilio Milton, a leading figure in the Ngöbe-Buglé community, whom I’d asked for his perspective on tourism in the archipelago. “With more development have come more problems and more pollution,” he wrote. “Sustainable tourism is what we need. Real estate tourism brings trash and problems. The animals disappear or they go elsewhere—the trees and vegetation are chopped down, and their habitat is lost. Big resorts create more noise, more trash, more sewage, and more fuel spilled in the water.”
That night, I pulled the mosquito net closed around my bed feeling I had been lucky to get a glimpse of Greene’s Bocas and confident that, for the next few years at least, it will be able to maintain that unbroken spell.