Rain + Friday afternoon = Cab drought

It started raining around 11am. It wasn’t lightly raining, it was pouring. We knew it was the end of the rainy season in Panama and expected rain in the afternoons during our trip, but we did not expect it to be cloudy and rainy all day. We took our time getting ready thinking the rain would stop, but around 2:30pm we decided we needed to get out and see Panama regardless of the weather. We were originally thinking of just wandering around on this day, but with all of the rain, we thought we might jump in a cab and head over to Miraflores Locks. These locks are the last set before the Panama Canal opens up to the Pacific Ocean and the visitor’s center provides a great view of ships passing through the locks and has a small museum. We were leaning towards doing the Panama Canal tour the following day, so we knew we’d see the canal, but thought going to the visitor’s center would be a fun way to spend the rainy afternoon. 

Miraflores Locks visitor center taken the next day on our Panama Canal tour.

Taxis in Panama City work on a zone system and, for the most part, are really cheap. The only issues are that each ride is negotiable, the taxi drivers tend to overcharge tourists, and most of the drivers don’t speak English, which can make negotiating difficult. I’d read that the trip from the city to the Locks takes about 10-15 minutes and should cost $6-7. We know a little Spanish, enough that we were feeling confident about the cab negotiation process. Things we did not take into account: it was still pouring down rain and it was almost 3pm on a Friday afternoon. If we had given these details consideration, we might have remembered that getting a cab in ANY city under those circumstances is nearly impossible. Many of the cabs in Panama City will stop for you even if they have a passenger already but will only pick you up if you’re going in the same direction as their original fare. This creates total chaos as every cab might stop for anyone standing on the street. Also, they LOVE honking. The cab drivers will honk if they even remotely think you might be looking for a cab. Because of this, we’d heard it is very easy to find a cab in the city. We walked around for a while seeing very few empty cabs and trying to avoid those with people in them already since we felt negotiating in Spanish in the rain was already a lot for our first day, and adding the extra pressure of the other passengers was something we were trying to avoid. An empty cab pulled over for us after about 10 minutes. When Andy indicated that we wanted to go to Miraflores Locks, he also offered $6 as the fare we would pay, thinking that if we paid up to $9, that would be acceptable. The cab driver abruptly said $15 (all of this in Spanish) and in the couple of seconds it took Andy to look at me to confirm that “quince” did in fact mean 15 (we were a little surprised since it was so much more than what we were expecting), the cab sped off. Our conclusion is that he just did not want to drive out to the visitor center and after we had a little more experience with Panama City traffic, we understood why. Our first attempt to hail a cab in Panama City was not a success. 

We were starving at this point and after a couple more attempts to talk to drivers with passengers already in the cab, we gave up. The Miraflores Locks closed at 5, so we knew it was getting too late to get there. We decided to sit down and eat which is our go-to back-up plan in any country. We went to a café type restaurant a couple of blocks from the hotel called Manolos. There was a nice section of outside seating, so we sat under the overhang and watched the rain. We did observe another couple try at least six cabs without any luck while we were eating, and we were glad we’d given up when we did. 

The place we ate lunch but taken later that night.

After our lunch and a quick stop back at our hotel, the rain finally slowed to a drizzle and eventually stopped around 4:30pm. We went for a long walk in the area around the hotel and stopped for a coffee at a café on Via Argentina. The coffee in Panama is very strong and has a good flavor. Later we ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant we’d passed earlier. We sat outside there, too. We enjoyed our lazy wandering first day in Panama and the failed cab hailing experience only added to our adventure.

A Christmas market/carnival we passed on our walk