A general funk

Noris is in the city this week, and when the cat's away... the mouse is really bored.

I've been antsy to walk up Volcan Baru.. you can't have a big 11,000 foot hill like that in the neighborhood without wanting to get to the top of it. You can't call it climbing either, if there's a road to the top. So, I thought I'd at least drive up to the end of the paved road and see what will be the start of the walk, on the rough 4-wheel-drive-only road.

From Boquete, it's easy to find the Baru road, which climbs pretty quickly out of the valley and gives some nice views of the town, which I don't have pictures of because it's a narrow road and I didn't see anywhere to pull over. Then you go into a sort of other place, like.. Volcan Poas or Irazu in Costa Rica, or probably other volcanic mountains in Central America. The mountain top itself was shrouded in clouds.

(Click photos for biggerness)

It's a narrow, barely two lane road, with pine and ciprés trees, flowers, and especially- coffee, café, the black gold of the tropical highlands world-wide. You know how much you pay for coffee. The seed has gone from its center of origin in Ethiopia to be grown everywhere in the world that it could be. Pretty good for a plant that probably was just trying to protect itself from herbivores by synthesizing caffeine as a repellent, which turned out to be a necessity for billions of humans. Good work, Coffea arabica.

Coffee is a woody perennial shrub which produces its small fruits along the branches. The harvest is done by hand. The outer pulp is removed and the seeds, or "beans" are dried and later roasted. Yum.

See the beans? Click on the photo. When they're ripe, they'll be red.

Everything is on a steep slope. Some places it looks like you'd need to hire acrobats to tend the plants. One advantage is that you can use gravity to load the trucks from the road side. See the folded red spout?

So I got to the end of the the paved road where the Elantra wasn't going any further, and saw the steam from the radiator. Uh oh.

Well, that will be an adventure for another day. Only 11 kilometers to the top.

Glueboards are wonderful things

When we lived in Southern California, we caught scorpions, small snakes and of course a wide assortment of insects and spiders on glueboards, also known as "sticky traps". They don't involve pesticides, so you can put them anywhere. In addition to catching creepy-crawlies, you are monitoring the pest population, so you'll know what's around before it's become a major problem. Then just throw 'em in the trash. This glueboard in the laundry room caught a large spider, with just the body about an inch long:

We also realized that one or more cats were getting into the laundry room at night through the metal security door that has bars at the top. I just installed a screen to keep them out. No kitties were harmed.

How about that rain?

Man, it rains here. There was a saying I heard a long while back:  "It was raining like a cow peeing on a flat rock". It probably stuck in my head because it sounds dumb, but here.. it would be a herd of cows peeing on something. I wanted to find out how much water was falling per day. I know it's a lot, but how much?

Rain sheet off the roof.
Well,  It rained over an inch today. Over 106 inches this year.  Damn, that's almost NINE FEET OF WATER. If it wasn't for the incredibly quick run-off, we'd all be treading water, that's for sure. Compare that to Southern California, where it rains 10 inches a year on average. Rain was a special occasion there, celebrated with extra car accidents.

The down-spout from the neighbor's roof.
That's a really great site I'm linking to.. Boquete Weather. They have a really great explanation of weather in Panama. That's the info I used to explain to Peace Corps trainees years ago about tropical climate and weather.

Speaking of great links, here's the best compilation I've seen for Chiriqui. Kudos to Chiriqui Chatter, which is a class act. Here's their link page: which pretty much has it all.  I've got it bookmarked.

Progress

I've got my temporary residency now, at least a carnet that says that the paperwork is in process, so I'm not a tourist anymore. It's cost about $500, which is really cheap as far as these things go. It definitely helps to (1) be married to a Panamanian and (2) have a couple of lawyers in the family who of course, didn't charge. The Lovely Wife did all the talking, I just signed and posed for photos when needed. It took several trips to Migracion in David, which we expected, lots of those stamps (timbres) that you can only buy at Banco Nacional, and photocopies of everything, notarized, of course. It takes patience, but it can done with minimal stress if you're willing.

Since I got a card in hand once the residency paperwork was turned in, I was expecting the same for the work permit. Different Ministerio, mostly the same photocopies with timbres, but no work permit for a month or two.  I can't work for someone else.. I could work for myself, though. Decisions, decisions.

In other progress, there's a heck of a road project going on next to our house. Well, there's one house between us and the road actually. It's the new road between David, the capital of Chiriqui, and Boquete, the capital of.. coffee, tourism and the gateway to the highest point in Panama, Volcan Baru.

They're moving right along:

Lots of machinery, new bridges

Explosions that rattle the windows

Look out for those light poles! They build the road, then move them.

It's all good. Everyone will get wherever they're going quicker, safer and happier.

Signs of Something or Another..

I was looking for a "sign" the other day, and found several around the neightborhood.
You can click any of the photos to make 'em BIGGER.

Apparently, all signs along the Panamerican Highway and the road between David and Boquete are now illegal. It must be very satisfying to be the guy who slaps those big stickers right over the sign. If the sticker is bigger than the sign, the whole sign gets covered by a piece of sticker. The big, multi-story signs advertising major businesses get a piece of sticker wrapped around the post. Not a bad idea.

Other folks have their folksy signs.

"Don't throw garbage, pigs". Way to win friends and influence people. Too bad they misspelled Basura.

Balboa Beer "Conectado al sabor" has a lock on painting all the convenience stores in this area. Movistar, with the weird pukey green has all the bus-shelters. 

IDAAN is the water agency. They make sure to shut off the water at night, and often during the day on the weekends. Thanks for saving us money, guys. The water bill is only $5.00 a month, so if you could somehow save up some of that 20 inches of rain we get a week and keep the water on longer, we'd gladly pay $10.00.

Well, that explains the big BOOMS that rattle our windows once in a while. No complaints- the new David to Boquete road that goes near our house is making great progress just in the short time we've lived here. More on that in the next day or two.

Who knew that they still sold Royal Crown Cola? And who would have thought that some advertising artist would draw a woman with piercings and a tattoo in the 1950's pinup style to promote RC? I ponder that every time I walk into that store.

As the sign says "Good taste never changes!"  

House Cleaning Lizards

Going to the humid tropics may seem like visiting another world if you're from the USA. I've got a couple of stories about an invasive species to illustrate this, but first there's a climate review... which you can skip if you want. Just pick up again after the world map.

While every spot on the earth receives the same number of hours of light per year, the further north or south you travel from the equator...the more extreme the distribution of those hours becomes. So, in Alaska, you have some days with nearly 24 hours of light and others with nearly 24 hours of dark, and of course you have winter and summer. Most of the US has obvious seasons as a result of the unequal distribution of solar hours over the year.

The tropics, the area of the earth between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, is notable for its more even distribution of solar hours over the year. Here in Panama, for example, it gets dark between 5:54 PM and 6:42 PM every day this year. Close to 12 hours of dark and 12 of light per day (actually between 11:36 and 12:38 in 2011), so there is no appreciable variation in temperature during the year. What is referred to here as winter (invierno) and summer (verano) is really wet season and dry season. Those two seasons don't correspond to our seasons of the same name and are instead due to the shifting of prevailing winds.

Don't worry if you don't remember the details, just remember that cold weather, Mother Nature's very own best pest control method, is not happening in the tropics. The exception occurs if you go way up in altitude (up in the mountains), which is similar to moving north or south, away from the equator.

World Map Showing the Tropics In Red

In the 1980s a "new" lizard, The Common House Gecko, set about living up to its name in Panama. It moved into houses big and small, city and country, and earned another name- lagartija limpia casa, house cleaning lizard. A native of southeast Asia and north Africa, it's gone cosmopolitan from the high rises of Singapore to Pacific Islands to Israel, Brazil, Central America and southern US. Have you seen them?

Here in Panama, its introduction was recent enough that people remember pre-gecko times. There used to be spiders and other creepy arthropods in abundance. Now there's a lot less of them, because.. there's little nocturnal house cleaners. If you're sitting around the cantina in the country having a few beers, you'll see several geckos on the wall and ceiling around the lights. When a moth or other insect shows up, attracted to the light, out darts the gecko, and opens a mouth that seems bigger than its head, and cleans house. It's kind of fun to watch, but some people think the gecko is a pest itself. My wife always says "ay no, they're transparent".

What I wrote up to this point was written while we were staying at my step-son's house in Panama City. There, the geckos were outside, though we could hear their call at night, which is amazingly loud for a creature between 3 and 6 inches long. It sounds like a demonic cackle laugh. Since then, we've moved to Chiriqui Province in the wild west, just short of the border with Costa Rica. It's the campo, the neighbors all have chickens, there's cattle down the street, and for some reason the water is shut off every night. And the damn geckos are in the house.

They are all over. They leave their distinctive little poops in the kitchen. They frolick on the walls in the bedroom. They cackle demonicly at night and wake me up. They lay little white eggs on the window sills. They get stuck on the glueboards (AKA sticky traps) we have out to kill insects. This morning I slid open a window and pinned one against the frame. He looked at me with his tiny black slitted eyes in his little orange translucent head. Good, I thought.

This invasive species is really getting on my nerves. They're not even that great at cleaning the house- we've got all sorts of insects also. It's the rainy season, and it never gets cold in the tropics, which after all is Mother Nature's best pest control method.

Chiriqui Links

There aren't a lot of websites about Chiriqui, but I've found a few. They're all in English except as noted. Here we go:

Boquete Panama Guide    Classy and updated often.

Boquete Weather  Guess what this one's about? Actually has lots of cool stuff like this map of Volcan Baru:

Boquete-Bajareque-Times  Will their classified ads ever change?

Chiriqui Chatter  Seems to be updated often and gets comments.

En Dolega  Spanish, nice photos of community groups. Check out this tree that was cut in the park for safety reasons:

Richard Detrich's Blog  This guy's interesting, and his site's worth checking out.

Asociacion Ambientalista de Chiriqui  Spanish. If you want to know who's blocking the Panamericana and why, here's their manifestos.

Boquete Blogger  This is basically a commercial site, and that's what I'll be listing more of in a following website list. In the meantime, I'll be looking for more, and if anyone ever reads this blog, I hope they'll tell me their favorite Chiriqui websites.

Pirate movies

The Lovely Wife bought a pirate copy of the Green Lantern today outside the Pio Pio for a dollar. It's in English with Spanish subtitles. The funniest part of the whole movie was when I saw a guy walk in front of the camera in the theater where it was filmed.

The Old Gringo and the Sea

I like the ocean, at least to look at, and I like eating fresh fish. I've never been too interested in how the latter gets out of the former and onto my plate.

The lovely wife and I have recently arrived in Panama City and are staying with her oldest son and his family while we acclimatize and figure out where we want to live. My youngest step-son, Danny the Dentist, is a fanatic fisherman and immediately invited us to visit his friends Damiana and Didimo, who live on the coast in Los Santos province. When I say "on the coast", I mean the ocean is their front yard and their supermarket.

Well sure, I keyed in on the road trip and hammock time. After I agreed to go, the fishing on the open sea and the sea-sickness thing popped into my mind like a painful boil. Oh yeah, there was that fishing trip with a previous father-in-law in Oregon, when I spent the whole time feeding the fish in a most unpleasant manner.

Danny the Dentist is known for his chronological flexability and he had patients Saturday, so we didn't cross the bridge over the Panama Canal until after dark. We drove west along the Pan-American Highway and then south into the Azuero Peninsula. We arrived at Damiana and Didimo's house after 1 AM, actually we arrived at the end of the road and then carried a bunch of staple food, beer and fishing equipment along the beach and up to their house.


Damiana and Didimo have lived on their piece of land for 20-some years. To say that they are of modest means is beyond an understatement- when they bought the land for $35 they had to borrow it from her father. They've advanced a lot from then, but they still insist they're poor. (They're not, except monetarily) When we showed up in the middle of the night, they warmly welcomed us and pulled three corvinas (sea bass) out of the fridge. Now, I love corvina, but this was the best ever, with fried platanos (non-sweet bananas) on the side and lots of beer. Didimo and I ended up sitting there and talking about this and that for hours. Every once in a while he reminded me how much he loves Danny like a son, and my wife and me also by extension, and he actually means it.


After a couple hours of sleep, I groggily stumbled back to the car with Danny, and we made our way to a beach near the town of Pedasi, arriving about 7:30. Avidel, the Captain of the 27' fiberglass boat didn't look too happy about our late arrival, but it was hard to tell with the mask he was wearing. We loaded up and pushed off.


The sea was a bit choppy, thank God that Danny had given me an anti-barf pill on the way. Actually, the waves made the boat look kinda small. Avidel is one hell of a driver, but still the UP/SLAM-down motion of the boat made me not want to move. They told me that we were looking for sea-birds or dolphins, that's where the fish are.

After a bit, the hills of the coast were barely visible. My fishing pole started to bend, and I heard the RRRRR of the reel as the line flew out. Did I mention that I don't know the first thing about fishing? So Danny is telling me what to do, and I'm trying to reel in what seems to weigh something like a Volkswagen. I let too much slack in the line and lost what Avidel said was a 50 pound tuna. He saw it, and he should know.

Crap. The one that got away. I didn't have too long to feel like failure because we started to catch fish. Dorado (mahi-mahi) with their bright gold color and huge head. Yellow-fin tuna and Albacore tuna, fat and silvery. When one pole gets a fish, you reel in the other one so that the lines don't tangle. But sonofabitch, the other one had a fish also. That happened several times. The last tuna we caught flopped over the side and got nailed by a shark. We had so many fish by then we didn't even care much.



Cleaning the fish took a while, but was almost as interesting as catching them. We anchored off the coast where we started from. The Frigate birds, pelicans and grouper fish wait there to fight over the scraps which are recycled into the ocean. The three dorados and 15 tuna became fillets and went into zip-lock bags, filling a rather large cooler. Danny gave fish away to six or seven people on the way home, as he seems to know and be loved by a significant percentage of the population.


So, that's my little adventure, so far. Did I mention I love Panama?

¿Qué sopá?

In Panamanian slang ¿Qué pasó? became ¿Qué sopá?  It means What's up?

(I'm still figuring out how to put accents on letters, and to make the upside-down question mark at the beginning of a sentence. I changed the keyboard to Spanish in the control panel, which works in Word, but not in Blogger.) I'll keep working on it, but the show must go on meanwhile.

My Name is Chiriquí is a play on the My Name is Panama brand of clothes and knick-knacks that has been around forever. No offense is meant to that fine company, and of course there is no connection. I do have a couple of their mola-trimmed shirts which I bought years ago.

Chiriquí province is in western Panama, bordering Costa Rica and the Pacific Ocean. The province used to be bigger, but due to the creation of the Ngöbe-Buglé Comarca in 1997, it lost considerable territory. In spite of the shrinkage, it is still referred to as "La Republica de Chiriquí" when the residents of other provinces want to be sarcastic about the Chiricanos  sense of self-importance. (Caution, swear words in the comments of the last link).

So why would anyone care to read this blog? Beats me. There will be travelogues, book reviews, links to pertinent articles in both the English and Spanish press, with summary translations of the latter as appropriate. There may be humor, both intentional and unintentional, cultural adaptation follies and photos of adorable grandchildren and pets. There probably will be ads. I'll also thrill you with my knowledge of tropical trees, plants and crops. So bookmark us, check back often, and we'll try to make it worth your while.