The Road to Panama: Day 1

For anyone stupid/desperate/adventurous enough to do it, here’s how to get to Panama the cheap way from Colombia.

-Cartagena, CO-Monteria, CO
-Monteria, CO-Turbo, CO
-Turbo, CO to Capurgana, CO
-Capurgana, CO to Puerto Obaldia, PA
-Puerto Obaldia, PA to Panama City, PA

I Left the hostel in Cartagena bright and early this morning at about 6:15 to catch my 7 am bus. It turns out that the bus station is not anywhere near Cartagena (like most bus stations here. Travel on the Caribbean coast is….interesting) and so the ride took over 30 minutes. Luckily, everything is 20 minutes late in Colombia so there were no worries. For the first time in 2 months I was too cold because of the damned AC on the bus…I need to start carrying a sleeping liner or something.

Once you get to Monteria, the real fun starts. There are only two bus lines that transport you to Turbo so there’s not much leg work to do; one is expensive and the other is less expensive. I think you know which I picked. The problem is, there’s a bridge 2 hours before Turbo that’s broken and has been broken for months apparently (the guy trying to sell me the ticket showed me the newspaper clipping as proof). This means you pay for only a partial journey (until you get to the bridge) and then have to walk across the bridge and pay for different transport on the other side of the bridge. The bus to the broken bridge was your usual crappy South American chicken bus blasting way too loud reggaeton. Once we got to the bridge, people madly scrambled over a crazy Indian Jones style pedestrian rope bridge filled with children and motorcycles to try and get a ride on the other side. The problem is there are no buses on the other side, only mototaxis and 4 x 4 jeeps. I didn’t get on the 6,000 peso one so had to talk another guy into taking me for 18,000. Why I had to pay triple, I’m not sure…it might have to do with the fact that transporting me with my huge backpack (which is now literally bigger than a midget and weights nearly 60 pounds) is like the weight of two normal people.

We waited almost 30 minutes for the jeep to fill up and then left. It soon became obvious that this was going to be the most uncomfortable ride of my life as they put 4 full grown men into a space meant for 2 people and we booked it down a basically unpathed dirt path towards Turbo. We stopped several times because the road was blocked by trucks stuck in the mud and one time I was sure that it would just be better to camp in the wilderness near the road since we got stopped for 30 minutes once. I don’t know how but we finally got to Turbo, I got the heck out of the jeep as quickly as possible, hopped on a mototaxi and got dropped off at a hospedaje I heard about called Residencial Florida. I hadn’t stayed in anything this bad since…well, actually ever. I almost slipped on a cockroach on my way back to the communal sink and my room looked like something out of a murder scene photo montage. Regardless, it was only for a night and the owner told me he’d wake me up the next morning for the lancha (speed boat) that was going to Capurgana so that was nice. I think my bed had a mortar filling.