Portobelo the town, not the mushroom.

Our cabinas  at Scuba Portobelo

Last day with New Beige

Old forts

New Beige in Portobelo, Panama

 

Sunday, April 22 2012

I treated myself to a chow down at breakfast today; 2 fried eggs, 2 pieces of toast with butter and a bowl of imitation fruit loops.  Dang what a way to start off the day!  And how better to follow up a man’s meal then to go out for a walk around the mall?  None better.  So we went to the Albrook Mall in Panama City, me, Marcie, Susan, Joey and New Beige.  We bot a 16 ft length of chain to secure the back gate of our truck.  We will be emptying out everything in the cab and locking it in the back in preparation for handing over the keys to the guys loading it on the boat.   

After having a pleasant American type experience at the mall we drove north to the Caribbean town of Colon, almost running out of gas on the way.  Everyone who I’ve talked to about Colon says that it’s a dangerous dump.  So we didn’t stop.  Instead we turned right and heading east along the north coast of Panama for another 30 kilos or so we arrived at the old Spanish colonial fortress city of Portobelo. 

Marcie, Susan and I split a cabana at the Portobelo Scuba Hotel, or something like that.  Susan went out for a scuba while Marcie and I stayed near shore for a snorkel.  The snorkeling was, as usual, a lot of fun.  There were all kinds of fish swimming in and out of living coral formations, spider web like sea anemones that will quickly suck themselves down to nothing when something comes too close to them.  We both noticed that while we have snorkeled in places where we’ve seen more tropical fish, and where the water was clearer, here we saw more coral formations and other kinds of things that were half plant half rock with colorful organic patterns. 

Since New Beige is shipping out tomorrow for Miami and Marcie and I are continuing on with backpacks, we had a lot of downsizing to do.  Before it got dark we took a break from repacking our packs and drove down into the old town (I think it dates from the 1500’s and was named by Christopher Columbus himself) of Portobello to check out the crumbling ruins of the old Spanish forts built to defend the gold rich city from British pirates.  The forts failed to keep Henry Morgan from looting the city in the 1600’s.  It seems like just about every old port town that we have visited in Latin America was sacked by Captain Morgan at sometime or other. 

The three of us seem to be the only ones staying on this oceanside property. I took a nap in the hammock while the girls cooked us up a vegetarian dinner of spinach, eggs, potatoes, peppers and onions.  We ate out on a concrete patio on cement stilts on top of rocks out on the ocean.  When you look down thru a grate in the floor of the patio you can see a bunch of tropical fish swimming around.