How to Break Your GPS and Other Stories from Panama

One Day.  One rental car.  One GPS. 

Yes, driving in hectic over-populated Panama City can be daunting but how bad could it be?

We had done this once before, when we visited last time in 2009, but then we were following our friends - one of whom is a native Panamanian and therefore knew the city well.

This time, on our own, we asked for directions on the best way to get out of the city and onto the Inter-American Highway (also known as the Pan-American, see link below), for our little day-trip to El Valle about 2 hours west and north of the city, from not one but several people. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-American_Highway

But, given their poor English and our (sadly, still) poor Spanish, we remained a bit foggy on the exact route.  Or at least I, the navigator did; David just trusted that with my uncanny sense of direction I had it well in hand.  Then the car-rental guy recommended we take the GPS for an extra $11 and when we accepted he even programmed it for us, starting point and destination, so it all seemed perfectly reasonable and off we went.

Even between our maps and the GPS we ended up going quite astray before we figured it out.  The GPS kept saying randomly, and unhelpfully "stay on this route" - even when we were clearly NOT on any prescribed route as we meandered through one of the (has to be) poorest neighborhoods of Panama City.

Near historic Casco Viejo (Spanish for "Old Town" - see link below), which we had toured on foot the day before, but instead of crumbling buildings next to pristinely restored mansions, it was just crumbling building after crumbling building.  And nothing historic about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casco_Viejo,_Panama

But still A LOT of people around so we never felt too unsafe, plus we just kept moving through the labyrinth with car doors locked.  By the time I realized where we could get the viaduct to take us to the Inter-American Highway, there were suddenly signs for a detour.

I swear we followed them, but before we knew it we ended up on what looked like a pedestrian-only walkway.

Picture a pleasant little Sunday market (Panamanian-style, that is), we just plowed through, before we finally got to the right turn I wanted.  The policeman we passed on our right, as we were almost to the end of it, just looked at our faces and shook his head - probably thinking "Is it just me or are the gringo tourists getting even MORE stupid?" :)

Once on the Pan-American highway and after another short wrong-turn side-trip we soon saw the limits of technology in our world today:  the GPS had gotten so confused by our road-less-taken route that it was telling us we had arrived at our destination (the mountain town of El Valle), about 100 miles before we actually got there in reality. 

Or I just never understood how to use it, user error?  Either way, at the end of the day, when we finally arrived back at the Hertz office across the street from our hotel in Panama City, and told our story to the car-rental guy, he ended up not charging us for the GPS.  Which was really nice of him.

That is probably my best memory of this Panama trip - how wonderful the people are there.  How they put up with our questions in bumbling Spanish and how they had to finally talk in their best broken English before we could understand.

As David says - Panama rocks!  More stories to come....