Melissa’s Soapbox

Santa Catalina

The Infamous Phone Booth
After leaving Panama City, we rented a car and headed southwest to tour Panama’s provinces on the Pacific side with our ultimate destination being Santa Catalina in Veraguas. Our guidebook described Santa Catalina as a place where “several hundred people lead simple lives in simple homes.” We felt this to be a fair characterization!

The town has one phone (payphone booth outside of the one grocery store) that serves as a landmark (”just take a right at the phone”). Luckily the phone works consistently or else the grocery store would be fairly useless altogether … there’s barely any food in there! Additionally, there are 3 restaurants, but the quality and quantity of their menu offerings depends on whether or not the guy with the vegetable truck shows up. At our first breakfast, we asked to see a menu when we were offered “jamon y pan” and a bottle water for $2.50. Later, we ran into some people who also had cheese with their breakfast and we felt jealous. For the 3 evenings we spent in Santa Catalina, we had dinner at Pizzeria Jamming which was the best food in town and a major social gathering for tourists and locals alike. Although we were unable to choke down any pizza for the remainder of our trip, we found Santa Catalina to be a highlight of Central America.

As with many places during our travels, Santa Catalina is full of ironies. For instance, this one phone town has satellite television and satellite Internet access. The guy who owns the Internet cafe must be the richest man in town with rates of $2.00 per hour (roughly the cost of 2 meals, or a third of hotel room for 1 night)!

Another interesting irony is that in this super small and remote town, we met more fascinating people than anywhere in the world … mostly ex-pats with amazing experiences that lend to them landing in this strange part of the world. Though we fancy our own lives fairly interesting, Andy and I were routinely mesmerized by the stories we heard in Santa Catalina. At breakfast, we noticed a guy playing solitaire and minding his makeshift jewelry counter. He told us about escaping from Cuba with a friend by building a raft out of empty wooden barrels. The sea was so rough that they lashed themselves to the raft to avoid falling off and drowning. They were hoping for Florida but landed in Grand Cayman. Fascinating. Our dive instructor was born in London but raised in Oman as her father was a diplomat. After working a conventional marketing job for several years, she moved to a small island off the coast of Zanzibar to dive instruct. After a year, she suffered from severe malnutrition and moved on to Panama because she wanted a remote location with more readily available food. Fascinating.

Additionally, Santa Catalina is an internationally recognized surfing destination, and home to some of the best diving in central America. Development approaches and the locals are hesitant to accept it or to get in on it! Speculation runs wild of which rich corporation swept up acres and acres of untouched beachfront land for pennies and for what reason. Many locals fear that their remote existence is definitely at risk and that moving on to further drop out of society will be necessary in the short term.

We signed in at the dive shop, Scuba Coiba and met Tomas (our French dive instructor), Sophie (his Argentinean girlfriend), and Bernard and Jerome (scuba adventurers on holiday from Paris). The shop offers trips to Isla de Coiba which was a penal colony during Noriega’s dictatorship. The island’s rather sinister legacy is full of tales of “disappeared” political opponents, impenetrable jungle, dangerous currents, blood-thirsty sharks and rivers teeming with man-eating crocodiles. The prisoners are all gone now, and Coiba is national park and UNESCO World Heritage Site of nearly untouched terrain and newly discovered diving.

After our training dive back home in Laguna Beach (which involved messy beach entries, maybe 3 fish and a lot of sand, along with rain and — yes — hail), our expectations were low, and when we were promised white-tip reef shark sightings, we became very nervous. But once settled in the water some 65-70 feet deep, swimming with thousands of fish amongst coral reefs and rock walls and other marine life felt totally normal but simultaneously extraordinary. Several sharks (some bigger than us!) joined our group and swam along with us for about 20 minutes of the day’s first dive (too curious for comfort in my opinion!). It was an amazing experience.