For those in the know: Paso Canoás (Costa Rica – Panama) border > Carretera Interamerica (aka PanAm Highway) > all the way to Panama City. Zero navigation!
Friday 17th November we turned a corner, turned out from one of North America’s great retail institutions: the worker’s cooperative outdoor equipment emporium and onto Copley Drive, San Diego.
Resetting the compass out of perpetual west and turning southeast in San Diego.
And that’s been the story for the subsequent three and a half months, a macro-navigation that each morning entails cycling into the sunrise. Into an opal light that soft-focuses our world, squinting for hazards, and wondering, “can the vehicle approaching from behind see us through the glare?”. A nascent sun that in a more northern clime, and around the solstice, rose obliquely, a slow arousal, with lingering shadows, but now the equinox is imminent, blasts up out of an horizon, away from the night, with momentary twilights and shrinking shadows, fleeting apparitions that need to be savoured.
Then we arrive in David, Panama’s second city, with a desire to escape the smothering humidity. To put it crudely, I think my sweat pores have been sufficiently flushed, and the cotton shirts in their various incarnations are in danger of rotting away. So we turn to the mountains.
Turning due North.
Which is why I’m now sporting sunburnt elbows. A new angle of exposure, new flesh that hasn’t been radiated recently, a back that hasn’t had a comforting warmth, for a quarter of a year. It’s quite noticeable that the Navigator’s bra-strap tan lines, even through clothing, have not been topped up, as they would by a south facing tour. It’s a debate that’s seldom raised when considering which direction for a long linear tour? Prevailing winds will inevitably top that calculation, followed possibly by which side of the carriageway gives the best view of the ocean, but “sun in your face”? Not sure I’ve ever seen that mentioned. It should be, it’s significant.
The road rises gently, which, given our recent experiences, is a novelty, passing a gentrification of tidy gardens and private schools, gated communities and swimming pool sales, all etched bright, clean, sharp by the change of direction. To front is Panama’s highest point, the dominating mass of Volcán Barú, its summit, bristling with comms towers, being occasionally obscured by clouds. A volcanic cauldron cooking up boiling masses of thunderheads that detach and roll south. Just like they did yesterday, dropping their cargo in a sudden warm, drenching downpour on the PanAmericana highway into town.
Yet another storm-caster mountain.
Still the road rises, laser straight, a constant agreeable gradient, the mountain ever growing, when the punctuation of a thirty metre candy-stick lighthouse in the middle of a mall, in the middle of a continent, slowly realises. Not so much a fish out of water as a ‘faro’ far from water. Such incongruities have been a rarity on this journey, an edifice more in keeping six countries farther north, but might be a reflection of the increasing number of US nationals moving into the area. Still we’re climbing, happily mimicking hill-slugs, only to be passed, effortlessly, by yet another training peloton and their attendant rescue wagon.
Then the wind commences.
At first it’s welcome, for it blows away the heavy humidity; however, it keeps strengthening. Yet again we’re among volcanic mountains, yet again we’ve found a katabatic wind. Gusts come careering down-slope, down the gravel streets whipping up dust, rattling palm fronds and crashing onto tin roofs that clatter all through the night.
Which makes for a differing dark-time soundtrack; no labouring air conditioner nor rattling fan stirring up stale moist air to drown out the passing heavy goods traffic, barking dogs or squealing cicadas. Just the question: “is this normal and will we have a roof in the morning?”
Intriguingly, the next overtaking cyclo-peloton is now ‘drafting’ in the wake of their ‘sag-wagon’… are they cheats or is it jealousy? At least they’re not hanging on the tailgate as we’ve seen before.
Our sojourn to the high ground with its cool, fresh evenings, will be short lived. To reach that airport departure gate we need to keep moving, to drop back into the humidities. Still, between here and there, there’s the ‘pay-back’; a forty kilometres free-wheel, followed by a 200km bend to the nor’easter and the isthmus of the Panama Canal.