Hey Hey! It's Santa Fe!

Santa Fe

We just had another training seminar in Farallon, immersing ourselves in the lush accommodations at CEDESAM. For those wanting a more intimate description of CEDESAM refer to the previous blog. Feeling like I hadn’t slept in three days, mainly because I hadn’t, I was ready to get a move on. I convinced a couple other volunteers, Victor and Debbie, to accompany me to the mountains of Santa Fe.

Santa Fe is a small town of about 3,000 people a couple hours outside of Santiago. It sits at about 3,300 feet and therefore is a lot cooler than the heat at Farallon. We stayed at a neat little hostel right in town made of bamboo stalks and stone. It’s a very open, airy, comfortable place with a big back porch that we used to play dominoes and UNO. I didn’t win a single game of dominoes, but I totally dominated UNO! YEAH! Actually, while we were playing dominoes the resident hostel cat joined us with a bird she had caught. She batted it around, pouncing and jabbing at it for some time, all of us feeling sorry for the plight of the poor bird. After a few minutes I decided it was better for the bird, and for us, if I just went ahead and took care of the situation. Debbie shrieked as I did what was necessary and then we went back to playing dominoes. Yeah, I know, that’s a terrible story, but it’ll make sense later.

We met some interesting people at the hostel. One guy from Belgium who had quit his job and was just traveling around Central and South America until he ran out of money and had to go back home. Another guy from South Texas, who had been in Panama for a month, was getting ready to go back and had stayed in Santa Fe the entire time. Apparently he found it on Google Earth and was charting the town with his GPS. He told a story about how Mexican drug gangs were jacking cars out of his neighborhood and he sat up one night with his 45 waiting for them to come to his house. Nice enough guy, but ……well, I’ll just leave it at that. There was a young couple from Tucson, Arizona who were spending the next couple of weeks touring around Panama. He had come down with a landscaping architecture company to do some work in Panama City. It was really funny to hear him talk about what we have been experiencing for the last ten months. They were working on a beautification proposal for the government with some other Panamanians. He was completely thrown for a loop when he discovered the Panamanians had used crayons to do their drawing of the proposal. He couldn’t get over it. He was talking about how in the states you have to go to school for four years, do two years of apprentice work and then take a yearlong series of tests. And here they do their architectural plans with crayons. The other day in school we were doing an English activity using numbers. There were four separate problems, each having a different pattern that needed to be indentified to then find the answer. I spent an hour going over these four problems and the students could not figure it out. This was not about English, this was about math. And for any of you who know me, you know that I’m about as good at math as I am at trapeze acrobatics, but it took me about twenty seconds to figure out each one. I work with juniors and seniors and this was basic adding, subtracting and multiplication. The teachers had an answer key and still couldn’t figure it out. There is absolutely no critical thinking. Every day I’m shocked at how poor the education system is here. It’s sad. To be fair, there were two kids who got it, but the rest…....couldn’t pour water out of a boot upside down with directions on the heel.

Now where was I? Oh yeah, Santa Fe. The next day Victor and I hit the Bermejo trail, taking a chiva (a chiva is just a four-wheel drive truck with a cage on the back that is used as a shuttle bus for people in the country) through some of the most beautiful countryside I have seen in Panama. We were in a hurry because it was late in the day and we had to go to the waterfall and back in time to catch the last chiva ride back to town.  What a sloppy, muddy mess. Victor completely bit it and smeared mud all over his backside. I laughed. We were going to go tubing down the river, but the guy who rents the inner tubes said that it was raining up in the mountains and it was too dangerous—the currents could rise too rapidly and wash us away. So boo hoo, we didn’t get to go.

Underwearless

That looks cool! I should do that too.

Debbie, Victor and I also did some hiking that morning and within about 15 minutes hit a neat little spot with a couple of waterfalls. Upon seeing a natural rock slide at one of the falls, Victor wasted no time, jumped right in and slid on down. We then spent the next few minutes arguing about whether or not I was a complete Sally, because I didn’t want to go down. Victor was wearing crocs, a bathing suit and had his contacts in, so he didn’t mind getting wet. I on the other hand was wearing running shoes, regular pants and my glasses. But peer pressure’s a real ______  (fill in bad word here) and it looked fun, so he finally convinced me.

Vic gave me his crocs, I stripped down to my skivvies and slid on down into the freezing water below. This was bad idea number one. Then I thought, “Well now that I’m soaking wet I might as well go down again.” This was bad idea number two. The second slide wasn’t really a slide at all. I pretty much rubbed my way down the waterfall and once I splashed into the pool of water below I quickly realized I had torn the seat out of my underoos.

What could possibly go wrong here?

Actually, not only did I rip the seat out of both sides of my underwear, I also gave myself a couple of red skid marks on each cheek. It hurt for the next couple of days, but it was definitely worth it. Debbie was laughing her ass off (at me rubbing my ass off) and we all had a really good laugh at my expense. It would have been completely embarrassing at some point in my life, but now it's hilarious....... and embarrassing. How could giving yourself skid burns and ripping the rear out of your underwear not be funny? It can't I tell you. It just can't.

Oh sure...now he has a bathing suit!

I’m being haunted!

And now we make our way back to the bird I so mercilessly killed with my foot. When I got back home from my weekend away, I found a dead bird in the middle of my house that looked eerily like the bird I had killed in Santa Fe. I don’t have a cat. All the doors and windows were closed. How did it get in there? It was just lying there in the middle of the floor. I think it was some sort of creepy sign that I should just let nature take its course and not intervene in the circle of life. Or maybe it was the dead bird haunting me for not helping him sooner. Although I didn’t really help him….I smashed him with my sandal. Oh well, who knows what it means. Life goes on. Well, for me it does, but not for the bird. The bird is dead. It’s definitely dead. Both of them. I think.

Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah

CEDESAM

I remember when I met my “counterpart” for my community at CEDESAM. Counterpart is in quotations because instead of living in my community she lives ten hours away in Panama City. Not exactly the best counterpart to have. But that’s not the subject of this blog and as you can tell, I am no longer bitter about not having a counterpart…...or a community guide…….or a host family…….or getting kicked out of my house and having nowhere to go…….uh hum. Sorry, I’ll get back on track.

CEDESAM is an acronym for yet another Panamanian agency (there’s only about a million of them) that reminds me of a dozen VDOT workers leaning on shovels watching one guy dig. It’s an old army base that was given to the Panamanian government when we hitched up our stakes and moved out. To say the least, the Panamanians haven’t exactly taken the care that the Americans did in maintaining the facility. It’s located a couple of miles away from Farallon beach. There is a lovely resort there called “the Royal Decameron Beach Resort and Casino” (what a mouthful). It’s right on the beach, has air-conditioned rooms, pools by the ocean, bars, restaurants, a discoteque (club) and of course a casino. But we don’t stay there. This is Peace Corps and we stay at CEDESAM; which is two miles away from the beach, does not have air-conditioned rooms, bars, restaurants, discoteques, swimming pools, or cute Panamanian waitresses that bring you tropical drinks in a hurricane glass with a little umbrella. We cram a dozen guys into a room with no air-conditioning, fans that look like they could fall down on top of you at any moment and sound like nails on a chalkboard, but you don’t dare turn it off because you’ve already lost five pounds in sweat and you’ve only been here 15 minutes. The water only works in some of the showers, and then only half-ass, the shower doors don’t close, three-quarters of the seats are broken off the commodes and we fight with the girls over toilet paper because there never seems to be enough. As you can tell, I love it there. We had IST (In Service Training) there and after a wonderful week at the beach, I decided it was time to head back to the mountains for some fresh air.

El Valle

Phil, John and I hopped a bus to a little mountain town known as El Valle de Anton. The town is actually located in the crater of an extinct volcano that erupted, according to Lonely Planet, “with such force that it blew off its top, creating a crater 5km across – one of the biggest in the Americas.” Being in the crater of a volcano, El Valle is completely surrounded by mountains and forests. It’s a great place to do some hiking, ride a bike, go horseback riding, bird-watching or just relax. It’s also only a couple of hours outside of Panama City, so it’s a popular spot for Panamanians that want to get away for the weekend. There are lots of very nice vacation homes owned by wealthy Panamanians and there is a strong expat community of Americans, Germans and other Europeans.

Sean up, El Valle down

We stayed at the Residencial El Valle, a nice budget priced hotel that’s right downtown, had good size clean rooms, but no hot water—as advertised. There are several nice restaurants in El Valle and we visited a few of them. Los Capitanes is a German owned place that serves a variety of European dishes, Pinocchio’s is a good pizza place, and we hit another Italian place (I can’t remember the name) and of course ate on the cheap at some regular Panamanian fondas.

Nothing but blue skies from now on

I really liked El Valle because it’s a great place to ride a bike. The town, although surrounded by mountains, is fairly flat and a using a bike is a great way to do some exploring. We rode all over town, checking out different resorts, hotels, restaurants, neighborhoods and the like. We weren’t the only ones; more Panamanians ride bikes here than in any other town I’ve seen. It was crazy! Every day looked like some sort of bike rally. There is also a neat little market downtown selling fruit, vegetables, and local handicrafts. Plus, they have a library! Granted, it’s not like the ones I’m used to, but still, I was shocked to see a library….that actually had some books….trust me, it’s a rare thing here.

La India Dormida

Gosh I hope that cable holds!

One of the major attractions here is hiking the trails at La India Dormida “the Sleeping Indian”. Legend goes that there was once a beautiful native princess who fell in love with a Spanish conquistador. After asking permission from her father to marry the Spaniard, she was denied, and promptly took her own life. She was buried in the hills and after several years, the mountain took the shape of her body. The trail we took leads up the mountain past another popular spot called La Piedra Pintada or “the colored rock”. It’s basically a huge boulder with some pre-Colombian carvings. We hiked up and down the mountain and were able to take in some spectacular views of the valley below.



Holy Jungle Wires Batman!

I had the most fun when we took a canopy tour of the forest on a series of zip-lines.There were six different platforms and the zip-lines are several hundred feet off the ground. It was really an exhilarating experience to fly through the jungle on a zip-line with my legs dangling in the air. One of the zip-lines took us right past one of the most popular waterfalls in the area called Chorro de las Mozas (Young Women’s Falls).

Afterwards we went to the base of the falls and did a little swimming with some local kids. All in all a good weekend. Enjoy the pics!

Whoa! That looks like a belly-flop fer sure!