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Panama: Eight Destinations in Which to Spend the Winter Months

First Time Reader?

Why Panama? – This blog explains the rationale of 
the trip and this series of blogs.

http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/lobo/excursions/1266327384/tpod.html

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Bocas del Toro

Destination no. 8 of 8 to Spend the Winter Months in Panama
 
Date of Visit: February 17 - 20
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Bocas del Toro - The Carnival

Part 3 of 3

Date Blog was Written: November 2010
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Walter and Letitia

I struck up a conversation with Walter and Letitia while walking down the "closed-to-traffic" main street. That initial conversation led to a visit to their home the next day for further discussions.

They seemed to fit the expat mould that I was looking for and their story turned out to be an interesting one.

I was thrilled to hear that their presence here in Bocas del Toro had been inspired by the website “International Living”. It is a site that I mention in my first blog – Why Panama? (see link above)

Inspired by International Living, Walter and Letitia took the leap in 2005 and left Florida, USA for a promised better life in Panama.


So what was their experience? Was it a success?

Often people tend to sugar coat the events in their lives to make it seem better. Let's just say that Walter and Letitia could not be accused of “sugar coating” as I caught them in the phase of their adventure where they were trying to wrap things up in Panama and get back to a life in the United States.

One of the first things they did upon arrival in Panama was to do the full monty by spending $1,600 for a lawyer to lead them through the application for official Panamanian residence. As a result of that act, they qualified for a long list of benefits that the Panamanian government bestows upon expats who commit to retiring in Panama under their “pensionado” program.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/RetirementandWills/RetireInStyle/PanamaIsParadiseForRetirees.aspx

They ended up buying a waterfront property only minutes from downtown Bocas del Toro with a western exposure that is to die for. Using U.S. contractors, they literally built a new residence around the original building and then tore down the original to end up with a larger residence complete with beautiful docking facilities.

In the rebuilding process they were left with four walls, a roof and plastic over the windows. To finish the inside, Walter and Letitia spent six hours a day, seven days a week, for two years with the help of the kid next door. Part of the rebuilding process was to incorporate the windows of the old structure.

And therein lies the problem – “the kid next door”.

It was the understanding of Walter and Latitia that under Panamanian law, if you paid a worker every day you were not subject to any government plan that would give the employee benefits – a plan to which the employer has to make a contribution.

Due to circumstances, they ended up firing the kid next door. That caused the kid’s mother and father to be upset resulting in demands for $700 in back pay, vacation pay, sick leave and other benefits.

They did not have a good understanding of the laws and it caused huge headaches for them including bad relations with their neighbours.

With the original purchase of the prime waterfront lot of $208,000 plus another $200,000 for the reconstruction job, they were into a financial commitment of about half a million dollars.

Their financial commitment to Bocas did not end there as a new bar and grill – Big Bamboo - had opened up very near to their residence. It was owned by two expats
and Walter and Letitia saw it as a good opportunity to buy half an interest in the bar and grill with a long-term view of involving the rest of their family.

Since they did not want to build a house and run a bar at the same time their daughter and son-in-law – Vickie and Steve – came from San Diego and bought a part interest as well and ended up running the bar.

It is a complicated process since there apparently is a law that if you are an American you cannot have certain jobs in your own business.

For example, Steve, the son-in-law, who was there every night could be a bar tender but could not do anything else that required physical labour. That was to be reserved for the local work force.

With time, the family owned the Big Bamboo 100% outright.

Just about the time that the restaurant-bar was starting to break even, around Christmas 2006 problems started to rear their ugly head in the form of employees who began stealing. The women who cooked would steal by hiding things under their skirts as well as giving free meals to their children and friends.


With this Walter and Latitia withdrew their participation and left it to be run by their son-in-law, Steve. Their words were, “Steve, you run it. If you lose money it is your problem.”

A fundamental problem was that while they owned the business they did not own the building. This meant paying rent of $800 per month.

With a “happy hour” of 50 cents per drink it was tough to make a profit. The food must be good enough to attract the expats since the locals don’t have enough discretionary income to eat in restaurants.

With World Series and Super Bowl of 2007 they made a major investment of a satellite system that would bring in ESPN from the US.

That was more than any other bar had at the time but the restaurant-bar was still losing money. In March of that year they cut out the kitchen leaving them with only a “Happy Hour”. The prospect of making money was therefore even less since the prospects of making money was better on food.

Steve and Vicky stuck it out until June of 2009 before they threw in the towel on the Big Bamboo Bar to close the business. Steve could not work for someone else so the doors were closed on the bar, the tables and chairs were sold and that was it. The worst part was that Steve and Vicky returned to the States – a turn of events that was very hard on Walter and Latitia.

The only benefit was a short-term loss on income tax and the rest is history.

One can only imagine the stress the business failure must have put on the entire family.

The unhappy ending left them with a huge sense of disappointment as there is an anticipation that if you work hard, you will succeed. Unfortunately that may not work here in Panama.


Why?

-       there is only a small part of the labour force that is capable of doing the job

-       they could not hire local people with the required skills

-       labour laws are too demanding

-       hire someone and in 3 months they are entitled to a week’s vacations

-       the high number of statutory holidays

-       some waitresses were not attending to customers because they lacked the basic work ethic

So in the end Walter and Latitia find themselves in Panama with only memories of their failures. They miss the kids back in the States enough to have them pull up stakes by putting their beautiful sea front property up for sale and to re-establish residence in Florida.

 
 
 
 


As I said earlier, I just caught them at the point in their lives when they were trying to wrap things up in Panama. Because of the economic meltdown prospects of a sale of their property at $399,000 was not good as in six months there had been only one showing of the property. If that isn’t the sign of a depressed market I don’t know what is.

As a last resort they are reluctantly considering renting their beautiful seaside home.

Renting however is a last resort as it created the possibility of major headaches in the form of non-payment of rent and having the property run down.

In addition to their home they also own an empty lot that they are trying to sell without success.

Hope springs eternal as Walter talks of an economic recovery that is coming to the U.S.A. that will spread to Panama. There are a lot of foreigners that come here from Europe and South America.

Walter goes on to say that Bocas del Toro is a desirable spot where it is easy to get in a boat and travel to beautiful near-by islands or jungle. It is a place where it is easy to find other expats for interesting conversations and support. The people in general are friendly.

On the negative side he cites undercurrents of hostility towards foreigners outside of Panama City and David. He also speaks of a land grab mentality in the sense that someone may show up to say, “that property is mine”. Having clear title to a property is a problem in Panama. Some properties were titled and still lost to Panamanians.

He spoke of a development at famous Red Frog Beach that was to have many homes and a golf course designed by Arnold Palmer. After a few homes were sold the workers became upset as they wanted a raise in wages. The response of the developer was that we will give you 10 cents more per hour but there will be no more boats available to take you to the island. That resulted in protest marches in the streets and the eventual closing of the project.

Sometimes the romantic idea of the Caribbean being nice has a rough edge of reality to it.

As I left Walter and Letitia I felt a sense of sadness as I could feel their disappointment in how their own version of “International Living” had turned “au vinaigre” as the French say.

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Mike and Ceese

Mike is from Montreal, Canada and Ceese comes from Leiden, Holland.

I met them at the Chitré Restaurant located right in the middle of town that serves tasty local food at bargain prices. We continued our conversations at a seaside bar over a beer.

  

Ceese had travelled widely in Indonesia and described it as a place he loved to travel to. He was very fond of Indonesian cooking and suggested that I try the menu at the Hotel Casa Max where I am staying. A Dutch couple runs the hotel and they serve Indonesian cuisine in the restaurant. Since he had travelled in Sumatra he reminded me of the story I heard while taking the coffee tour at Café Ruiz in Bouquete of the Kopi Luwak coffee that has a taste like no other because it is processed like no other coffee. Have a look, you will be amazed:

http://coffeetea.about.com/cs/kindsofcoffee/a/aakopiluwak.htm

Indonesia is starting to be touted as a destination for expats. As the world's largest Muslim country it is quietly chugging along avoiding controversy and the news except for the Bali bombings of 2002 in Kuta. Ceese said that he used to go to the very club where the bombings took place.

I just talked to Ceese again as he walked by to his hotel, turns out he is the business development manager for KH Engineering based in Leiden, Holland. With a high pressure job like that no wonder he is hanging out in laid back Bocas del Toro.

http://www.kh-engineering.nl/

He also mentioned the surprising information that Panama has 1,509 islands and a coastline of 3,000 kilometers.

Mike was from Montreal and travelling with his wife. He and Ceeese had hit it off and made a friendship that often happens in travel. There is no easier situation to meet people than in travelling. Mike had travelled extensively in Mexico and we both raved over that country comparing notes. I liked his cute little joke. What flower do you have between your forehead and your chin –think hard –ok – two lips!

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Christer

Another expat that I encountered in Boca while enjoying a late afternoon cup of coffee was Christer from Gothenburg, Sweden. Given his unorthodox appearance, I sensed that an interesting story was waiting to be discovered.

That was confirmed when he professed his occupation to be “searcher for second youth”. That certainly got my attention since it is a nebulous search that I loosely engage in as well.

Christer has all the appearances of having detached from a lot of the “hooks” of society that keep most people well within the accepted mould.

Call him a hippie, call him a flower child, call him a philosopher, call him a meditating monk, call him the antithesis of the typical Swede – call him all of those things and you would not be far off the mark.


He describes himself as being very introspective, open minded and very cognisant that life only happens once.

More conventional labels can be attached to Christer as he has worked as a male nurse in mental institutions in Sweden and he has been an artist and a singer.

In wide reaching remarks, Christer spoke of his work in mental institutions and how in that process he gained more than he gave. The patients gave him their life experiences and why they felt so bad. This taught him on a personal level not to figuratively climb walls and to jump from bridges. He spoke of his experiences with people who were totally crushed, had fallen apart and who had lost all control. In one instance he successfully negotiated with a would-be suicide seeker to abandon his perch on the 24th floor of a building.

He describes these people as having lost the connection to the center of the cyclone or the eye of the hurricane as they have absolutely no connection to it.

They have taught him to seek life’s intrinsic values through meditation. He loves riding his bicycle (I suspect there is no car in his life) to a place where there is total silence and to lose himself in Zen Buddhist meditation. I suspect that this process is largely responsible for releasing him from the “hooks” of society that I spoke of earlier. He claims to work on the meditation over and over again. Having been a sporadic practitioner of meditation myself, I just had to ask him where it had led him. The answer surprised me as he responded with “I haven’t figured it out yet as I am still searching”. Notwithstanding, he does profess to be happy and at home in the space of meditating as he sees it leading him into his second childhood.

All this had my mind scrambling to grasp and make sense out of these profound words.

To bring the conversation back to a level that I could understand I asked him about his stay in Bocas del Toro.

This was the second time that he had been here as he is retired now. He also does not want to live in Sweden as he seeks a more pleasant climate. He finds Bocas to be exotic in any type of weather. Everything is close by here – the sea, the beach, and the town with its easy-going atmosphere. He values the year-round song of the tropical birds that resonate through his open windows. It would appear that Christer has found the perfect place to find his own type of paradise.

Just before I got too carried away by talk of paradise I could hear the word “shit” coming out of his mouth. Now what was that all about?

It seems that reality is also poverty, misconduct and dirt. People in Bocas seem to be a little footloose and fancy free with their garbage, not caring a lot and of course there is the mañana, mañana attitude. Now in a burst of emotion “I’m into taking care of my own shit, they are not, as there is lots of garbage.” He says that he tries to get communal clean up projects going but it is slow going to say the least. Cleanliness is a problem in Bocas.

Finally for the financial aspect, for two rooms, kitchen and shower he pays $290 a month. It is located at the backside of a house with a garden that has all kinds of animals. He is located ten minutes from downtown and the beach.

He can easily live here on his Swedish pension of $2,300 per month. What he finds expensive are his travels back and forth to Sweden. He also professes to be somewhat of a shopaholic.

That last remark I would not have expected as Christer struck me more as someone who would eschew the materialistic life style to embrace more of a monastic way of living. I guess it depends on what he meant by “shopaholic”.

Suffice it to say that Christer was one of the most interesting and enigmatic expats that I met.


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Peter’s Best Cynical View of Bocas

Peter was a guest at the Casa Max where I was staying. As a tourist he was unusual if for no other reason than his country of origin – Hungary. I can honestly say that in all my travels I have never met a traveller from Budapest, Hungary.

I have fond memories of my own visit to Budapest in the 1970’s when the country was still under communist rule. Nevertheless the city was by far the most western of all the eastern block capitals. That translated into a chic main street offering western boutiques that were unknown in other parts of the eastern block. The cities of Buda and Pest are located in a beautiful setting straddling the Danube River. Highlights for me during my visit were: the Gothic parliament buildings, similar to Westminster in London and Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada, the view from Gellert Hill and the Turkish Baths at the Gellert Hotel.

http://www.budapest-tourist-guide.com/budapest-parliament.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherman's_Bastion

Peter and I got along well because he was from Hungary, he spoke English fluently, he always had something interesting to say, he was knowledgeable and he was cosmopolitan having travelled widely. I think he enjoyed talking with me as much as I enjoyed talking with him as we spent a lot of time just walking through the streets of Bocas taking in the atmosphere and shooting the breeze. I particularly enjoyed his wry sense of humour and healthy east European sense of scepticism cultivated by years under communism.

 
 

On the third day when it was time for me to travel on to Costa Rica I sensed that Peter, the inveterate traveller, would have liked nothing more than to join me instead of spending a total of ten days in Bocas del Toro.

After three days in Bocas he was getting tired of the “carnival” and was ready to see something different. However he had prepaid his ten days at the Casa Max Hotel and that was that.

I am writing part of this blog on November 10, 2010 and I met Peter in Bocas around February 18, 2010. We exchanged addresses and had a great time together in Bocas but I have not heard a word from him since. To a large extent that is typical of travel. Friends are made and enjoyed for a brief time but never to be seen again.

Nevertheless after the writing of this blog I will drop Peter a postcard from beautiful Victoria, British Columbia where Barbara and I live.

For all my enthusiasm about Bocas del Toro, Peter had a one-liner that kind of took the air out of my balloon when he said: “Why would any American with money come to a place like this?

Good question for which I could only mutter things like –“the weather” (but then there is Florida and Key West and Arizona), “the pensionados program” (but the cost of living for the most part is cheap in the U.S.

I think to an east European (and to a good part of the world) the good life is still in the United States. But then he perhaps answered his own question when he added, “they come here with the big bucks to be Joe Cool and big shots after all, Donald Trump invests here”.

As for himself he found Bocas del Toro “too touristy and noisy and off the wall”. That was from a man who had travelled all over the world.

Like I said he was eager to leave as he described himself as a restless person who found himself in the very unfortunate situation of being locked into Bocas for ten days. His final comment was “I am here but I am already thinking about my next trip”. That statement of course describes me to a T and that is what keeps me travelling along with my permanent restless state that might be grounds for professional analysis.

On the positive side there are many other islands here as well as famous Red Frog Beach. I am sure in the end Peter found plenty in the archipelago to keep busy.

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Casa Max Hotel

The Casa Max Hotel is operated by a Dutch/Indonesian couple - Ari and Shirley Keppler. I booked my reservation at the hotel from the city of David and at the time was very glad to get a hotel room for $45.


I found the hotel to be adequate and other than the punctured mosquito screens I had no complaints. I must say that I am not hard to please and therefore am somewhat surprised by a fair number of negative comments on the hotel’s reviews. On the other hand considering the small number of rooms in the hotel how much effort does it take to keep things in tip-top shape? It must be said that a lot of effort is being put into the construction of a few more rooms. Perhaps it is the Caribbean attitude to not sweat the small stuff. Maybe it is the realization that most guests book sight unseen and only come one time anyway so why go the extra mile whatever it is, it is preventing the hotel from being lifted to the next level.

Ari Keppler was a man of few words who would only volunteer that they were here in Bocas del Toro because it was out of any hurricane zone.


By comparison Shirley Keppler, who is of Indonesian ancestry, came across as warm and friendly. She and Ari specifically came from Holland to Bocas to start the Casa Max Hotel.


Her view of Bocas was summarized by “island people, meaning the native inhabitants, stick together and don’t let foreigners get too close”. The locals have the attitude that foreigners think they know it all and can change the world.

Living on an isolated island is like the wild west where you never get integrated and remain apart from the local residents.

The isolation however is broken by the steady stream of Dutch people that come to the hotel and the restaurant/bar that serves Indonesian dishes among other things.

Nevertheless they are very happy here and have a wonderful life together and she is very much enjoying her thirties on the island.

They meet people from all over the world at the hotel that she feels is a substitute for travelling the world. The guests all have stories that are like an education. She loves to work with people and never finds it boring and above all she does not miss Holland. She misses the organization so inherent in Dutch life but she does not miss Holland.

Their son and daughter go to private schools where Dutch and Spanish are the language of instruction.


Miehe and Jan

Among the Dutch guests at the hotel I had a chance to speak with Miehe from Noord-Brabant, Holland. She and her husband had spent a lifetime raising horses. They are retired now and their children are running the horse farm. 

 
They have decided to make Bocas del Toro their retirement home. So what were the factors that made them select Bocas del Toro as their number one choice to retire?

There is a Dutch expat community of about 80 people who have been coming here for the last 12 to 14 years.

There are even younger members of the community aged 30 to 40 who have settled down here running businesses such as dive shops. They had businesses at home but are looking for a better life here.

It is hectic in Holland and she feels comfortable here in this laid back place. Her husband likes birds and Bocas is a bird paradise. They bought a large piece of property about four years ago for 100,000 Euros (ouch) located just ten minutes drive from the center of Bocas del Toro in the Big Creek area. They are now in the process of building a home on their property. She describes it as a difficult process to build as everything has to come from the mainland and qualified labour is hard to come by.

They are getting great help from Ari, the Dutch expat mentioned above who owns the Hotel Casa Max where I am staying. The owner of the hotel is very much into construction as he is in the process of adding several units to the hotel presently. These will have air conditioning and rent for $60 a day.

She went on to say that it is expensive to build here, as their nice home of four bedrooms and three bathrooms will cost about $400,000. It is being constructed one and a half meters above ground like most structures in the area due to the rainy season.

Behind every good-looking woman there is a husband. No, that’s not always true but in this case it was as later I met her husband Jan. He was the driving force behind the horse farm and enjoys his passion of raising birds.


With pride he told me about the horse farm and that one daughter is a world champion rider while another daughter is involved in the operation of the biggest and best western gear stores in Europe.

Jan and his wife Miehe are extraordinary people who had accomplished much and who are now reaping the fruits of their labour in Bocas del Toro.

Here is a link to the horse farm:

http://burgmeijerqh.com/index1.html

Here is a link to the biggest Western Store in Europe:

http://www.westernstore.nl/

Coming Soon: Puerto Armuelles – Penetrating deep into Panama