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| Kuni Indian textile on display at a market in the Casco Viejo area of Panama City |
Before I knew it, I was being told that “people like me, who are used to five-star restaurants and services, think that they [we] can just steal from from her.” Then she picked up the phone and threatened to call the police.
There’s more to it than that though. This was a moment in a day of a five-day trip that I took with my mother this Thanksgiving. We spent the holiday week in Panama City and then four days in the gringo-laced beach town of Bocas del Toro on the Caribbean coast. I love active vacations – find me a bicycle, a trail, water to swim or snorkel in, an island to wander, and I will be have a divine time. My mother can read anywhere – give her a charger to keep her Kindle alive, and a comfortable seat to fall into, and she will thrive.
And we have developed a tradition of finding an adventure together on an annual basis – usually in the western hemisphere with rather direct flights from the east and west coasts, and with warm weather and a tourism infrastructure that enables older folks with limited mobility to get around easily. This year’s bull’s eye led us to Panama.
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| View from the 4X4 drive outside Bocas del Toro. |
So one day, I took a snorkeling tour for a half day and prepared to play the part – beach cover up, swimsuit, sunscreen, hat, sunglasses and flip flops. It was a small group of about eight tourists, gathered from their various hotels in town, and off we went to the Zapatillas Islands, which are off the coast of Bocas and nationally protected for their pristine terrestrial lands as well as their marine life.
However it was a windy day and our launch driver decided not to distribute the snorkeling gear even though we were surrounded by other tourist boats and tourists with goggles and air pipes dangling from their heads. Without birding gear or binoculars, hiking shoes or even clothing, our group was out of sorts. We were not doing the activity we had been sold.
Thereafter we were brought to an isolated restaurant where the vegetarian option started at $18 USD. No sun cover. We waited way too long for the launch driver to finish his meal while the rest of us were on the dock, ready to get back to town.
I have traveled extensively in parts of the emerging world, so I was prepared for overpriced food and variable conditions of all kinds. But upon our return, after eating overpriced, stale pasta and having done no snorkeling, I told the agency lead that I was struggling to feel like it was appropriate to pay the full cost of the tour. In Spanish.
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| Our view from our hotel room of downtown Bocas. |
And here we landed with a threat to the police and an aggravation that wasn’t commensurate to the grievance. I ended up paying the balance since the argument wasn’t worth it. It didn’t matter how justified I felt in having forgone a service for which I thought I had signed up. The conflict transcended the actual scaffolding of the transaction. I was a white gringa face telling a working-class Panamanian woman that her product was overpriced, but this woman wasn’t hearing me. Through her lens, I was a nameless, affluent face representing parts of the world that provoked resentment for probably all kinds of reasons – wealth, historical conflict for land, colonization, systematized inequality, globalization and its diluting effects on the traditions, languages and local affluence of tiny little special towns like Bocas. She wasn’t interested in my time abroad, my work in conservation – with ecotourism outfits no less – she didn’t see me. And maybe I didn’t see her.
I felt the wounds of the unfinished dialogue as Mom and I found fire dancers in town that night. Those orange angels provided a perfect, dreamy way to close out our visit before we jetted back to Panama City and soon after, to our homes.
My projections. Her experience. Whatever it was, we weren’t arguing about a national park fee.