Our guide was Anne Gordon, a well known animal trainer that has done work for TV series and movies in the past. She now lives in Panama where she has married an Embera Indian and organizes tours of an Embera village. She recently started doing whale and dolphin watching tours as well. You can find out more here and here. While I don’t for one minute believe her “spiritual” stuff, or that she communicates with the whales or worse, that she can heal people over the phone by channeling ”Dolphin Energy”, Anne is nonetheless a remarkable woman that has deep knowledge and respect for the animals, especially the whales. At our request, she respectfully kept all of that “woo woo” stuff out of our trip, so don’t let her website scare you away (I nearly cancelled after reading her website).

Anne organized the whole trip including the plane tickets, the lodging, a fishing afternoon and the whole day on the catamaran with Capt. Pascal. So this was a pleasant and worry free trip. If I was to do it again though I might elect to take the 1.5 hour ferry ride to the islands. While Air Panama only takes 20 minutes to get there, you need to arrive 1 hour ahead of time and we had 2 hour delays both ways. On the ferry you might actually get to see whales on the way there too!

Our first afternoon a group of three went fishing and caught 3 large dorados (mahi mahi) and 6 mackerels. These were dropped at two different restaurants on the island (Romantica and Gerald’s) where they were cooked for us for our two dinners on the island. All 9 of us slept in the comfy Contadora Island Inn B&B.

The second day we boarded the 44′ catamaran at 9:30 ( I think we should have gone out at 8 am since we were all ready, but it was what it was). The boat is very modern, roomy, stable and comfortable. Capt Pascal is a very nice guy and he cooked us a nice lunch too. The only disadvantage of the catamaran is that it is very slow so you can’t rapidly get to the whales when you spot them. But other than that, it was the ideal platform to spend a day on the sea looking for whales while respecting their space.

Things augured well when Pascal told us he was awaken by a couple of whales that came right up to his boat in the bay where he was anchored. Only a few minutes after leaving Contadora island, we spotted a smaller boat surrounded by a group of whales so we immediately aimed for them and it took us maybe 15 minutes to get there.

Morning Light in Altos del Maria

What triggered me to write this is that this problem came to a climax with my house builder last week. I always liked the man because he’s generally a good honourable man and he stuck to my project even though he was losing money and going through some very difficult times. I kept recommending him despite the fact that he completed my house 1.5 year late (I’m being generous with “completed” too), because he stuck with it and always came through, eventually. I even agreed to pay for things I shouldn’t have because I knew he was having financial problems. I even paid for the materials to fix our swimming pool and only asked him to provide labour and cement. It cost me $3500 to fix a problem that was his responsibility, but that’s what I needed to do to see it get fixed.

One exception is with the wooden doors below my BBQ counter and the steel doors in the carport. He had been promising me those doors since last October. I would ask him once or twice a month when he would deliver them and the answer was always “next week” or “in two weeks”. In January he even said “they are being manufactured right now”. I recently sent him two more potential customers so you would think he would treat me better than this…

Last week I just plain had enough and sent him an email asking him to stop lying to me and tell me exactly what was going on and when he really planned to deliver the doors, if ever. If he had said he needed me to help him with the cost of materials I would have helped, in the interest of actually getting those damn doors. Even if he had told me he couldn’t delvier them, at least I could have moved on and got them from someone else. Anything would have been better than just dragging me along for 9 months.

Well I found out that while they lie constantly, they don’t view it as lying. Telling you what you want to hear is apparently just a form of optimism and to call them out on it is a great attack on their honour. He just went ballistic on me and told me that “no sabe nada de nada” (you don’t know anything about anything), he insisted that he always intended to deliver on his empty promises but that something always came up to preclude it. Nine months of that, really? How stupid does he really think I am? If that doesn’t make him a liar , then it makes him and incredibly poor planner.

Needless to say I will not be recommending him again and I will be buying my own doors from someone else.

1. The French Government attempted to construct the canal first (in fact, it was a commercial enterprise and the government never got directly involved).

2. The French were defeated by diseases (while deadly tropical diseases were a contributing factor, this was not one of the main reasons for their defeat).

In any case, this 600 page book is a fascinating account of the story that was only possible after years of research through the archives in France, America, Colombia and Panama. It is a tale of egos, greed, power, politics, science, culture clashes and the unforgiving jungle of Panama. It is well worth a read if you have an interest in Panama, or simply like history!

And a video as well…

I just had another brush with this incredible inefficiency while trying to register a trailer. I had this really nice trailer custom-made for my company, so I had to figure out how to get it registered.

First thing was to get it insured and while this has nothing to with the government, I hit the first road-block: the insurance company required a serial number, something the custom-manufacturer didn’t provide, but he made one up for me on request. I was also surprised by the cost of the insurance, which was about four times what I expected and nearly as much as for my car! Apparently that is because it is a commercial trailer…

Once I had the insurance I had to go to my local municipal office (Palacio Municipal de Chame) to get it registered. As usual they needed photocopies of all my documents including my passport and government ID (cedula). I always carry a copy of my passport, cedula and insurance, but I was missing copies of the trailer’s description. As usual, while they require a copy of everything they do not have a photocopier (in this day of $200 copiers, that is inexcusable, a scanner would be even better and save tons of paper). So I had to go out to the nearest photocopy center and come back. Then I needed to go out to the cashier to pay my $15 registration fee, and also go to the Banco Nacional to deposit $10 in the treasury account and obtain a deposit voucher.

I then had to go get a “revisado”, this ridiculous and useless yearly inspection process where they take pictures of your vehicle but never inspect anything, as evidenced by the thousands of completely unsafe vehicles on Panama’s roads. What they failed to tell me though is that because my trailer wasn’t yet in the system, I had to get something called a “pre-revisado”, where they create your record in the registration system and enter the vehicle’s description including weight, dimensions, serial numbers, etc.  The problem is that only a few places are authorized to do the “pre-revisado”, so after some seemingly endless arguing with the clueless girl at the San-Jose revisado center I finally figured out the problem and had to go all the way to La Chorrera with my trailer. The pre-revisado cost $15 and showed me how easy it would be to get a stolen vehicle properly registered in this country, the process being entirely handled by some gofer in a second-rate garage.

Once armed with the pre-revisado, I had to go to the Palacio Municipal de La Chorrera with all my docs and went through another photocopy dance because I had already given away my passport/cedula copy! It was doubly frustrating here because the woman actually had a nice photocopier right on her desk, but when I pointed it out she sternly informed me that it was strictly for internal use and not for public use! After returning with a photocopy they could finally print the official registration certificate (Registro Unico) which includes a hologram and a government seal. They also assigned me a plate number, but I had to go back to my municipal office in Chame in order to retrieve the actual plate.

Something that should have taken a few minutes ended up taking several days…