Going The Distance

We head back out to the Miraflores area of the City where our next couple live. They have been married for 11 years, both are on their second marriage and arrived with kids in tow, so the marriage started with 5 kids. Pablo worked for the APC (Panama Canal Authority) for 38 years. It’s one of Panama’s biggest companies, employing 7,000 people directly (and countless more indirectly through tourism, restaurants, museums, etc) and much of the country’s youth aspire to work for it. His wife, Marisa, also works for the APC as an electrista. And to our delight, she is fully qualified to operate one of the little locomotives which guide the supertankers into place in the locks. (“Tommy Tow Trucks”). Uniting two families of teenagers who have been raised in totally different ways is enough to separate even the hardiest of loves, but these two somehow managed it. Marisa talked about how the 3 sons, raised by their single father, had very boyish ways about them (flipflops and bare tops the norm, coming and going from the house as they pleased) but that they managed to work it out between them, with a lot of love and a little diplomacy (the parent of the relevant children would tackle whatever issue arose). Her piece of advice for lasting love was that, when you find yourself engaged in debate with your beloved, decide whether the discussion about a topic which is going to affect you for life, or just a passing foolishness. Then react accordingly. Invariably, nothing is that important…

The firemen burst into unprompted life at around 6.10am. This is not an hour which the Clears can recognise. Nonetheless, there is no chance to going back to sleep. With a bit of fannying about, more references to Sex Max, and a quick chance to interview the entire squad on “Que es el Amor?”, we set off with the ever-famished and big-haired Mark to find a big breakfast (he eats the meals of 8 men).

I force Mark into the sidecar, the helmet barely fits over his now-massive Einstein ‘fro. Then we part company. Him to cycle to his boat down the canal (lucky sod) in 3 days and us to drive to Panama City.

We have yet another meeting with friends when we cross paths with our favourite South African BMW man, Chris, and his gorgeous wife, Melissa (references to Barbie and Ken abound). It’s speedy, seedy and sweaty. But we promise to cross paths in Ecuador.

And so Mike and I head to Panama City. The rains come, natch. We are now listening to Mr Norrell and Jonathan Strange on audiobook which is totally absorbing and helps the hours fly by. Even in the rain. Once in Panama City, we check into some local shithole and head immediately to the Miraflores Restaurant north of the city, where I promptly am rendered as excited as a child.

The Miraflores locks are one of three sets of locks of on the Panama Canal. I really have never seen anything like them in my entire life. The canal is busy day and night. Supertankers queue up across the bay to traverse the canal (which takes them about 10 hours, across the three lock systems and various lakes along the way). The supertankers are pulled by locomotive engines, genuinely like Thomas the Tank Engine, and guided (with usually about one foot to spare either side) into position for the locks. Out floods the water, the huge vessels sink and then glide on to the next awaiting lock. I’m speechless with excitement. Which doesn’t happen often, let me assure you. If you have any doubt about where to spend your next well-earned holiday, come to Panama City and spend a happy couple of hours in this restaurant, it’s one of the most extraordinary things I have ever seen.

The day dawns bright, and many tears are shed by the various Boylan women as the little Ural heads off into the distance towards Panama and a day of PanAmerican driving.

The border provides the usual hilarity (through gritted teeth) of 15 documents to be filled in, and hundreds of locals to be paid off. Mike stands at a window, ostensibly at the front of  the queue, with a lady who serves 10 men behind him by reaching through the window for the documents of the people behind him. He, naturally, found this a calming and rewarding experience. “How many more hours have I got to wait?” he asked her in Spanish. She held up her palm to his face. “What?! FIVE hours?” said the ever-cheeky Miguel. Howls of laughter from the gathered crowd. Moments later he was invited into air-conditioned comfort to begin the lengthy process. Nothing like turning the locals against their bureaucrats.

Day of driving. The usual sweat and rain. We make contact with Mark Beaumont who tells us that he is “at the firestation” in San Felix. As we pull up, to the amusement (perhaps bemusement?) of the firemen, it transpires that Mark is spending the night in the dorm with the 10 men. And we are invited too. Just little old me and 12 men. In bunks. Grrrrrr.

I get down to ribaldry in no time, asking if they have a naked calendar, and quickly establishing with the Jefe (the chief) that his man Jose was the young buck who had earnt the much coveted title of Senor Febrero (why February was the dream month, my dodgy Spanish couldn’t discern). One of the merry men whipped out a packet of Sex Max, “para problemas erectil”, which brought with it a fresh wave of chuckling.

Sleeping with that many men was exciting (“poke me if I snore” said Mike as he clambed up on the bunk above me. Sexy sexy). I didn’t really sleep, having given my parents all the camping gear to take back to the UK, I froze in the airconditioned dormitory.

My parents embrace the Outdoor Life with a ne’er-before-seen gusto. They started Wed by waving heartily to us as they set off on a 2 hour rainforest walk. (All this is in direct contrast to the behaviour of the two GTDers who are supine and intend to be for the full 48 hours) Two hours later, they appear sweatier than it was previously thought that humans could get, puce and cursing the vine-ruptured and steep walkways which penetrated the jungle. They had little time to grumble to our passive selves before they had to leave for their horseride through the jungle and down along the beach. Again, they leave with a smug wave and cheeky grin. Again, they return broken and shadows of their former selves. The horses, when they emerged from the jungle overgrowth, saw the expanse of the beach and both bolted with everything they had. My father has only just started to ride, my mother’s horse shot sharply sideways when it saw driftwood – both of these fillies were at top gallop speed, and my parents could do nothing but cling to their manes with determination and terror.

Thursday morning brought with it a whale watching trip for the intrepid Mr and Mrs B. 4 hours of floating on the high seas and not a whale to be seen. The captain of the 5 man vessel took over 35 phonecalls on his cellphone though. My parents loved that.

The day starts with a curveball: Mark Beaumont, the man cycling the same route as us (incidentally, in the same time), needed two parcels collected from San Jose and delivered to him on the road. Mike and I have become mates with him and his team so offered to do it as it just about coincided with our trip and seemed a nice excuse to see Mark and say hello. Little did we realise that he’d be miles away from us at this point, and that my parents had kindly offered to put us up in a Costa Rican paradise for two days to give us a bit of a break. Mark and paradise seemed mutually exclusive.

Realising that we had to get the package to Mark, we set off in convoy. Mike and I on the bike following my parents in their massive beast of a 4 wheel drive vehicle. It is not long, of course, before the heavens open and the wrath of Rainy Season is upon us. My parents are not taking all this very well. A full day of driving, in the rain on very potholey and hilly roads, trying to catch up with a man they don’t even know and even less feel that they owe a favour to… So I suggest we stop at the next wonderful resort, deposit the parents, Mike and I then take the car and drive to catch up with Mark who is an hour and a half further down the road. Relief from all. Parents stop at blissful Cristal Ballena resort in Uvita on the Costa Rican coast, Mike and I can race down to Mark and we end up having a muchly entertaining if barely edible dinner in Rio Claro before we turn around and head back for 2 days of general, undiluted loafing.

(the reason that this seemingly mundane update has made it on to the blog is that tempers really were very very frayed today. I think it was very nice for Mike and I to realise that what we are doing – namely driving for 8 hours for one day, stopping and interviewing couples on other days – is enough to drive most people a little bonkers. After only two days of it, my parents were a little fed up)

Well, Bloody Nora, I’m 30.

Breakfast celebrations: cards, presents and ridiculous headgear. Thank you so much to everyone who managed to thwart the postal strike and get cards to my parents for them to bring out. I spent a very happy half hour working my way through cards and presents. My wonderful mates Freddy and Emilie sent a package full of banners, glitter, balloons, all subtly emblazoned with my new age. In that way that all the hues of a Sesame Street Special are subtle… Mike had spent the previous week panicking because, given that we spend every waking minute of the day together, he didn’t really have an opportunity to hatch any kind of surprise. So the two of us plodded down to the hotel giftshop and he got me a pair of turquoise earrings.

We then leave the wonderful Lost Iguana, and drive to San Jose for an interview at the Finca Rosa Blanca inn and coffee plantation with the owners. Glenn and Terri have lived there and run the place for the last 20 years or so. They are San Francisco (well, Oakland) natives who first went on holiday to Costa Rica 30 years ago when people scoffed them and asked why they would risk their lives, and that of their newborn daughter, by voyaging to such a dangerous and unknown place. Needless to say, they loved it, came back and raved about it to Glenn’s mum, who then decided to buy a patch of land and build a house. The plans became rapidly inflated and the house was too big just to be a private residence so Glenn’s mother had the idea to turn it into a hotel. She very sadly died suddenly fairly soon after she had got it running, and Glenn and Terri were bequeathed it in her will. So they left a cold New York winter behind and embarked, with two young daughters, on a life in Costa Rica. The place is gorgeous, they decided that to feel like real Costa Ricans, they should use some of their land as a coffee plantation which they run sustainably and with all the principles of Fair Trade for their workers. Glenn now tours the world as a lead advocate for sustainable coffee farming.

As a couple they are really interesting because they are great fun and obviously have a riot together, but they are the first couple we have interviewed who freely confess that they love to argue. Or rather, not that they love it, but that they do argue often and that it is a big part of their relationship. Terri admits she is “glass half empty” and the realist of the pair. Glenn is more the optimist who leaps into things without thinking too much about them. Terri loves to travel, Glenn is a resolute homebody. These, and many other things, mean that the two butt heads (they recounted how difficult external contractors find it at the beginning of projects with them, because they often end up with total and extreme differences of opinion which they air loudly in front of the new workmen…) But they’re brilliant and it’s plain to see how much fun they have. One of Dr John Gottman’s findings, when he came to analyse relationships with the intense scrutiny he is famous for, is that couples who fight are – despite what we’d all assume – the ones who are going to split up. It’s the WAY that couples fight which is the indicator for the future success of their relationship: couples who argue in a healthy way will, at some point in the conflict, throw out a lifeline to the other person, a light attempt at humour, or an outclause from the argument, if you will. Couples who are on the road to ruin demonstrate one (or more) of Gottman’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (namely criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling) in their arguments. (I’m not doing his groundbreaking research any justice by summarising it as I am from a small table in a dingy Panama City restaurant, but if you are interested in reading more, Google John Gottman and the 4 horsemen and a plethora of info pops up, here’s a decent summary: www.chinnstreetcounseling.com/zomerland/zomerland_8.shtml)

As an example, Glenn and Terri related an anecdote of when they were outside a supermarket, arguing violently in the carpark. Both were irate to the point of divorce, Glenn terminated the argument by storming off towards the supermarket. As he got through the doorway, Terri kicked the back of his shoe so that he tripped and fell. And from a crumpled position on the shiny, striplit floor of the supermarket walkway, he started laughing and the two of them collapsed in fits of giggles. Argument over.

We then wento on to interview a very different couple: the CEO of Costa Rica’s biggest coffee producer, Cafe Britt, and his wife. What an interview! What a sage and wonderful couple! (more to follow)

I’m exhausted so flake out early. Birthday was breakfast, am now too old to enjoy the day.

A full day of no driving and total relaxation.  My father, ever the researcher, had found a dream hotel cut into the hillside of the rainforest, a place called The Lost Iguana, www.lostiguanaresort.com. For a birthday present, he treated us to a suite which looked out over the Arenal volcano, an active peak which has a constant plume of smoke and fairly regular lava eruptions. (We saw neither though jet-lagged parents were up early enough to snap some awesome shots of the peak)

We spend the morning walking through the rainforest on a suspended walkway. The path weaves through the overgrowth as vines, roots and branches frame its way. Streams of millions of leaf-cutter ants wobbling their way with heavy cargoes of rough-edged leaf chunks cross our path. The sun is shining (very unusual) and the sweat flows in abundance.

Then to a butterfly garden where butterflies as big as wrens flap around. I watch one happily inserting its long and bendy proboscis (oooh Matron!) into a slowly rotting orange. The markings on the wing of the biggest butterfly replicate a small mammal’s eyes, complete with white lines to give the impression of 3D. Extraordinary.

Mum, Mike and I spend the afternoon drinking beer at the pool bar in the tropical rain feeling like we were in a Wham! video. (Natch, my lifelong dream)

We then interview the fabulously-named Johnny Calderon and his wife, Marion. Johnny is a biologist and rainforest guide, and they are childhood sweethearts. They have known each other since she was 3 years old, and they have been married for 11 years, with a 10 year old son, Daniel, and a 3 month old, Santiago. Very cool people with a wonderful attitude to life (and living in the shadow of a very active volcano – “beautiful things are often dangerous” says Johnny cryptically). When asked what love is, Johnny picks up the wide-eyed Santiago who’d been nestling in the crook of his arm and says “This is love!” and the whole family beam. Very sweet.

So sorry folks, we have not had internet all week – but loads to update: my 30th in the Costa Rican rainforest, meeting with the CEO of the biggest Costa Rican coffee producer and his wife, night in a firestation with 8 Panamanian firemen and BBC cyclist Mark Beaumont. And the Panama Canal! Wow! Will try and update tonight!