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The Purple Culture Guide to Panama
What Panama is really like, beyond the canal, the skyscrapers, and the tourist postcards
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: First Impressions
The first thing that hits you is the heat. Not the pleasant, dry heat of a desert or the crisp warmth of a Mediterranean summer — it's the wet-blanket, immediately-sweating-through-your-shirt heat that follows you from the airport door to the car to the hotel lobby. You'll wonder how anyone wears a long-sleeved shirt here, and then you'll see a man in a full suit walking briskly, somehow completely dry, and you'll realize you're the only one suffering. That's your first lesson in Panama: the climate negotiates everything, and locals have made peace with it in ways you haven't yet.
Your second lesson comes within the first hour of driving from Tocumen International Airport into Panama City. You'll see the skyline before you understand it's a skyline — a cluster of glass and steel towers that could pass for Miami or Singapore, rising out of what seems like unbroken green jungle. It's disorienting. One minute you're passing dense rainforest on both sides of the highway, the next you're in a gleaming financial district with a Starbucks on every corner. That juxtaposition — hyper-modernity and raw nature pressing against each other — is not a coincidence. It's the defining character of this country, and it doesn't resolve itself. It just is.
Most people arrive with assumptions, and most of those assumptions are wrong in ways that matter. Let's start with the big one: Panama is not just a canal. Yes, the canal is here and it's remarkable, but