I didn’t like Panama City. It’s not that it was particularly evil, I just didn’t find it that 
interesting. Sure, my very first night in Panama, we went to Casco Viejo (Panama City v. 2.0, Rick called it), and that was plenty interesting. Particularly the part where a young girl ran after us and started tugging on my arm and delivering the message her mother had sent her to tell us: don’t go down that street, it’s not safe (when we checked the guidebook later, it concurred with the little girl’s mother). But this moment wasn’t why I didn’t like Panama City. That night, actually, I had no issues with it.
When we came back from Bocas, it was a Wednesday. My flight out was a Sunday, and Rick had Things To Do (nomadic software developer things, so don’t ask me, I just know that he needs internet and several computers and ignores me if I try to talk to him when he has Things To Do). So I amused myself as best as I could: I ventured all of about five blocks from the hotel (where you going? Rick said, seeing me put my shoes on. Grocery store, I said. He placed an order for several more of his favourite dessert – Tres Leches – and made nice to his Mac some more). I killed an hour or so doing my laundry. I didn’t want to buy handicrafts, or a cell phone, or clothing, or tang in a paper cup, or anything else, really. I didn’t want to read my book, nor did I want to update my blog.
I can honestly say that I wasn’t bored once in Bocas. I was bored in a hotel room in Panama City. It wasn’t Rick’s fault: he even took breaks. We went out for an overpriced mediocre lunch at Pomodoro, and agreed 
with my book that the fuss about this place was a mystery. We went to Balboa, to meet someone Rick wanted to talk to, and since we were in the neighbourhood we wandered over to Miraflores Locks and looked at the Panama Canal. But mostly, Rick worked. Until Friday. On Friday morning, he announced he was done for a couple of days, and we could go do something. And then he went to rent a car. And then we got horribly lost trying to get out of Panama City and *not* going to Colon – all roads seemed to lead to Colon – and the neighbourhoods got pretty sketchy. In the sketchiest of them all, Rick asked a traffic cop for directions. We wanted to go east, he asked for the way to Chepo. Be careful there, the cop warned. This was the part where I looked out the window, put my hand on the door lock to reassure myself that it was, indeed, locked, and thought, you’ve got to be kidding me. We’re going somewhere that the people who work *here* feel the need to warn us of? This sucks.
Rick had a somewhat more relaxed outlook at this point. “It’ll be ok,” he told me. I sunk down further in my seat, and demanded to know *what* we had to be careful of. “What does the book say,” Rick asked. Nothing, I admitted – as in, it didn’t say, be careful in Chepo. It says, “there’s little reason to stop here on the way to or from the Darien”. “Well, we’re not going to Chepo either,” Rick said. “Let’s try to go as far as Cañita tonight.” I wasn’t entirely reassured. “Look, that guy just knows it’s the road to the Darien, he’s probably never even been there,” Rick explained. “We’ll ask at the police checkpoint, if there’s anything going on, we won’t go.” I continued to stare out the window. I saw bus shelters advising us to combat dengue.
As promised, Rick didn’t even slow down for Chepo but kept driving. Everywhere along the Interamericana, the rainforest had been replaced with cattle pastures. It looked sad. When we got to Cañita, Rick propsed we go all the way to Icantí and scope out the next day’s adventure. So we did.
Icantí is the administrative site for the Comarca Kuna de Madungandí, which is an indigenous reservation. It’s also the site of a very active police checkpoint, and the location of the first bridge over the narrows of a massive reservoir, Lago Bayano. Our interest was in some caves on the south side of Lago Bayano that the book describes as “a pretty cool daytrip for the adventurous”. It goes on to tell you to try and find Mateo Cortéz, see if he’s interested in guiding you. The policeman who wasn’t holding our passports said, ah, si, Mateo, and told us that Mateo would be at the bridge at 8 a.m. the next morning. The one holding the passports had mine turned to the page with my entry stamp, and demanded to know where my entry stamp was. Rick pointed to it, I looked confused. He wasn’t satisfied. Finally, his colleague thumped his finger on my passport and said something that roughly translated to, right there you idiot. The “idiot” part could be my interpretation only. We got our passports back. We went back to Cañita.
In Cañita, we wanted to find a place to sleep. This time, we had a mosquito net with us, at least (I had, by now, consulted the book for active diseases between Panama City and the Darien Gap, and I was full-on paranoid). Rick checked the first place while I stayed with the car. He seemed underwhelmed. Nobody was home at the second one, but we saw that there were empty rooms. While we discussed this, the proprietor came home, and showed us the way to the room he thought we should have. It came complete with a hole in the drywall which led to the bathroom (you could turn the light on if were in bed, but not if you were in the bathroom. But that was perhaps the safest location, from a water and electricity standpoint. If the water had been running in the bathroom. Which it was not, at that point. Instead, I got a bucket of water to wash.) The sheets were clean, the floor had been swept at least once in the last month, and there was an air conditioner which meant no need for the mosquito net. We stayed. A bed is a bed. A bed is also *not* a thermarest on a floor where the bugs are the size of mice. I had no issues.
That night, we went to an open air restaurant for, oh goody, Panamanian food. I didn’t want the pollo, there was no pescado, and Rick had told me several times that Panamanian beef sucks. I declared myself content with plantains and potatoes, since that would be the only part of the meal I’d actually eat. Rick overruled me and ordered me some entire meal with meat. I ate my plantains, and a good chunk of his fried potatoes. He ate my mystery meat and ordered more potatoes. The waitress went home to find her swiss army knife so we could open the wine we’d brought, and we shared this with her and two other guys. The waitress and one of the guys were the same in the morning, when I wanted one egg, coffee, and fry bread. Rick ordered, and I was presented with two eggs, a huge plate of frybread, and some fried yucca concoction, plus my coffee. I consumed one egg, coffee, and frybread. I abandoned the yucca thing when Rick discovered that it was full of chicken. And then it was off to Icantí again.
We had to go through the same routine with the police again in the morning, but this time they were friendly. 
They told Rick to park “over there”, pointing to the police compound. Over there, another cop wanted our passports, and painstakingly copied our first and last names into his book. I became Johanna Deutsch. Rick’s last name was also Deutsch. As would be any other German citizen, since our passports’ photo identification pages have the last name, with a big space, then the first name, then a smaller space, then our nationality, in German. In German, “German” is “Deutsch”. Thus Rick and Johanna Deutsch were duly entered into the book, and the poor cop was confused when I denied Rick as my husband and he denied me as his sister.
And then it was cave time. Mateo was indeed around, and willing to spend the day with us. So we deeted up and packed some stuff into a drybag and hopped into Mateo’s boat. Lago Bayano is eerie – it’s 350 square kilometers big, but nobody had bothered logging it or doing anything else to the land that was flooded before flooding it. The timber down there is now considered valuable, Mateo explained. (I don’t think chainsaws would work underwater, though. Not even for Abelardo.)
In addition to diseases, I was now worried about the cave. You see, here is what my book said about the first cave: “(it) has a river flowing through it, the Rio Seco … visitors have to get out of the boat and wade in through chest-high water … there are some aggressive fish with sharp, pointy teeth swimming around in the dark … wear a bandanna or 
t-shirt over your nose and mouth. There are lots of bats in this cave, and there’s always a chance of contracting histoplasmosis … it’s utterly dark in some sections … you’ll likely see a solid wall of bats … It’s all very Indiana Jones … the locals have stories about troll-like creatures that live in the cave .. real, live creatures may be enough to keep the cautious (sane?) out, though. After coming back out of the cave, our little group spotted the head of either an unusually large caiman or a small crocodile lurking about the entrance. It could easily have come inside to swim with us.”
Yeah. Goody. I was good with the bats, I had insisted we buy bandannas to ward off the scary sounding hisotplasmosis, I had my headlamp for the dark, I was okay with the chest-high water and I’m rather troll-like myself. I was even okay with the sharp-toothed fish (mostly) because I was wearing long sleeves, long 
pants, and big boots. But I had issues with the thought of encountering a very large caiman (or a small crocodile) while wading through chest-high water in the dark. 
Admit it, you would too. I declared that if I saw *any* caimans lurking near the entrance of the cave, we would have another no way no how no sir moment. This was when Mateo explained that the caimans are all gone, the last one was killed two years ago. Colombians were paying a good price for (illegal) caiman skin. So the locals kept hunting them. They took 700 per year, and then they were gone. And I know that this is very bad and very sad, but “sad” was not the emotion I felt at this particular point. “Guiltily relieved” might come closer.
Still, despite the removal of the big pointy teethed critters, I figured this cave was something to endure. See, I wanted to have *done* it, but I didn’t actually want to *do* it (don’t underestimate just how many things I’ve done in my life because I wanted to *have* done them.) Still, I’ve been in more caves than Rick. I figured, at the very least, I’ll get a picture of some bats. While Rick tried to keep his boots dry along the banks with Mateo, I waded right in. “We’re gonna be totally wet anyway”, I announced. Rick saw the logic in this. Mateo sat down on a rock, and Rick waded on in. We headed for the cave proper.
And what happened next is just plain magic. The water of the Rio Seco was fresh, and clear. As promised, the cave was alive with bats, millions of them. There were stalactites and stalagmites. We were wading in water. It was a pretty cool cave, as far as caves go. And then we got daylight again. For a long time, we were wandering through an incredible slot canyon. It was only fully dark in a few sections, most of the time, we had green filtered light from high above. 
There were deep, calm pools that we had to swim, and little cascades, and big mossy rocks. This “cave” was not something to endure, it was something to enjoy. I enjoyed it a lot. Far more than even my most optimistic predictions would have said (but this is not difficult – earlier that day, “maybe I won’t get a horrible disease” would have counted as optimism). It was a special place. You can see the pictures, after all.
And I would have left it at that serene interlude. If it had been just me, this story would end with “and then we came out of the cave, feeling like we’d just been transported to another dimension, one where it was beautiful and quiet and [insert more cheesiness]”. But this was a trip with Rick. And the guidebook said “the second (cave) requires crawling through narrow passages on hands and knees – pretty intense”. Worse, Mateo had said that almost none of the people he takes ever try to go into the second cave. Well, you can guess what Rick wanted to do.
Despite being a great big chicken about everything, I was actually ok with this. I may not *like* caving very much, but I’ve been in enough real caves to not be terrified of crawling on my hands and knees through narrow passages. When Rick carefully asked me if I’d mind going to see the second one, I just said that I was drawing the line at having to wiggle on my belly while pushing with my feet. We were good to go.
I think Mateo expected me to take one look at the second cave and revert to no way no how no sir mode. He certainly looked like he expected that. The entrance was a ways above the river level, and you had to climb up some heavily weathered limestone to get there. The entrance itself was not very 
high, and it had a sharp lip. But I was out to prove something at this point, and I declined all offers of help and climbed up, and popped into the cave and started crawling. And bitching. There were biting ants, and I would have preferred knee pads and a helmet. But I went in, and I crawled maybe 15 feet until the cave opened up, and waited for Rick, and then we explored together. This was a pretty neat solution cave, and had obviously seen people before (some stalactites were broken off, there was a teacup in one spot). I was mindful enough to keep swiveling my head and looking for side passages, I was not risking getting lost.
Pretty soon, we got to another tight part in the passage. Rick was all for crawling along some more, but I was not so inclined. It’s just more muddy passage in the dark, and I like my knees. We turned around. I tore my pants on the sharp lip on the way out (you had to exit backward, the combination of sharp lip and distance from the 
ground meant you needed to be able to get purchase with your feet quickly). I declined Mateo’s help again. I kept my pride.
I did not, however, want to keep the new layer of caving mud I now had all over my body. At this point, we were in a river. Rick and Mateo discussed, and it was decided that we would travel upstream – past an indigenous village – to have a good wash in the rapids. This we did.
On the way down, they flagged the boat down in the indigenous village. There was a sick villager, he needed to get to a doctor. We had a big boat, we were heading back to the road, it was a no-brainer. We were invited to the village to 
see the spider monkeys tetherd in the tree, and Rick held a pet bunny. When we got back, the sick villager – who was not conscious – was lying in the bow of the boat, covered by a sheet. His nephew was climbing in. Mateo motioned to me to come sit by him, in the stern.
Now let that run through the mind of a paranoid gringo in Panama. A very ill man in a boat, and we are downwind. 
I was uncomfortable. It took Rick at least 15 minutes of goofy behaviour 
before I even managed a smile, and then it took another 15 minutes of logic for me to relax (logic: the man had been sick for some time. None of the other villagers were sick. His nephew said he had a pain in his belly, but no fever. From this, we concluded, not highly contagious.) Still, I was not sad to get out of that boat, and back to the car (and into dry clothes).
Rick was determined to check on some rivers for potential whitewater paddling, and we continued toward the Darien for a few more kilometers. In the Comarca Kuna, the jungle is much closer to the road than near Chepo and Cañita. We found no promising rivers. We turned back. We had visions of a cloud forest, but it rained really hard and the road there was not passable even for a rental car whose shocks you don’t care about. So instead, we sat in traffic in Panama City for ages on the way home.
For me, the Panama adventure was over: the rest of my time would go like this: hotel, long hot shower, sangria (Rick came back with the fixings when I dispatched him for soap), laundry, cab, fancy restaurant, cab, hotel, sleep, Bridge of the Americas, Amador Causeway, return rental car, crappy restaurant, hotel, sad, cab, airport, gone.