We’ve done a lot of just living life here recently, hence the less frequent blog posts. I did, however, fail to fill you in on Carnavales! So here you go…
We decided to do it up right this year since I was sick and couldn’t do much last year at this time. We ended up spending two nights in Las Tablas, a small town that is famous for having the biggest and most ridiculous Carnaval celebration. It’s about a 3.5 hour drive from the city.
We actually stayed in an even smaller town about 5 min from Las Tablas called Santo Domingo. The thing is, you have to book hotels months and months in advance if you want to be in Las Tablas for Carnavales. We did not. But, we really lucked out. We stayed at a nice B&B in a very clean room within walking distance of Santo Domingo’s town square. Of course, this meant that we were listening to partying until all hours of the night…and to the drums that started up at 4 am and continued for a couple of house…but hey, all in the spirit of the celebration, right? Meh…it was loud. I’m old.
So when we got into town around 4 pm, we decided to head to Las Tablas and walk around to get a feel for things. What we found was this:
Amazingly disgusting. I have never smelled smells like that before…or at least not that combination of smells and not at that intensity. The gutters were completely filled with beer cans and trash. We caught several people peeing behind houses or…you know…kinda wherever. Actually, my friend Mahalia, when asked whether she was going to Las Tablas, responded that she preferred not to smell pee for 4 days straight. Lovely. But hey, what do you expect? It’s a huge 4 day party!
So anyway, we arrived around 4 to find the streets pretty dead. It turns out that people are out all morning and early afternoon, then go home from about 4 until 7 or 8 to rest and eat dinner. Then they come out again and play drums all night right by the window of the place we stayed. Okay, not really, but it was close. We got the whole experience.
So one big thing about Carnavales in Panamá are the culecos. As you might imagine, it’s pretty flippin’ hot during the day b/c 1) it’s Panamá and it’s always hot, and 2) it’s our summer right now. So the towns will bring out huge trucks filled with water and hose down the crowd from time to time. You’re supposed to expect to get wet…it’s just going to happen. As we walked down the street that first day, we passed by a small house where an old (80’s at least) woman was spraying people with one of those noodle-looking pool toys that squirts out a ton of water. Eric says he’d call it a water cannon. But the best part was that since most people had gone home to rest, she just targeted this one poor guy who was obviously wasted, over it, and wanting to be home. He was shocked and mad…and she cracked up! We did too…as we made our way to the opposite side of the street.
On our first night, the town ran out of water. Like, the whole town. Apparently that happens when you spray down all of your residents and visitors all day long. Luckily, the hostel where we stayed was able to get a water truck to refill their tank by maybe 11 am the next morning. They also made arrangements with a woman down the road to feed us breakfast. This is what the place looked like:
Breakfast restaurant
It was great! We had some chorizo and yuca and coffee while we chatted with a retired couple who had just moved down from somewhere in the midwest and an Australian couple. It was interesting to hear their stories and experiences and share some of ours. Listening to the American couple made me think of our first few weeks here and how much we’ve learned about the country and culture since then. We also wondered why in the world they would move to Las Tablas, of all places, because it is such a small town and it’s neither on the beach nor in the mountains. Kinda a stuck-in-the-middle kinda spot. The Australian couple had been traveling for years. Evidently they will spend several months to a year in one country, then move on to the next. Colombia was next on their list. Old hippie types…pretty cool.
So…the celebration. We decided not to go back to Las Tablas, but rather to hang out in Santo Domingo. This way we could easily go back and forth to the hotel for beverages and bathrooms and didn’t have to worry about driving or looking for a taxi. It was still a huge party. The floats were particularly impressive, as you can see above.
They also select a Queen from both Calle Arriba (roughly translated as “uptown”) and Calle Abajo (downtown), and each of those women (18-22ish years old) lead the parade of the Polleras, the traditional Panamanian dress that you can see in the photos below. Maybe a hundred women, from tiny kids to elderly ladies, dressed up in their polleras (which can cost upwards of $60,000 if it’s intricate and you add in the cost of jewelry and shoes) and walked around the square while men played the drums.
We also had the opportunity to drive down to Playa Venao, which we had heard was beautiful. We only stopped there for maybe 45 min. It was pretty because it was in a little cove, but it wasn’t super amazing compared to some of the beaches in Panamá. Still glad we went though.
