Panama..
I love the buses in Panama and Nicaragua. They all have custom paint jobs, individual names and chrome exhaust pipes rising vertically from the rear bumpers.


Just to let you all know I'm still alive, I'll post more on this when I get back to Canada but here's it:
I'm staying in a small hostel in Casco Viejo, Panama City. The people are friendly a mixed crowd from Europe and North America.

The area is reminiscent of Havana vieja by which I mean a run-down slum that was once an area of envied affluence. Totally unlike Havana, some of the houses have been restored to a candied pastiche and if you move a block or two outside of Casco Viejo, which is crawling with various styles of police, it gets dangerous as it is a quaint old colonial slum surrounded by an unpleasant graffitied 20th century slum. Havana is also safe as Cubans caught giving tourists a nasty look can be jailed for an indefinite period, Panama isn't like that.

It's hot, humid, there is no sound of gunfire, all the bars shut early on Monday. It has a tropical down-at-heel decomposing feel about the place, which if you have never been to a poor place in Centro America is difficult to describe.

There will be more photos later in the week.

Casco Viejo is a place trapped between poverty and wealth, where western tourists and businessmen pass each other by on the same streets in different worlds.