MUNGO EATS Latin America

Well, we have received word from the shipping company, that there is officially room for our van on a boat leaving November 15, so this morning we drove to Panama City to find a hotel and get ready to start the process of shipping.  A few of you faithful readers have seemed confused when I say we are shipping the van, so let me explain.  Even though there is a land connection between Central and south America, there is no physical road across about 200 km of this land.  This area is known as the Darien Gap.  It is composed of nice thick jungle, guerrillas, drug lords, and other bad things.  To get from Central to South America, it is necessary to put you vehicle in a shipping container, which is then loaded onto a ship and taken from Colon on the east side of Panama, to Cartegena, Colombia.  We do not accompany the van.  We have to find our way to Cartegena via either plane or sailboat.  Kevin would love to go by sailboat, but given that 3 of the 4 passengers suffer seasickness, I think we will likely travel by air. 

Today we entered Panama City.  We had to cross the Panama Canal on the Bridge of the Americas, which I thought was pretty exciting.

We got into town fairly early, right around noon and started looking for a hotel room.  We have gone beyond just asking if the hotel takes dogs and just start right in with the whole “service dog” lie.  I know, I will probably go straight to hell for all this lying, but really how else am I going to talk these folks into letting my dog stay in the hotel.  We visited about 8 or 9 hotels today, and got turned away from every single one.  We visited fairly inexpensive places and we tried 5 star hotels and got the same story from each one, “Sorry, no pets”!  Now I know we are trying to weasel our way in, but what if you legitimately had a service animal, you would be hooped!  Oh sure, one hotel offered to let us keep Mungo in the basement, in a dingy little corner, but otherwise, we were not welcome.  We ended up giving up for the day and tonight we are camped in a national park 15 km or so from the city. 

I really is important that we find a hotel though, because at some point in time, our van will be in a shipping container and we will have no opportunity to camp, while we wait for our van to leave the port and for our plane to leave Panama.  We plan to go back into the city tomorrow and try more hotels.  If we really are unsuccessful finding anything in the city, we may have to try some of the smaller cities along the canal.  It will be much easier if we find something in town though, so wish us luck tomorrow.