Saturday, November 29, 2025
Last night we had a wonderful dinner at the Peruvian French place. Ceviche and Pisco Sours just like in Peru.
Today, we started our long journey home. We got up around 6:30 or so, and neither one of us slept great. There were hooligans outside revving cars and making a ruckus well past midnight.
Since we’re all out of yogurt and eggs, we decided that we’d pony up the $18 per person to have the hotel’s breakfast buffet. Good, but not quite Austrian or Slovenian good. There were a few pastries, bread for toast, sausage, bacon, scrambled eggs, yogurt with toppings, juice and coffee. You could also get made-to-order pancakes, omelets and fried eggs. Nathan ordered a ham and cheese omelet and I ordered a fried egg. There must have been a language barrier, because I ended up with a plain omelet. Order what you want, eat what you get!
After breakfast, we went to the dive shop to drop off a tip, and our leftover rum. From there, we had an hour or so to burn before the taxi came to get us. We walked down towards the Queen Emma bridge and found the floating market of produce sellers. Man, I wish we had walked down here earlier, because they sold all kinds of fruit: cherimoya, pineapples, watermelon, anything you could have wanted. And my Spanish is useful down here too. I can’t imagine any of these things come from Curacao, so these sellers are perhaps Colombian or Venezuelan.
We find the bridge, take a few photos, and look at a few souvenirs before hustling back to finish packing up our bags.
The taxi arrived a few minutes after the 10:30 arrival time we had set, but whisked us off to the airport.
A few people over the years have asked us why we never rent a car on vacation. Even in Curacao, most people rent a car. The island is big enough and public transportation is not very good.
First of all, why add all that stress to your vacation? Where to park, where are the keys, etc. But have you seen how people drive in other countries? Like they have a death wish. No thank you! Not on vacation.
Our driver dropped us off at the airport in one piece, took my last US $40, and we went inside the airport.
The Copa app had warned me to get to the airport 3 hours ahead of time, but that seemed a little crazy. We arrived 2 hours and 15 minutes ahead, and the line of Copa passengers waiting to check in and check bags was snaking out of the queue.
A Copa employee came over to us and explained that either Copa or the airport didn’t have internet, and our flight might be delayed. We stood in that line for more than an hour, and joked about me offering them my IT assistance. (Have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in?)
Once we finally got to the front of the line and checked our bags, the guy at the counter handed us our boarding passes and said “Gate 1, they’re boarding now.”
We hustled through immigration and security checkpoints, had enough time to hit the bathroom, and then boarded our plane.
On board, I dug out my dive computer. “Does it say No Fly?” Nathan asked. Yes, it does. We had ~15 minutes left of our surface interval, and I watched the computer count down until we were safe to fly. This was one flight where I didn’t mind a small delay.
We took off a few minutes late, and our 2 hour flight to Panama City was uneventful.
Our arrival in Panama was equally uneventful, and once we got a gate and disembarked, Nathan and I sailed through passport control and baggage claim.
We had to wait just a minute or two for the hotel to pick us up, and we were off to ORHO Tocumen, our new favorite little hotel in the Marbella neighborhood.
Dominico greeted us once we arrived, and reminded us that he is Italian, and his English is not great (it’s actually fine), so could we please speak slower…we had been chattering away like two excited little birds.
We got a tour of their recently renovated rooms, new since last year, and he showed us up to our blue room. We dropped our stuff in the room, before walking out to the Pacific Ocean and enjoying the sights and sounds of the city.
Since we were just here last year, we wandered about near the ocean, found a few parks, and even saw a local raccoon.
We’d missed lunch since our wait in line at the airport was so long, so we headed back to our room, and out to an early dinner at the fish restaurant with the yummy passion fruit mojitos.
