Panama

In October 2017, I was lucky enough to go on a week-long trip to an all-inclusive resort in Panama, along with my parents and a friend of mine. I was my first time on the Pacific Ocean and being so close to the equator that the days were almost exactly twelve hours long. It was also my first time on a beach with my walker, and that was all kinds of exhausting, let me tell you!

We left Montreal at the crack of dawn, on the way first for a stop in Toronto, and then to Panama. As I’m disabled, I had a free reserved seat in the front row, along with my friend. Since the airport we were landing in in Panama was Rio Hato, which is tiny (it literally gets two flights a week…), we’d asked for my walker to be brought up to the plane when I got off, so I could just walk up to the terminal and be ready to go. But there I was, waiting on the tarmac, and my walker was nowhere in sight. So I got into the wheelchair they’d brought out for me and let the attendant push me through security, to the luggage piles (no carousel in Rio Hato!), and there was one of our suitcases, two, three, four… and no walker in sight. I was starting to seriously panic that they’d left it in Montreal, when they finally brought it out, literally the last thing to leave the plane, when we’d specifically requested it to be the first. So that was a mediocre start to the vacation…

Then we took the transfer bus to the hotel, five minutes away, and my walker was put below with the luggage. When we got there, I stayed seated on the bus until people had cleared the way. That is how I saw, through the window, the bus driver set my walker down, turn away, and an older woman, another tourist, grab the walker and start leaving with it! Luckily, my dad was already outside, because he’d seen her too and ran after the woman to get my walker back. If he hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t have seen it ever again. Today this is a funny story I tell everybody, but somebody clearly dropped the ball there! Mobility aids aren’t just luggage you can leave unattended on the side of the road!

But finally we were at the hotel, the beautiful Riu Playa Blanca. I had asked for an accessible room (i.e., whatever passed for accessible in Panama), but it had never been confirmed, so I walked into my room not knowing what to expect. But it was an accessible(-ish) room! The bathroom was ginormous and the door was wide, there were bars next to the toilet and a roll-in shower, but no bars or seats (or functioning lights) inside it, so… B+? The only very perplexing thing was that all four elevators were in the central part of the hotel, but this room was half-way down one of the side wings, closer to stairs than to elevators. So every morning before leaving our room I’d check my beach bag about seven times to make sure I had everything I needed, because I did not want to have to walk all the way back to my room before that evening!

The hotel itself was accessible. There was ample room to move around in the bars, buffets and restaurants, and virtually no steps anywhere. As you can see on the photos above, both taken from my parents’ room (which I did not share, it was even farther from the elevators than mine was!), there was a smooth path on a slight incline leading from the hotel all the way down to the beach, passing between the four pools. At the beach it went down and disappeared in the sand, so it took no special effort to get to a lounge chair under a palm tree—no more than it usually takes to roll in the sand, that is!

One day, we went on an excursion to Panama City. We’d borrowed a wheelchair from the hotel for the day (simple to do) and walked around the city, both modern and old, which was surprisingly not completely inaccessible. You can see for yourself how smooth the sidewalks and streets are (that embarrassing moment when Panama roads are better than those in Montreal…). The sidewalks were, however, quite narrow, oftentimes with cars parked halfway up on them, so swerving into the street was often necessary. While the curb cuts weren’t always perfect (or even there), in general navigation around town wasn’t as terrible as it could have been in such a country. We even visited a church to which they’d added a small but functional ramp! I mean, the last church I went to in Chambly (Quebec) had four steps to go in and no way to avoid them…

That day we also went to the Miraflores locks on the Panama Canal. It’s a relatively modern construction, so fully accessible. Functional elevators allow us to go up to the observation deck and take in the oddly fascinating show of a huge ship creeping through a very narrow passageway from one ocean to the next. The exhibitions and gift shop were also very welcoming, with enough space to move myself around in a wheelchair without bumping into anything.

This is Roger, our tour guide. At one stop in the city, the bus was across from a patch of dirt and grass, so I had to get out of the wheelchair and walk across it myself, holding on to people for support. Roger saw me struggling, picked me up and simply strolled over to the bus, calmly depositing me on the steps. Once past the surprise of being suddenly carried by a near-stranger, I found the whole thing pretty amusing. Thinking back on it, though, I realize how inappropriate it was—or could have been. I’m a young thin woman, which is probably why everybody laughed, but what if I had been older, heavier, or a man? It probably wouldn’t have been as easy to just pick me up; maybe Roger would have asked, or at least warned me (which he did later in the day on another occasion, but not that first time). I’m sure he meant well, but please never touch people, be they disabled or not, without their consent. This photo will always be a funny anecdote from Panama, but it was only funny because it was me and I didn’t mind; it could not have gone as well with someone else and should not have happened, at least not that way, in the first place.

A few more days reading on the beach and swimming in the pool later, and we were back on the plane to Montreal. Unfortunately, the end of the flight back was as unpleasant as the flight to Panama. This time we’d asked for the walker to be checked and to have a wheelchair waiting for me at the gate, because if you’ve ever walked through the Pierre Elliott Trudeau airport you know that even able-bodied people would sometimes rather be in a wheelchair… So we landed late, around 11 p.m., and what was waiting for me at the door? My walker, no wheelchair! We explained to the airport employee and to the plane pilot that I had asked for a wheelchair, not my walker. Neither of them understood why I couldn’t just take my walker and walk (because I was tired, sore from nine hours on the plane, it’s about a kilometre walk, and there was a reason I asked for a wheelchair, maybe?), and weren’t exactly polite when suggesting it as something I should do. The airport employee grumbled that all the wheelchairs were in use at other gates, but we insisted and he ended up leaving to get one.

Irritated, we slowly walked up the jetway to the airport, where we figured we’d wait on the benches to be more comfortable. And what did we find there but an abandoned wheelchair? We’re not supposed to use airport wheelchairs without supervision, but after a quick look around to make sure the attendant supposed to go get a wheelchair for me (who clearly hadn’t done a very thorough job) wasn’t around, I plunked down in it and we went on with our business. So if YUL employees are still scratching their heads over the mystery of the disappearing wheelchair around midnight one October 2017 night, that was me, and now you know why!

And that was my 2017 week in Panama! Apart from the slight unpleasantness of the plane trips bracketing the vacation (but can plane trips not be unpleasant when you’re disabled, really?), it was an enjoyable time!