getting lost in Panama

In my ridiculously busy schedule of the last few months, I had a weekend in Panama in between trips to Nicaragua and Haiti.  I could have sat at home and rested, but the apartment was a mess as the landlord had moved all my stuff as he worked on fixing the ceiling (although he had removed and painted over the mould before fixing the pipe above where the water was leaking from so the mould was already starting to regrow amongst the drips ... sigh ... such is Panama) so I decided to go out for the day.

We have a few Whatsapp groups for different interests, one of which is Panama Hike and Beer.  I don't like beer but they were running a hike on the Saturday described as "easy" so I joined them.  It started off easy - a local bus to a nearby town, a climb over a low fence, a jump over the litter, and we were in a patch of rainforest with a sort-of trail.  Just five of us, which was nice.  After walking for an hour so so we reached a stream, and the others proceeded to cross it, stepping carefully from one (slippery) rock to another.  I pondered turning back at this stage, but they persuaded me to stay with them - but without making it clear that we were now going off trail, to rely just on the GPS of the hike leader to make it back to some form of civilisation.

To cut quite a long (six hour) story short, the features marked on the GPS (such as a road) didn't seem to be there, whilst lots of fallen trees, streams, thick rainforest vegetation interspersed in places with thick reeds growing to above head height were there.  It was quite a tough hike.  The leader kept saying we were x metres from a road, but the best we found was a stony track that disappeared into nothing.  Then we saw a sign in the distance, and were hopeful that we had reached at least the edge of civilisation, but a closer view revealed this:

... a warning to keep out because of unexploded ordinance!

So we gave that area a wide berth.  We had no choice but to keep going though, as we would never have been able to follow our winding route back and by now we were running very low on water, and two of the five seemed close to heat stroke.  Still trying to follow the GPS (with the battery charge nearly gone), we got to a rather wider stream - more like a small canal.  There was a dammed area which we were able to cross, and an abandoned lighthouse came into view higher up the slope ahead.  We pushed on.

& to our relief (well, you knew I made it out or I wouldn't have been writing this) we hit a cleared area with a road, and some way beyond it the Cocolí Locks of the Panama canal.  We collapsed beside the road for a while in the shade of a tree, but then flagged down a passing vehicle.  It turned that we were inside the restricted zone of the canal.  Before long a security vehicle came along with a policeman and a canal security person inside, and of course they stopped to question us.  Turned out that we were not the first foreigners to somehow find ourselves in the restricted zone, and we were not arrested but rather escorted out onto a public road where we were able to find a taxi.

Quite an experience, and not one that the hike leader has shared with other people signed up to his Whatsapp group!