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Also in this section:
Nostalgia Night
Darrin DuFord's book signing at Excedra Books
Theatre Guild of Ancon Christmas play auditions
Gallery & Museum Guide

Book signing with Darrin DuFord

Excedra Books

October 14, 4 pm

and a reprise of the review:

Panama, not the way expensive tour agencies recommend it

a book review by Eric Jackson

Is There a Hole in the Boat?

tales of travel in Panama without a car

by Darrin DuFord

self-published, Queens, NY (2006)

180 pages in paperback

Available through Amazon.com

There is a fair amount of low-intensity class warfare going on within Panama's gringo community, a lot of it egged on by others. The Torrijos administration and its Tourism Minister Rubén Blades are pushing a concept of "residential tourism" wherein rich foreigners would establish second residences in Panama, these mainly being in government-promoted gated ghettos which by law would be able to house no more than 20 percent Panamanians and where there would be armed guards to keep the locals from using the beaches that they had since time immemorial. The officially recognized tourism industry is for the most part in hot pursuit of the high-end niche. Folks like International Living have been promoting Panama as the next step of American white flight past suburbia. Backpackers are at best tolerated.

But the American community here isn't this all-white society largely composed of millionaires. Go to the Elks Justice Lodge in Rio Abajo for their student awards ceremony and you will see dozens of retirees who hold US citizenship, and there won't be too many white faces among them. Go to any Epsicopalian church in Panama that celebrates an English-language service and you will see a few American expats and maybe some Brits, but a lot more dual US-Panamanian citizens and, although the people will on the whole be more prosperous than most Panamanians, they will generally be no more than middle class on a US scale.

And the retirees? Yeah, the people who are looking to make money off of them are hoping for millionaires but mostly they're getting the lower middle class, people who often have past ties to Panama and who almost always come here because up there they can't afford to live a dignified life on their fixed incomes.

Subscribe to the Panama Internet groups and it won't be long before you run across some version of that pervasive ugliness in American culture, the notion that if you don't have a lot of money there's something wrong with you. Everybody has a car and a telephone and all that, didn't you know? At least, everybody who counts.

People who think that way probably won't get very much from Darrin DuFord's book. The Panamanians whom the government's tourism policy is designed to benefit --- although ineptly and maybe even self-destructively so, according to a recent Inter-American Development Bank report --- will by and large hate this book. I don't think it will be for sale at the AMCHAM tourism forum, which usually has some very interesting speakers along with the gushy cheerleaders and predictable self-promoters.

That would be a tragedy, but a self-inflicted one. Let the in crowd remain clueless. It's their loss, not yours.

The rest of you, particularly people who want to do backpacker type tourism, but also those who care to learn many interesting things about Panama that the snobs neither know nor care to know, should buy this book.

DuFord, a world traveler, on some visits accompanied by the foxy Filipina-American lady in his life and some visits not, takes us on 16 excursions in which he does not drive.

Some are scary --- water crossings in leaky and fragile boats, terrifying bus rides and all that --- but mostly they're not.

DuFord visits most of Panama's indigenous nations, including the Naso at the time of a power struggle for the crown in that only place in the Americas ruled by a king. He gets into the subtleties and variations in Kuna Yala while celebrating the bloody 1925 revolution that gave the area its autonomy from the national government's impositions. He goes upriver with the Embera and hangs with the Bugle.

The author visits places left out of the tour books, like Colon's Costa Abajo. He witnesses the comparatively fair santeño way of bullfighting --- death not being the object, and the odds being evened just a bit by the human participants' ingestion of seco. He dines on lobster, bush rat and other delicacies. He gets and gives a sympathetic view of the Panamanians who don't count, except maybe at election time.

It would have been better had DuFord obtained the services of an editor in Panama, and if this self-published book is noticed and bought and published in a second edition by a major publishing house --- as it should be --- there are a few minor usages that would need to be tidied up. It's capitalinos, not capitaleños, and that sort of thing. But let me not complain very much because there's very little to complain about.

You see, what Darrin DuFord has done stands in stark contrast to what the people who write the travel guides do. The latter, to the extent that they succeed, introduce us to the sights of Panama. DuFord introduces us to the people of Panama, and he does it hilariously and most perceptively.

So if your instinctive reaction to someone who would eat a reptile or a jungle rodent for dinner is "eeew," just walk right on by. But if you are going to use public transportation in this country as part of your retirement lifestyle, or if you are a bit upscale from that but interested in how the people around you live, you will find this book useful and entertaining. If you intend to get around Panama on a backpacker's budget, "Is There a Hole in the Boat?" is a must read, preferably before you set out on your journey of discovery. But even if you are a retiree like my mother, who's past the years when she'd consider riding in a chiva or a piragua, you'll find Darrin DuFord's new book a good way to spend a rainy season day --- like she did.