In some ways Panama feels like the trip proper is starting. Hong Kong and Orlando have been awesome, amazing, but very much like being on vacation. Now, we become backpackers. The first challenge we hit was getting into Panama. Panama it seems has some of the strictest policies regarding onward tickets, which means you won’t be allowed on the plane unless you have one.
After much research and debate, we decided to use a company called flyonward who will purchase you a fully refundable ticket that is valid for 24hours for use in these situations. It’s a real ticket, and you pay them US$10 to do the buying and cancelling for you, rather than having to do it yourself (apparently most airlines have a 24 hour free cancellation policy). The system sounded great. But, we hadn’t banked on Jason’s paypal being linked to his old work email, and the company sending the ticket to that email address. We were madly trying to get this sorted, tried checking in and being honest with our flight out of Mexico, got rejected for being honest and sent away. More frantic emails and eventually our ticket arrived at an email address we could check! The airline check in person wasn’t the least perturbed about us now having a flight from Panama to Amsterdam, despite us having just told her our real travel plans. She just went ahead and entered all our new flight details in the system, checked it was legit and gave us our boarding passes.
We then passed through Orlando immigration, or we hope we did. We passed through a chaotic mess, where a guy on a chair looked at our passports and stamped our boarding pass (not our passport though), before a ramshackle queue led us towards security and the now familiar strip down to your underwear to get through system. Ok, potentially a slight exaggeration...
We kept waiting to find immigration, but didn’t. I really hope it was the guy on the chair, but I thought American immigration would be a little more organised and official. There wasn't even any biometric scanning, and even the theme parks were checking our fingerprints on a regular basis!
On arrival to Panama’s immigration we filled in our arrival form listing our stay as 5 weeks - the time until our flight to Amsterdam - which would be cancelled a few hours later. The immigration official, who spoke no English, then informed us we were only allowed 30 days. Given my limited Spanish I knew what he was telling us, but not what we could do about it. We nodded, looked reproachful and I said 30 days back, then 4 weeks, just so he knew my Spanish was up to the important parts of this conversation. In my head I was quickly freaking out given the complete intransigence at the Orlando end for requirements to get in. He seemed satisfied and stamped us in anyway. Maybe if we’d spoken Spanish it would have been a more indepth interrogation, who knows? I was just grateful we made it in!
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