The Panamericana is the monster truck of the world’s roads. The thinness of the thread stretching from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego makes it the time-honoured grande dame of the road trip basics. Ewan McGregor rode it south on his motorbike. We headed north with our kites.
On the first morning of the trip, my first destination was the exciting Puente de las Americas across the Panama Canal. Today it’s Boquete at the foot of the 3,500 metre high Barú volcano in the north of Panama. Km 532. Ten hours, four buses and a nice Panameño north-west of Punta Chame, I’m quite overwhelmed by the endless expanses. The Panamericana has bitten me for the first time.
The first 170 kilometres from Chame to Santiago are a leisurely start, 2 hours of SUP in an overcrowded salsa-balla bus. For the next 200 kilometres to David, the next even more cramped bus takes a full five hours through a single gigantic roadworks site. The Grande Dame Panamericana is being widened to two lanes and obviously also significantly lowered. The telephone poles to the side of the perma-pothole road, which is littered with an annoying amount of asphalt, stand on grotesque earth block teeth five metres high.
Every settlement, no matter how small, has a smart but apparently unused footbridge over the Panamericana. A large cemetery usually follows shortly afterwards – macabrely enough, always with a panoramic view of the Panamericana. On the seat in front of me, a Panameño is enjoying the bloody pictures of the latest traffic massacres in the newspaper.
We pass endless seas of sugar cane and yellow Caterpillar armies. Greece may call a 25% civil servant quota a great reason to elect Germany as its dictator. Panama calls 50% of all road construction workers (including a massive 10% of human traffic lights) simply progress. An extremely skilled excavator driver managed to sink his 25 km/h vehicle 15 metres into a river next to a Panamericana that had already been lowered by five metres. Even the Panamanian fraggles turned into lemmings: everyone was salivating.
We leave the Panamericana in David. After 45 kilometres we land in a completely different world. Entry 32°/85% humidity, exit 20°/60%. Steep volcanic slopes, pine trees and drizzle make Hamburg tremble. The Bavarian feels right at home in board shorts among Panameños dressed like Zulus on summer holidays in Alaska.
The hostal is fine, the steak good, and the clouds hanging low on the slopes of the Barú volcano sound exactly like the Hidden Cameras, Skin and Leather.
The jazz and blues festival has been going on in Boquete for days. It tastes like liver cheese and Brussels sprouts casserole with mustard gherkins on tarragon mango parfait: 9 musicians from at least 12 countries play wonderfully colourful bluegrass salsa jazz in Santana style in front of the international crowd of guests. I feel as if my word brush has fallen into a barrel of discreetly melted Skittles, and a picture asks me to cook it something delicious.
In the morning, I hike eight kilometres up the volcano to around 1,800 m. The soil is so fertile that even stones bloom. Coffee, hibiscus and angel trumpets line the path through the rainforest. The entrance fee for a small waterfall at the end of the path in the jungle is about as reasonable as a sodium chloride voucher on an Atlantic swim. In other words: the journey was the destination.
Frank Woelky, born in 1973. Kitesurfer since 1998. Since 2006, I have been combining kitesurfing and web design on trips lasting several months off the beaten track.