I ran across this great article written by Seth Kugel “Frugal Traveler” about his visit to Panama with his parents.
The first Panamanian I met promptly handed me a baby.
It was a logical move, from her perspective. She was the lone person working a bamboo-walled roadside stand halfway between Tocumen International Airport and the sunbaked Azuero Peninsula. I had parked our rental car, told my parents to wait, and run in to order a cantaloupe milkshake. And, of course, you can’t cut melon, scoop ice and operate a blender while holding a little girl.
But for a visitor just off a five-hour nonstop from New York, it was a bewilderingly tender moment.
“Me permite?” she asked with utter nonchalance, then handed me the 4month-old with scrunched up lips and golden stud earrings. “Her name is Hannah,” she continued in the choppy Caribbean-style Spanish of the country. “Like Hannah Montana.”
Hannah was perfectly calm, as if she had been handed to scruffy, gray-bearded foreigners a thousand times before. A few minutes later, I handed her back, along with $2.50 for the shake (Panama operates on U.S. dollars) and headed back to the car, where my parents were waiting. I showed them the selfie I had taken, hoping to pass some of the warm welcome on to them.
It seemed an appropriately familial moment. In a sense, my parents have been watching their own son depend on the kindness of strangers to care for him for over five years as the Frugal Traveler columnist. This would be the fifth and final time I took Peter and Judy Kugel along (as Feb. 7 will mark my final column).
It was an auspicious start to our trip. My parents essentially taught me to travel, and we believe that being handed a baby, getting a rental car stuck in the mud (Nicaragua), swimming with a local family (Croatia), happening upon a midsummer feast (Norway) or dining out in the immigrant-filled suburbs (Vancouver) are the kind of experiences that matter more than museums and sightseeing cruises. And they almost always cost less.
That’s one of the reasons we were heading to Azuero in the first place. A Panamanian friend of a friend had called it “one of my favorite places” and “very traditional of the Panamanian culture.” When I found very little online except for talk of surf breaks (age inappropriate) and annual festivals (not coinciding with our dates), I decided it would be a perfect low-key first experience in what was a new country for all of us. An added bonus: It’s the driest part of the country, which we’d be visiting during the rainy season.
Judy and Peter Kugel, the author’s parents, walk down a sidewalk in Casco Viejo. Credit Seth Kugel for The New York Times
Panama itself is convenient to get to. There are direct flights from a dozen U.S. cities, plus Puerto Rico, on Copa Airlines; my parents flew in from Boston and I came from New York. A search this week found flights from February for as low as $500 from New York and $560 from Boston. My ticket was more expensive, the first leg of a longer trip. (Wait for that Feb. 7 column for more.)
The Azuero, a squarish 3,000 square miles of land that juts out into the Pacific from the southern coast, about four hours from Panama City, is perhaps best known for a town called Pedasí. An allegedly adorable spot with a colonial center, I read it was becoming popular among American retirees, and saw there is even a place called the Bakery, whose sign boasts “artisanal bread”; its muffins and pepperoni pizza get strong reviews on TripAdvisor.
Pedasí was out.
Instead, we checked into Hostel Kimmell, a bed-and-breakfast in the lazy little town of Santo Domingo. It is run by Martha Kimmell, who as a child came from Panama City to spend summers in what had been her great-grandmother’s house. Ms. Kimmell speaks near-perfect English (with an outsized affection for the phrase “I’m not going to lie to you”) and is an aggressively good host — short on charm but spirited and well-meaning. She told us how she is leading an effort to develop tourism in her corner of Azuero, training local guides and developing activities on a still-rough rural tourism loop.
I had bypassed online booking sites and contacted Martha directly, booking a “family room” for $89 a night, less than the online price. My parents said would prefer their own room, but I’ve long found that if you book cramped quarters in the off-season, the hosts will often upgrade you. “I hope you don’t mind, I’ve put in you in two rooms,” Martha told us. Mind getting a $145 value for $89? Not at all.
The rooms bordered a covered outdoor area replete with hammocks — perfect for reading and watching the neighbors stroll by under their umbrellas (used to ward off the sun, not the rain that was pelting other regions of the country).
My parents are generally up for anything they can still do at ages 77 and 85. (My mother could probably do back flips if she tried; my father is slower, but shows remarkable taste for adventure nine years into a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.) So we accepted Martha’s generous offer to take us on a local tour into the inland hills, through agricultural villages with picturesque names like Loma Bonita (Pretty Hill) and Bajo Corral (Low Corral). It ended on a hilltop that overlooked cornfields and had a sweeping view down to the sea.
Or so we expected. “I didn’t realize it would get dark so soon,” said Martha. We settled on a visit to a tiny general store, Kiosco Los Sobrinos, where the owner showed us a traditional embroidered dress she was making and sold me a glass bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale for 35 cents.
By now, Martha’s guides are offering tours in English and Spanish for $25 an hour — while we were there, she was still winging them, for free. On a morning hike the next day, my father asked what bird was making a repeated call in the distance. “I have no idea,” she said, noting that she was trying to convince the government to fund a wildlife inventory. We laughed. That was after she took us to “help” milk her boyfriend Carlos’s cows. Even though it was barely after dawn, he and another worker had already filled several 35-liter metal tanks with frothy milk; they allow each calf to nurse from its mother as they milk her, which we found adorable. They assigned me to one of the tamer cows (named Muñeca, or doll) and watched as I extracted a tiny fraction of a liter.
My parents contented themselves taking photos of their son’s incompetence; I learned that my dad had milked cows one summer in upstate New York, circa 1940, and we all learned how the business worked in Azuero: Farmers leave the full tanks by the side of the road, and companies send trucks around to take the milk. Carlos used to sell his milk to Quesos Lourdes, a local company which made the fresh yogurt we would later have at breakfast, but now sold to Nestlé.
That kind of detail — that a multinational corporation like Nestlé gets its milk from cows like Carlos’s — is enough to fascinate me, so I was happy to hear my father enjoyed it as well. “It’s a kind of tourism I haven’t done in a long time,” he said.
He was referring to a day spent seeing nothing but the normal life of the region. And we continued it that night, when we went for the second time to a place called Dolce y Saladito, a casual, untouristed, nominally Italian place in the neighboring (and much bigger) town of Las Tablas. We stuck mostly to the local fare, especially the expertly fried green plantains, fresh $2 juices (like frosty pineapple and very fresh strawberry) and generously portioned $5 plates of Creole-style fried rice studded with carrots and celery and chicken or pork. (Panamanian cuisine is a mix of Caribbean — this meal’s apparent influence — and Central American influences.)
It was becoming evident that the main attraction of the peninsula is its small-town ordinariness, a change from our more complex urban ordinariness back home. To be clear, there are some legitimate tourist attractions in Azuero. We took a boat ($70 for up to six people) to Isla Iguana, an island wildlife reserve populated by two kinds of lizards but most notable for its empty (on nonholiday weekdays, at least) and near-perfect beach, covered with skittering hermit crabs. We visited a dusty museum in Las Tablas (admission, $1) dedicated to its native son Belisario Porras, a three-time president of Panama in the early 20th century, and were tickled to meet one of his great-grandsons, who coincidentally was there removing a portrait of the president lent to the museum by his brother.
And we ended up getting a small taste of the peninsula’s festivals by visiting the Casa Museo Manuel F. Zárate, a tiny, airy house museum in the little town of Guararé. The town of 4,500 is known for its annual September festival celebrating the mejorana, a traditional Panamanian stringed instrument. Entrance was free, as was a Spanish-speaking guide: We learned about the festival and its founder, Mr. Zárate, and viewed examples of the intricate embroidered polleras, dresses produced locally and used in the festival. Our guide, Pancho, also told us of a curious local ordinance: During the month of the festival, non-Panamanian music is prohibited within town limits. “If you hear someone playing foreign music, you can call the police and they will come stop it,” he said.
My favorite activity, though, was simply to wander out of Martha’s home and around Santo Domingo. By day, the town was largely empty, even in the old-fashioned central plaza. But at night people appeared on their porches, bought supplies at Doña Gilma’s minimart, turned up 1990s merengue in their homes or tossed baseballs in the street. (Panama is a baseball country, boasting several major leaguers, including Randall Delgado of the Arizona Diamondbacks, a native of Las Tablas.) We had all noticed an adorably pink house on one corner, surrounded by flowering bushes surrounding it, and I made a mental note to come back and take a picture it the next day. My plans were foiled the next morning by a naked 2-year-old climbing on the porch furniture, rendering photography creepily inappropriate.
We did leave a day and a half to explore Panama City at the end — staying at a $135 a night Airbnb apartment in Casco Viejo, the old colonial center that had declined and decayed and is currently being restored, with predictable gallery-cafe-boutique-hotel-heavy results. My parents love Frank Gehry, so we went to his lone Latin American work, the Biodiversity Museum (admission, $22) under a riotously jagged, multicolored roof that resembles a partially melted Lego castle.
And, of course, we had to go to the Canal and watch a boat go through the Miraflores Locks ($15). It’s a whole to-do described by a wisecracking bilingual P.A. announcer. With the water draining astonishingly fast from one of the massive locks in under 10 minutes, he said: “The fish don’t know whether they’re coming or going, they might as well go along for the ride!”
His jokes were not a match for my father’s humor, an occasionally embarrassing mainstay of our family trips dating back to the 1980s. The boat was flying a Liberian flag and hauling what looked like enormous propane gas tanks; my father noted the huge “NO SMOKING” sign painted across the superstructure. “I hope the crew knows how to read English,” he said.
But we’ll mostly remember Azuero, which was as dirt cheap as it was genuine — it’s the only place I’ve ever seen ATMs give out dollar bills. After a $3.50 lunch one day in one of the fondas, or traditional restaurants, in Las Tablas, we spotted a little stand called La Heladera, one block north of the main plaza on Paseo Carlos Lopes. A woman sold what were clearly homemade desserts from a glass display case, and we pounced. Thirty-five cents got me a masmellena (from the Spanish “más me llena” – something like “It fills me up”), the Panamanian take on bread pudding; my mother had a gluten-free jam-filled merengue for 20 cents, and my dad had a coconut cake for 30 cents. I noticed that nowhere on La Heladera’s signage was there any boast of “artisanal” processes; there did not need to be.