Castaway-style Dining

Broken bridge

Yesterday was perhaps even better than the day before! We left early in the morning to go work near Pina (that small town on the Caribbean side), this time going further west once we got to the coast and checking out a few roadside cuts and quarries that were potentially of interest. The drive itself was surprisingly eventful, in that we encountered a fallen bridge with buses and delivery trucks backed up for about a quarter mile. Passenger cars were still allowed to cross though, so long as everyone but the driver got out and crossed on foot. I don't know what caused the collapse, or how long it had been that way, but the bridge was intact enough for a crossing, it just had a bizarre-looking kink in the middle of it. I was a little bit nervous that the concrete was going to fall out from under my feet as I walked across, but we made it over just fine. The drivers of the larger vehicles were finding ways to move their products and finish their routes despite the holdup. Buses on either side of the bridge basically traded passengers and turned around and delivery trucks were selling off some of their snacks and drinks to all the stranded people. After getting past the bridge, we were basically the only car on the road, and I was given my first lesson driving a stick. It did not go smoothly at all! I'm kind of got the hang of it after 15 or 20 minutes, but I'm going to need WAY more practice!

As the old saying goes: A banana in the hand is worth two in
the bunch

A few of the sites that we had hoped to visit had been overrun with elephant grass and shrubs or were closed off, and those that we were able to get to had exceptionally low productivity. At one quarry, I thought for half a second that I had found some large pieces of petrified wood, but upon closer inspection they turned out to just be sandstone-filed casts (the bark texture was all that had been preserved). I think someone found a claw at one site, and Aaron found a broken shark vertebra at another, but that was it. As we were about to leave the last site, though, we spotted a bunch of ripe bananas on a nearby tree and couldn't resist the urge to go chop them down! I've always been unimpressed by the fruit, eating it mostly because they're so convenient and easy to get, but those little guys were incredible! They were short and fat, brilliantly yellow, and the peels came right off. And the flavor was unlike any banana I've ever had before - they tasted somehow more banana-like and were remarkably sweet. The only let-down was that they were FULL of seeds! So many that you couldn't avoid them no matter how hard you tried or how small your bites were. Commercial bananas are clones that have had the seeds bred out of them, and now I understand why. The seeds have an acrid taste and are unpleasantly crunchy, so to eat the bananas we would kind of just roll around each bite in our mouths and spit out dozens of seeds. Totally worth the effort though!

Since there were no other sites to visit and we had nothing to do back in Panama City, we decided to take an extended lunch out on one of the cleaner looking beaches under the shade of a grove of palm trees. Sam and I took it upon ourselves to bring down a coconut or two, a task which, as it turned out, I'm pretty good at! Of course I had a number of failures before my first nut (throwing rocks, attempting to climb), but in the end I was able to use one of the palm fronds to continually knock the coconuts into one another, eventually getting two to fall down (one of which came dangerously close to smacking me in the face). We used our machete to hack away the fibrous pod and expose the nut and then carefully sliced off the top so we wouldn't lose the water (I'm also quite good at this!). By the end of the coconut feast, it was apparent to me that the meat and water were mediocre at best, but I swear the first few bites/sips were beyond delicious! I think the water was slightly fermented, since it tasted a bit like kombucha and was almost carbonated, but I took my chances and drank a ton. I also ate about half a coconut's worth of the meat. Upon finishing, I was extremely satisfied but also felt like I had a rock in my stomach. Overdoing it hardly describes the amount of coconut and banana I ate that afternoon.

Drinking coconut water, sloth-style

On our drive back in to the city, one of the weirdest, hardest to describe things happened to us - twice. Once as we were approaching a narrow bridge (not the broken one) and once as we were making the turn away from Pina and back to the highway. In both cases, some kids (maybe 12-20) formed a sad-looking roadblock out of string, buckets, and an occasional cone, and then would jump out of the bushes as our car approached. They covered their skin with charcoal, wore palm fronds as clothes, pinned random trash and knickknacks on themselves, and wore hats made of buckets, cones, and boxes. As they approached the car they screamed wildly and danced/hopped around and looked overjoyed. One kid would approach the driver's window and say "dame algo" (give me something), among a million other incomprehensible things, while the others would continue chanting and hopping or would approach the other windows and introduce themselves. We offered each group roughly a dollar in change, which judging from their expressions was more than they had hoped to get, then they cleared the roadblock and let us pass. It was so much more surreal than I'm capable of putting into words, and for the rest of the ride home all of repeatedly broke out in laughter just at the thought of it.