I am no stranger to cramming extra moments into a trip. So much of my traveling is done for work-related reasons, and I feel like I am in a constant cycle of scheming to make the most out of it. My travel claims never even come close to covering a work trip, because there is always that extra weekend, the need to go *do* something since I’m already there. I would be a fool not to appreciate the opportunities I have, and, by and large, I’ve done a lot of appreciating.
Thing is, work is familiar, no matter where I am. Thus, when you think about the exploring part of the work trips, it is a relatively small fraction. It feels like there is never *enough* of the just *being* in a different place and looking around before I have to get back on a plane. This pattern has tricked me into assuming I have limitless energy and capacity for absorbing new stuff.
I don’t. When I’m not in a situation where I retreat to the familiarity of work, and it’s a whole new world, it turns out, I don’t have half the energy I expect to have. Sure, I was dealing with heat and humidity in Panama, and I’m not used to that. But, no matter how much Rick had told me about it, and how many pictures I’d seen, it was a whole new environment for me to absorb. I was ambivalent about planning adventures – I was plenty stimulated if I sat on the picnic table with my coffee cup already: I was in a house on stilts, built over a coral reef. The house had a roof made of penca thatch, it was full of gas-powered appliances and things that ran off batteries and words like “inverter” were as common as “outlet”. I tossed kitchen scraps out the window, and watched the barracuda nibble on them. I was eating breadfruit, and cooking with coconut oil, and sweetening with sugarcane juice. All of these were experiences I’d never had, and we haven’t even left the house here! Let’s not even start on all the new things I passed through just on my way to the composting toilet!
I have no experience with the tropics. I didn’t understand all the dangers there were, so I probably overestimated them. I *hated* feeling that I was totally dependent on Rick all the time. That’s not Rick’s fault. It’s not his fault that my Spanish is nonexistent, that that I can’t tell a viper from a boa, don’t know which ant is a bad ant, or that sloths can carry leishmaniasis. I’d never even heard of leishmaniasis except in emails from Rick.
It might have been more gratifying for Rick if I’d played the part of the wide-eyed but bubbly and enthusiastic neophyte better. But that’s not my style: when I’m uncomfortable, I get quiet. When I don’t understand the world I’m in, I have to put it all together in my own way – and while I ask questions, I have to do that myself. So for the first three or four days, my head was fully devoted to just getting the basic pattern down, in such a way that it made sense: the names of the people and who they were, spatial relationships, how the inverter/battery/generator setup worked, and so on. It was a weird feeling, the first day, wandering through a hillside where the guys were working and not being able to identify anyone except Man Hing. It took a couple of days for me to learn their names, and it took a lot longer before I had a rudimentary sense of them as people. Similarly, the jungle was just overwhelming. And while I got a better sense of it with every walk, I didn’t get to the point where it felt familiar, where I wasn’t on edge in it. It took me a *week* before I ventured more than 50m from the cabana on my own.
And I didn’t really notice how ungratifying a visitor I was. I don’t remember what it was specifically, but several days after I got there, I got all hyper about something, and Rick said, that’s the first time I’ve seen you get excited about anything here. Similarly, when I was visibly delighted by the beaches on Isla Colon, Rick said, well, I guess we’ve established that you like beaches. I responded with, I *understand* beaches. What I was trying to say was less that I have a passing familiarity with coastal geomorphology and more that it’s easier to just burble happily and enjoy myself in my silly way when my brain isn’t processing 16 never-before-experienced events at once.
My overwhelmed phase coincided with Rick’s period of catching up to everything that had happened in the five months since he’d been there. He wasn’t in the bubbliest of moods either.
It’s not like those first few days sucked (well, the part where I discovered biting ants sucked). But the longer I was there, the *more* I liked it. And there were about a million special moments that don’t fit neatly into a blogstory and that I don’t have pictures of. Like the plankton: when the water isn’t cloudy, if you go swimming at night, the plankton glow all around you (we went swimming a lot at night. It was hot, and it gets dark very early.) Rick jumped on the dock, and the shock waves lit up. Another night, Rick suggested we go night snorkeling – but since we didn’t want to trash two headlamps in the saltwater, only he had a light and I swam beside him. That was cool – if I looked where he looked, I saw lit up coral. If I looked away, I had phosphorescent plankton in my face. The best part was when these tiny fish with translucent bodies – and guts that lit up neon green, yellow and red when the light hit them – started attacking the light on Rick’s head. He probably didn’t think that was cool, but I had no light and had a front row seat for the show.
There was the time when Rick decided we could probably make potato pancakes out of taro, and, seemingly innocently, asked me for directions and then just *happened* to get distracted and left me to finish the job. The pancakes were delicious (I think most anything is delicious if it’s deep-fried in coconut oil). There was watching Ricardito make the coconut milk in the kitchen, and Choni peel a coconut with his machete. One time, Rick convinced me to go snorkeling in the mangrove with him. The disembodied fingers of the mangrove freaked me out, and I was uncomfortable in the short little mangrove passage I went through, but I’m glad I did it. I got comfortable with diving down with the snorkel on, and got to look at deeper corals. Rick taught Tita to climb onto his kayak while he was in the water - and grew to regret it when he couldn't get the dog off there, and she 
automatically boarded every time he tried to go paddle. There was also the day that Tita decided that people food on the picnic table was hers - and swiftly got tossed into the ocean and discovered a shut gate when she wanted to come back to the house. I don't know who was unhappier at that separation, Rick or Tita - but they both stoically bore it (well, Tita whine a bit. Tasso enjoyed being top dog during that time.) There really were dolphins in dolphin bay. On my last night, Rick and I sat at the picnic table, and the sun was setting just as we had poured ourselves some wine. A few hundred meters off the dock, a bottle-nosed dophin jumped – its entire body came out, and it was silhouetted against the pink of a sunset.
There were other memorable moments that are in the category diametrically opposed from the dophin at sunset: one day, we had the piece of pink crap tandem kayak out, and Rick decided to buy fish from some pashing fishermen who turned out to be shark poachers. Shortly after that, we saw a disembodied cow’s head floating in the water, drifting toward the dock (I went swimming that day, but I refused to go in unless Rick was stationed on the dock, updating me on the relative location of the nasty cow’s head. He went in after I did, and reported that he saw it float by mere minutes after he got out of the water.)
The thing is, at the time, I didn’t care if some of the things Rick wanted to show me didn’t happen (I think he has a long list of “cool things” that he wants to show people). He was more disappointed than I was (I wasn’t, then) that our plans to go way out in the boat and then go to Cayo Crawl for dinner tanked because of a thunderstorm. On my last day, he started listing all the things we *didn’t* get to do: go diving for conch, or have a drink at the bar with the sunken ship. We didn’t go see the Zapatillas, we didn’t tour a chocolate farm, and we certainly didn’t make it out to Escudo. Nor did we explore any of the “easy” mainland rivers he had in mind. The water was never 100% clear for snorkeling. I, however, refused to feel like my visit was any less than what it could have been – it was wonderful, and I liked it, and I’m glad I got to have the experiences that I didn’t like too. *My* only regret was that I never got a pineapple! And Rick bought me one in Panama City anyway.
It’s not until now, three weeks after I’ve come home, that I’ve finished processing a lot of what I did and saw. I’m reading Rick’s almost daily dispatches from Bocas with interest – after all, the story arcs that he’s telling me were already started while I was there. It doesn’t really feel like the trip is completely over, not when I get these little glimpses (these will end soon, too, when the software developer relocates again…)
I want to go back. While I was still in Bocas, we put an end to the whole things Johanna didn’t get to do discussion with a “next time”. And I want there to be a next time (though my invitation to re-visit may have been retracted when I confessed to *not* loving the jungle…) I just don’t do “oh-gosh-this-is-fantastic-squee!” all that well…
But next time? I better get to see how they make chocolate.