| There is plenty
to do in the areas around the town: there is Parque Amistad which leads
up to and over the border of Costa Rica; years before there had been a
European Colony near Parque Amistad, lot’s of Germans but also other Europeans
as well, I think mostly Czech. The one time I hiked into Parque Amistad,
I ran into some Germans. There is also Parque Volcan which includes the
highest volcano in Panama; the volcano is no longer active, the Park is
a very good place for long walks.
We drove around
the valley and enjoyed the fresh air. The valley is full of plants and
flowers that you would normally only see in a flower shop in the U.S. or
Europe, but in Cerro Punta the flowers and plants grow in the wild.
The houses
are A-frames with wood alpine exteriors. Most of the houses in Cerro Punta
are made of wood.
There is water
all throughout the town and the soil is black volcanic: lots of onions
and lettuce being grown and flowers. The Panamanian supermarket chain El
Rey is the major producer in Cerro Punta. Land is not readily available;
we saw one lot that was going for $25 a square meter; we saw a two hectacre
place with 4 small bedrooms, two-bathrooms that was going for $250,000.
It was set up and back from the town and the owner, I think, is the owner
of the Hotel Quezales – also a very nice place to stay.
But back to
the Hotel Bambito and the new admistration sign. We checked in and went
to our room. As I walked into the room with the bellboy, I remembered that
Jimmy Carter used to come to the Bambito to fish. There was a bar in the
room and thick glass ashtrays and an old disconnected stereo system from
the 1970s. We went to the restaurant and had a good meal, then went back
to the room and talked. People quietly pulled up during the night and walked
to their rooms, no noise, very private. After I woke up with a terrible
headache, we went to breakfast and then checked out and walked around the
grounds of the hotel taking photos. They have a pool and two tennis courts
with lights. The price of whole thing - flight, rental car and hotel -
can be as low $119; you get breakfast free and you can eat strawberries
and crème, bread and cheese in the town of Cerro Punta for lunch.
There is also a pizzeria in Cerro Punta and other small restaurants. The
$119 package is available through National Car Rental, Aeroperlas and the
Bambito Hotel, rent a car first with National and they can offer you the
package.
We stayed in
Cerro Punta for an hour or two and then drove back down to David: we ate
at a pizzeria in David in front of the Hotel Nacional David. Very good
place and then headed for the town of Boquete where Gabi’s oldest friend
in Panama mother lives. The drive from David to Boquete is very short.
Boquete has been in the news a lot lately for being one of the best places
to live and retire to worldwide. And I can see why. But the real beauty
of Boquete is the farm land up above the cliffs that overlook the town
center, that is where the air and views are incredible. We were tired and
we pulled into Boquete at sundown around 6:30pm. There is a Sushi restaurant
in the town along with coffee shops: not normal for a small Panamanian
town, the people we talked to from Boquete were O.K. with the changes and
large influx of outsiders, though we heard some people were not.
We called Gabi’s
friend’s mother and she sent her younger daughter to come get us. They
had a new car and we followed them up into mountains. Coffee fields all
around us now, with the late day sun against the dark, green metallic
coffee leaves. The views of the valley below were open and as you wound
up the road, going higher and higher, the landscape changed and then changed
again around you. One moment it was Panama, then Costa Rica, then Ireland
and then the greenest Pennsylvania. I was floored by the changes.
We turned left
across traffic and went up a small country lane that was not paved but
had two concrete strips that you drove on; short green grass grew up around
the concrete. The views were of open fields and wooden, brightly colored
houses. We entered the farm and met Marilyn’s mother: she reminded me of
people I had known when I was living in the countryside of Panama, but
she was stronger than the people I had known; she lived in a place where
the soil gave back food. The earth was volcanic and anything that you planted
would flourish in the soil. In the poorer areas of Panama this was not
so and people were hungry and struggled. Nothing worse than a farmer who
can’t grow anything. We went out into the fields and looked at the carrots,
the onions, yucca, bananas, Zazamoras (Raspberries), beans and papaya.
She was a strong fiery person, very conservative, but decisive – which
is often the case – and wanting to tell us about the evils around us. Men
were evil; they talked pretty but never stayed around: she secretly wanted
to have a male companion and hinted so, but none of them – men – had ever
stayed around long enough to trust – “they’re all dogs.” I was in dangerous
territory as my wife Gabi caught onto this line of thinking very quickly,
two-on-one. I moved the conversation to letting the mother know that I
had lived in the countryside of Panama and had always liked it. We became
friends after that. She liked shotguns; she had had a Brazilian shotgun
she told me – she didn’t have it now – she said the dogs kept people away
now and anyway on this side of the valley there were no problems. She told
me that on the other side of the valley men were being raped, so people
were carrying guns. She never told me who was raping these men. She pointed
in the distance and she told me an American had bought a piece of property
nearby recently: she liked Americans, at last someone, and she was looking
after the place for him, making sure no one was stealing anything. We then
walked up to an area that was open and airy; in the distance I thought
I could see where they were cutting the new Boquete to Cerro Punta road.
Sean Connery is supposed to have a place along the road. Not that this
woman would give a shit about that: who? We drank a little wine and talked
about the bible, she did, I listened. What she said about religion was
directly connected to her immediate world, her fields, her house, her family.
As she talked I noticed a picture of a young U.S. military soldier on her
old wooden cabinet. He had been a friend of her daughters; she couldn’t
remember his name. He had stopped writing around the time of the first
Gulf War – they thought he had been killed. Seeing the official army photograph
of the G.I. didn’t really surprise me: lots of homes in Panama have pictures
of U.S. G.I.s that came through Panama on their way to somewhere else.
The winds pick up at night in Boquete and the stars come out; there is
no light for miles and you have an encompassing dark sky, with high winds,
and the sound of wind whipping through pine trees and in the distance you
can see the outline of distance hills and volcanoes.
We stayed in
a little side section of her house and slept, not very well, the mattress
wasn’t comfortable, but the air was good. We woke up around 6:30 and had
breakfast; Corn tortillas with fresh mountain cheese and Nescafe – she
didn’t like coffee even though it was the major cash crop in Boquete. We
had an early plane to catch in David, so we left before 7:30am. The flight
back was smooth; I was tired from the early morning wake up and slept a
little on the plane and two hours more back at the house.
Places To
See
Hotel
Bambito
http://www.flylatinamerica.com/hotels/panama/bambito.htm
Hotel Los
Quetzales: http://www.losquetzales.com/s_index.htm
Parque
Amistad
http://www.letsgo.com/CORI/10-SouthernCostaRica-122
Parque
Amistad And Parque Volcan Baru http://www.adventurepanama.com/page9.htm
Hotel Nacional
David http://www.panamainfo.com/granhotelnacional/
Aeroperlas:
http://www.aeroperlas.com/eservicio.html
http://vacations-a-la-carte.com/?http://vacations-a-la-carte.com/airlines/airports/panama/david.html
http://www.nationalpanama.com/english/promotions.htm
Hotel In
Boquete http://www.travelimpressions.com/destinations/camerica/pty/pty_pmt.html
The Trials
Of Henry Kissinger
I read most
of the book and now have seen the movie based on the book starring: Kissinger,
William Shawcross, Seymour Hersh, Edward Korry, Alexander Haig and Christopher
Hitchens, and supporting cast of: Michael Tigar, William Safire, Elizabeth
Becker and Richard Nixon. The people interviewed in the movie were very
articulate and well spoken. The message seemed to be that diplomacy has
a strong propensity to ignore the legal and pursue the purely political.
Politics has less rules and more flexibility than the law. That means politics
in the form of diplomacy can do great good or do extensive damage. In politics
if you are the strong then you can negotiate over the life and death of
people you now nothing about. Politics in this case will depend very much
on the cast of mind of those involved in making political decisions, as
there are no general road maps as in law.(As a side note, Kissinger is
out of step in the video when he talks about himself as a "swinger"; he
should stay to the kind of politics he knows.)
Kissinger comes
off in this whole thing as a little confused. Terrible childhood filled
with chaos, insecurity and exile, all of this was inflicted on Kissinger
and his family in the name of order and security – in this case Nazi Germany.
Why would you come out of that and want to inflict with such savagery the
same on others: destroying Cambodia, or planning the assassination of the
Chilean Chief of Staff. Actually, if you think about it, it makes perfect
sense: youth and enviroment
Of course Kissinger’s
rational for carrying out the killings in Cambodia and Chile is the doctrine
of “national security”. But the doctrine of “national security” can
be used to justify about any criminal act, and has been used in the past
for just that reason. The conception of “national security” has changed
in the United States over time. When the country was founded “national
security” meant protecting the country from foreign invasion. After the
threat of foreign invasion was eliminated, “national security” meant eliminating
the native population and chasing the Spanish out of Florida. From there
“national security” meant expanding west and taking lands controlled by
the Mexicans. After that was achieved “national security” meant not only
controlling Mexico, but also Central America and the Caribbean. Then at
the end of the 19th century “national security” justified American expansionist
policies in the Pacific, with the taking of the Philippines from the Spanish
and the annexation of Hawaii. After that, in the beginning and middle part
of the 20th century, “national security” meant securing Europe, and then
in the 1950s and 1960s “national security” meant fighting in southeast
Asia and now “national security” means expanding into the Middle East and
curtailing civil liberties within the U.S. What I am saying is that the
term “national security” can be used to justify any kind of policy, no
matter the policy’s moral foundation good or bad - it can't just be all
one or the other.
Other articles
by the author:
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