Our guide Christopher described our first bike ride in
Panama as his favorite of the whole trip . It certainly sounded good with a
total of more than 1,500 meters of descent. That’s a lot of fun hills you get
to go down! It’s not all that easy, though, the day’s ride was also listed as
having 500 meters (more than 1,600 feet) of ascent. That’s some hard peddling
up some quite big hills to earn the rides down.

After our speedboat ride back to Almirante from Bocas del
Toro, the day began with a two hour drive along the Caribbean Coast and then
south into the Cordillera Central to cross the Continental Divide and descend a
short distance to the beginning of our ride at Fortuna Reservoir at 1,070
meters (3,500 feet). What impressed me about western Panama is how empty it is.
Most of Central America is quite heavily populated, but the Caribbean side of
western Panama is a like a tropical wilderness with only a few scattered
settlements. Panama’s highest mountain is in the west near the Costa Rican
border, as well as its high altitude coffee plantations and a mountain town
named Boquete which is popular with North American retirees .

For most of its length the isthmus of Panama is about 100 kilometers/60
miles wide, so there are many peaks from which it’s possible to see both oceans
at the same time on a clear day. We had a mostly clear day for our ride, but
since we weren’t on any mountaintops I didn’t have the experience of seeing
both simultaneously.

Most of the uphill sections of the day’s ride were in the
early part. Although I had to peddle hard at times, I have to admit that it’s
hard for me to believe I ascended the vertical distance of say the Sears Tower
over the multiple hills. I guess I was going up a lot more than I thought I
was.

The ride downhill almost to sea level on the Pacific side
was spectacular. I definitely agree with Fez (our guide’s nickname) that this
was the best ride of the trip. While the ride started out relatively cool at
nearly 4,000 feet of altitude, the lower we got the more it felt like cycling
into a sauna with temperatures probably close to 95*F by early afternoon . The
difference in landscape between the Atlantic/Caribbean and Pacific sides of the
continental divide in Panama is dramatic, with lush tropical rain forest on the
Caribbean side and dry tropical savannah on the Pacific side.

Our ride finished in a small town named Gualaca only about
35 kilometers (21 miles) from where we started, but what a ride it was! Fez
prepared our last picnic lunch together beside a swimming hole surrounded by
rocky terrain, a great way to cool off after a ride with a very hot ending.

From there we had about a three hour drive eastward to
Santiago, our hotel stop for the night, on the Pan-American Highway. Or maybe I
should call it the Pan-American Construction Site, since most of the 100 plus
miles seemed to be in various states of widening. For most of the distance
there was effectively one lane open in each direction, but that shifted
frequently depending on where the four lane divided highway had been completed –
very slow going . It’ll be nice once it’s completed as a true divided
expressway, but at the pace things move in Panama that’s likely to be quite a
few more years.

I had been warned by people I met along the way that the
food in Panama is about the worst in Central America. I honestly can’t say that’s
been my experience in the country overall, but in places like Bocas Del Toro
and Panama City I ate mostly international food or local seafood rather than
Panamanian food. What does seem to be especially atrocious in Panama, though,
is the service. Things happen when they happen, and you might well be seated at
a restaurant for half an hour before a waiter takes you order, and then it
might well take another half hour to be served a beer or coke let alone the
food you ordered. Such was our experience at the restaurant and the quite nice roadside
hotel on the outskirts of Santiago, the Hotel Gran David. The burgers most of
us in the group ordered were really not bad when they arrived, but that was
well over an hour after placing our order, an order our guide Christopher took
himself and delivered to the waiters to turn in because of past experiences he
had with staff incompetence at the place .

With an early start for a bike ride planned, Chris decided
the cafeteria at the next door truck stop would be a better bet for breakfast
than being held up for two hours at the hotel restaurant. Now there was some
really bad Panamanian food! Rock hard pancakes, tough stew meat, fried chicken,
deep-fried everything, tough corn cakes known in Panama as tortillas, something
that appeared to be liver. Luckily Chris bought some bananas, watermelons, and
pineapples to cut up to supplement the dismal Panamanian breakfast choices.