A detour-filled drive across Panama

In high-rising heat, Julio Eligio Bernal Jr. grabs a coconut and, with a few swift whacks on a stake in the sand, removes its husk. Bernal laughs and tosses it onto a pile of others, to wait.

Three lobstermen, lean and lanky, beaten by sun and sea, idle on a shade-stroked platform.

It begins like this, things so strongly defined by tropical terrain. But even a brief encounter on this trip across Panama, long a place cut through quickly, finds foreigners and their money coming to stay in the Central American nation.

Bernal, 66, sits in a plastic chair and talks about nearby plots where he once grew yucca and corn to supplement a steady catch of spiny lobster, oysters and conch. When Isla Parida, 10 miles off Panama's Pacific coast, became part of a national park more than a decade ago, locals were told they could no longer plant crops. Bernal says he sold 100 of his acres to a U.S. investor for a very small sum.

"Why should I keep the land, if I cannot take advantage of it?" he says.

Bernal, who has spent his life on Isla Parida, as his parents and grandparents did, says he learned too late to see land had such financial value. Now even this hillside, once property of his brother, belongs to an American. Bernal stays as a caretaker.

Passing through Panama, so much can seem permanent. Among the mangroves that separate Isla Parida from the mainland, a crocodile's snout ripples still water. Three snow-white egrets stand ankle-deep in mud. A still-winged frigate bird arcs above.

After arriving at port in Pedregal, 30 minutes by boat from Isla Parida, photographer Essdras Suarez and I switch to a rental car for the trip from the Pacific over the Continental Divide to the Caribbean Sea. The 70-mile drive in western Panama can be made in a few hours. We will detour and take far longer.

On the straight-shot avenues of David, Panama's second-largest city, banks, shops, restaurants and bars stand stoic in dry heat. It is noontime, and sidewalks sleep. Only the evening before, roadside throngs cheered a victory parade for the national junior baseball championship team that converged on David's central square. Girls in orange on top of cars. Mothers and toddlers waving big balloon bats.

Essdras is from Panama, and on the road that climbs from David toward coffee-thick highlands, he slows on a bridge above the cool currents of Rio Dolega.

"That," Essdras says, "is a typical Panamanian scene."

On the rocks below, four generations of a family — a teacher, lawyer and small-business owner among them — share a Saturday afternoon picnic of roast chicken and rice. A great-grandfather settles in the embrace of a tree trunk, while a girl strokes her grandmother's hair.

It is only 15 miles farther, a drive of not half an hour along the bobbing two lanes, to Boquete.

Panama's western highlands remained beyond the edge of development last century, when the United States built and operated the 48-mile Panama Canal that splits the country at its core. In the nine years since the canal came under local control, skyscrapers have spiked in Panama City, and upscale resorts have awakened sleepy beach towns an hour west of the capital. Venezuelans, Germans, Canadians and Americans have bought in.

Tourism is an economic engine, with nearly $1.5 billion in annual revenue, more than is earned from tolls for the canal. The tourism ministry has launched a new campaign — "Panama — It will never leave you" — and blogs and newsletters parse the latest legal changes for foreign retirees looking to buy a place of their own.

Nowhere is the investment as intimate as in the lush foothills of the 11,397-foot Baru volcano, where Americans retire in mass to the town of Boquete. Signs on the edge of town promote Coldwell Banker, Kohler sinks and the Hacienda Los Molinos, which promises, in English, "A Fabulous Lifestyle in Boquete."

Into the mountains

Later, Essdras and I drive the road east from Boquete and pass parked bulldozers, cleared hillsides and billboards promising more. After 25 miles — the fields now climbing, two farmers sitting with floppy-eared cattle on a ridge — we join the paved lanes of Route 4 heading up and into the Cordillera, as the jungled mountain range is known, and soon veer off on a narrow lane to a modest Smithsonian research station. Its single building is separated from the surrounding forest by a small yard.

Alberto Gonzalez, a caretaker who grew up farming tomatoes, beans and coffee a few miles away, stops sweeping a porch and invites us inside to see two old trays. On each are dozens of insects — moths, beetles, flies — pinned in position. Gonzalez holds up a glass jar full of the coiled corpse of a poisonous snake with diamond designs on its back.

"Thank God I've never found anything like that in the woods," Gonzalez says. "Scorpions, but nothing like that."

The forest, some of the richest tropical mountain terrain left in North America, has been protected as the Fortuna Reserve for decades. Scientists and students, notebooks in hand, come to walk trails among seldom-seen jaguars.

Any such dangers, Gonzalez says, are nothing compared with pictures of progress he finds in the pages of glossy magazines.

"I see the destruction man can produce," Gonzalez says. "We have preserved things here."

Life in a village

We drive another half-hour, over the fog-socked pass of the Continental Divide, then stop. In an evening downpour at a roadside restaurant, we meet a 16-year-old named Alexander. He agrees to take us the next morning to El Guabo village.

The trail is wide enough for three people, and still mud-slick hours after the rain has ended. Down, down, down, then comes a young man walking uphill. He is wearing blue slacks and a collared shirt and carries black dress shoes in his hand. Alexander was born and raised in El Guabo, and the two speak in the soft cadence of a local dialect of the Ngobe-Bugle Indians.

At a footbridge, a girl approaches carrying a machete. A grandmother follows her, an empty sack and a machete in hand.

The village, on the far side of the narrow suspension bridge, nestles at the confluence of valleys swathed in deep green. Fresh currents rise from Rio Guabo to break damp heat. White clouds sift sunlight.

El Guabo is only a mile or so from Route 4, and at the edge of the Comarca Ngobe-Bugle, a semiautonomous region that is home to more than 100,000 Indians.

A few dozen of the 500 or so villagers trek uphill each day, then on to jobs, including work as landscapers at vacation homes and coffee-pickers in the fields around Boquete. They earn $1.50 for each 30-pound can.

Most villagers stay, though, venturing to fields thick with cilantro — that is what sells on the outside — or to trees heavy with bananas, mango and guava, before returning to their community beneath thatch roofs.

Back beneath the footbridge, three boys swim in a deep pool. A woman drops a sack on the bank and squats to scrub soiled clothes.

To the coast

Walking back to the road, we drive down into the Caribbean flats. Tractor trailers pull tanks of fuel from the port in Chiriqui Grande toward the mountains, and the Pacific beyond. Others haul Atlas beer toward hotels in the islands of Bocas del Toro, 10 miles into the Caribbean.

In Chiriqui Grande, Alexander joins us for what we learn is his first meal in a restaurant. He pushes his fork through a plate of fried rice — Chinese restaurants are common — but stares toward a far wall, where a flat-screen television broadcasts HBO2.

It has been more than 500 years since Christopher Columbus sailed among the Bocas del Toro islands. One is still called Isla Bastimentos, or supplies, for the nourishment Columbus' crews found there. Another is called Cayo Carenero, or cleansing, to mark the spot where ship hulls were scrubbed.

Vacationers now seek restoration in stilted luxury bungalows set above the sea and backpacker lodges tucked in towns on Bastimentos, Isla Colon and others nearby. Bastimentos is a hub for Panamanians with African roots, a community more connected to Caribbean culture.

In the morning, outboard pangas stop at fuel docks before shuttling tourists in search of secluded beaches, or world-class surfing and sportfishing.

Our random route through the islands passes through Dolphin Bay, where a half-dozen boats circle tightly as the dolphins' black backs break the surface. Next to mangroves on Isla San Cristobal, three boys with Indian features paddle in a dugout canoe.

Beyond Isla Colon, swells 3 and 4 feet high churn the approach to Isla Pajaros, also called Swan's Cay, or Bird Island. It is small and stark, cliffs and tufts of trees surrounded by surf that pounds holes through the island's core.

Frigatebirds again soar high, wings bent in solid angles of boomerangs. Brown boobies snuggle against branches. White terns dart through gusts of sun and sea and back to chicks in trees.

Our boat turns and surfs from the Caribbean cliffs of Isla Pajaros back toward the coastal calm, to another face of Panama.