Day 3: First Stop

I am about to set my feet on foreign soil for the first time in my life (not counting Agua Prieta and Nogales because they don't really, really count.)

WELCOME TO PANAMA

Crossing the plank we see several people holding signs for excursions that people have signed up for, and solicitors trying to hook you on their excursion. Our group of 10 has 2 extra friends. We are essentially glued together looking for "Mario." One of the guys in our group set the excursion up for us online through a private company, not associated with the cruise line. A man with a thick local accent starts saying "mario, mario" along with someone else. We follow him to a nearly empty parking lot. He looks at his partner and leads us in another direction.

Some of us are developing heist anxiety. We ask for him to read our names from the list of people who signed up so that we know he is legit. He does not have it. He begs us to follow him. Still no one named Mario. We follow him anyway and he leads us to the proper busses with a tour guide who reads all of our names from a her list. Whew!

We drive for over an hour through the bumpy streets of Panama as the two tour guides take turns describing different facets of panamanian culture and canal history, to which my eyes relax. I find the strain of keeping up with the passing scenery to be too strenuous.

Still, my bladder keeps me awake, trying to contain the supergreens, even though we stopped at a grocery store fairly early on to stand in line for a single restroom. I would not find relief until we reached the slatted (non-private) shack with a hole in a concrete slab at the village of the indigenous tribe we were to visit.

We were greeted by dark men in colorful loincloths. They led us to a hand-carved canoe on the especially low waters of a river somewhere in the rainforest. (It was the dry season.) The primitive man pushed us off with a long pole and then started the outboard motor. (Who wants to teach a bunch of tourists how to row?) Still, we had to get out of the boat in the shallowest spot to free it from its attachment to the bottom of the river.

We docked at the bottom of a high, rounded hill. Tribe members greeted us atop with the music of coarse reed fluts and rythms of turtle shells and gourds. We were honored guests. The chief himself played an instrument. After two canoes (long ones) full of people took the aforementioned potty break, they served us lunch. It was fish and, perhaps, corn-breaded plantains. The "plantains" tasted better with every bite, and the fish was the most flavorful I have ever had. It was served in a banana frond folded into a cornucopia.

We were then invited to watch sacred dances of celebration and healing, as well as join in. We were then given a few minutes to peruse tables of handmade crafts: beadwork, weaving, and sculpture.

The canoe then carried us further upstream where we would begin a hike to a waterfall with a large natural pool. We only had about 10 minutes to enjoy the cool, if not clear waters. We dried as we walked back to the canoes, which took us back to the busses, which then carried us to the heart of the Panama Canal.

The ship that was passing through the barges was massive. Just the width (which fit snugly into the canal) had standard rail cars stacked 17 wide, I didn't count the length of rail cars, but it might have been as long as a regular train (60-80 cars). The average toll for passing through the canal is over $7,000.

Within a mile or two of the canal we passed an LDS chapel. It warmed my heart--and was the closest I got to Sunday activity. Church was already out, or I might have made the bus let me off and pick me up when it came back through.

It was a magnificent day.

Day Two

Still at sea on day two. Rough waters. Oi! I think I had cradle flashbacks as I slept with as much as the boat was rockin'. I felt a little queasy after I got my first liter of Supergreens down, with all the fluid that was sloshing in my belly. Time sunning on the Lido deck nearly settled it.

At 1:00 there were no volunteers in the sign up bucket for the Fear Factor challenge. Theresa put her name in and submitted mine as well. Julie was the social host who moderated the game that day. She encouraged me to keep my name in because there was nothing really bad that we had to eat. AND I BELIEVED HER!

The first challenge was getting the four people on our team across the stage without touching it, using only two exercise mats. We aced it and beat the other team. We also aced getting ping-pong balls across the stage between our knees. We lost it though in the balloon-pop because my balloon wouldn't blow up big enough to pop. I lost it personally when we had to chug down a mixture of coffee, ketchup, mustard, tabasco sauce, and various seasonings. There was more than volunteer names in the bucket all of a sudden.

That evening, Karoke began at 6:00 so I enjoyed being one of the only 3 people who wanted to sing, and I got my voice thoroughly warmed up for the 11:00 auditions that night for the Legends concert, which consists of 10 passengers doing various celebrity impersonations. I got one of the parts. Stay tuned to find out who I became on the last day of the cruise.

Cruise: Day One

My cruise was absolutely fabulous. Unfortuately, the memory stick in my camera is not feeding properly into my computer. Perhaps I will post pictures later.

Technically, day one of my cruise was Thursday, March 9th. Our flight from Dallas had a nearly 2 hour delay, so we barely made our 3:00 boat departure. Leaving port was pretty smooth. It was really cool though when the boat started rocking because that was the only indicator that I had that I was not just hanging out in a huge hotel-casino. It was like, "oh yeah, I am on a ship on the ocean."

The first full day at sea is what I will call Day One. My name was drawn out of the bucket to play survivor. I helped my team regain time it had lost by swimming vigorously with a volleyball tucked under a wet T-shirt that I had to trade with my teammates. Still, they voted me off in the first round because they all knew each other. By the way, the water in cruise swimming pools is saltwater straight out of the ocean. That was a little surprising.

Every night we had a sit-down, four-course dinner with an awesome waiter named Derek from South Africa (bald white guy). Then Theresa and I would always go and see the 10:30 show in the 2,000 seat theater. 11:30 was when Karaoke started. It stayed open till 1 am. Still, Theresa and I stayed up and chatted until 3:30.

We slept in the next day because we had another whole day at sea. More on that later.