Farallón
PANAMA
Royal Decameron: Mai Thais, Music, Men in Tights
By AARON
Sunday, August 10, 2008
There comes a time in every man’s life where he must look deep inside himself, be introspective, and ponder the lifelong questions that have piled up before him like files on an apathetic’s work desk. Questions like, “what is the meaning of life?”, “is there a God?”, “what would I look like in skin tight gold spandex?”, and “exactly how much food and alcohol can I stuff into myself at an all-inclusive resort in one week?”. It was at the Royal Decameron All-Inclusive Resort and Spa where some of these mythical questions would finally find their answers…
August 10th was a date that had been drilled into the minds of Lyndi and I ever since I got the e-mail from my parents about coming to visit us while we were on our year long sabbatical from work. Long story short, we were to meet my parents at the Royal Decameron on the 10th of August for a week to visit, catch up, and enjoy the sights and sounds of an all-you-can eat-/drink-/sail-/sunbathe-/swim-/kayak-/windsurf- (well, you get the idea) resort. Lyndi and I boarded the Ticabus at noon on Saturday (August 9th) about as giddy as 2 kids knowing they’re about to embark on a trip to Disneyworld. Except at this Disneyworld, Mickey Mouse is a bartender, and Goofy serves you fresh sushi and steaks while the 7 dwarfs do Panamanian dances to entertain you.
We arrived at the Albrook Terminal in Panama City around 5am on August 10th, and boarded another bus back to the small beach of Farallon, where the resort is located. After a 2 mile walk from the highway to the resort, we arrived at around 8:30am not even feeling the weight of our backpacks as we absorbed with our eyes “all that is Decameron”. The place was beautiful. Just like you see in all those ads for Club Med or Sandals, hundreds of employees there to serve your every whim, take your bags, make you a drink, while you just sit there in one of the 13 pools (one with a swim-up bar I might add), or bask in the sun on their mile long stretch of white sand beach.
Our host, Robert, was gracious enough to let us take in all the amenities of the resort while they prepared our room for us. It was, after all, just 9am, and check in isn’t until 3pm. After gorging ourselves on the breakfast buffet, we changed into our trajes de bano (swim suits), and went straight to the pools. Decameron has, as I said, 13 pools that span the entire length of the property, most of which are right before the beach. Being spoiled as we are, and seeing that over the past 4 months we had already been to about, oh I don’t know, like 47 Caribbean beaches; but no crystal clear, drink while you sunbathe pools, our choice was an easy one. Although it was only 10:30am by this point, Lyndi went to use the restroom and conveniently came back with 2 fruity beverages that may or may not have contained alcohol; and as the saying goes that we taught our friend Mirko in Semuc Champey, “it’s 5:00 somewhere”.
My parental units arrived the next day, almost a full 33 hours after we had already been there, so needless to say, by this point we were seasoned veterans of Decameron. We had already made dinner reservations for all 7 nights, and had graciously “sampled” every conceivable concoction of libations, so as to make their transition from “busy work life”, to “God’s resort if he left Heaven” (as I like to call it) as easy as possible for my parents.
Now at this point, I know that you’re staring at your computer screen saying “Aaron, please tell us more! Describe every minute of every day using your witty, descriptive rhetoric that has captured all our hearts and minds!”, but you’d find out quickly at a resort like this, you start to fall into a rhythm. All day you relax, swim, drink fruity drinks, enjoy the scenery, play trivial pursuit, giant chess and left-handed/no-look/speed/drinking shuffleboard, and enjoy the great food at the buffets and restaurants. So instead of describing every day, I would like to highlight 2 things that stood out as the most memorable happenings of the week.
First was on Thursday, when Lyndi and I decided to take my parents out of the resort (why would we do that?), and spend the day at the Panama Canal. Having taken a private taxi all the way from the airport, we decided to give them a taste of what we do all the time – take local buses! The bus was actually great, with everyone getting a seat and no one in the aisles, we made it to Albrook Terminal in Panama around 10:30am. We then boarded another bus that dropped us off at the Miraflores Locks of the Panama Canal.
The Miraflores Locks are the first set of 3 locks that the boats go through that enter in from the Caribbean side. At the locks, there is a 4-story museum that takes you on a tour of the building of the Panama Canal, and although it is a bit sugar coated (it gave the impression that everyone worked in harmony, and the “volunteers” (slaves) from the Bahamas, Barbados, and Jamaica were just so darn happy to be there getting yellow fever and malaria!) it does provide some informative visual aids. We also watched a movie about the canal, that had a 90s German techno/trance musical soundtrack opening to it. I thought we had maybe wandered into a rave instead of the movie theater.
Anyway, after the museum and movie, it was time to see what everyone comes here for: to watch huge container boats pass through the canal. There is an observation deck on the 5th story, but below was the Miraflores Restaurant that has a patio where you can eat lunch and enjoy a perfect view of the boats passing by, just spitting distance from your table, and we sure are hungry. But oh no! You need reservations to eat on the patio! And we’re booked solid! Is this the end of our wonderful vacation? Will our heroes be able to enjoy lunch and watch the boats? Will Aaron ever get back to the story? Well as you recall, by the time my parents had come to the resort, I mentioned we had taken care of everything. That includes calling the Miraflores Restaurant 3 days in advance and making lunch reservations for the patio at 2:30pm. In Spanish. All by myself.
Needless to say, my parents were excited as we sat and enjoyed great food, a bottle of wine, and 5 HUGE container ships pass by while we ate. My dad, being a retired Navy man himself, thoroughly enjoyed watching this marvel of modern engineering take place 20 feet from his seat. When we were ready to leave, or when they kicked us out because the museum closed at 5pm, we took a taxi back to the Albrook terminal, and then took a minibus back to Decameron where luckily they were able to load about 35 people on a 12 capacity bus, giving my parents that true local Panama transportation experience. We made it back to the resort around 7pm, giving us just enough time to have some drinks, and head to the Mediterranean restaurant for our dinner that night.
The second memorable experience happened on Friday morning, when as part of our “daily routine” we grabbed a couple of drinks and checked out what was happening at the activities center. Turns out that for that night’s entertainment they were having an “Pareja Ideal” (Ideal Couple) competition in which guests of Decameron pitted themselves against each other in numerous competitions doing god knows what to find out who was the “best couple” at Decameron. Here’s how the conversation went down (I think):
(Lyndi) “Hey Aaron, we should enter into that contest, wouldn’t that be fun?”
(me) “Well, I’m not too sure. Will I have to wear any funny hats?”
(Lyndi) “No, of course not!”
(me) “What about skin tight gold spandex pants?”
(Lyndi) “Don’t be ridiculous!”
(me) “I won’t have to serenade you or anything like that, will I?”
(Lyndi) “No, I’m sure it will just be a bunch of questions that every couple has to get right about each other, it’ll be a breeze!”
(me) “Okay, let’s give it a shot…”
Friday night came with a fury as the sun seemed to settle all too quick, as if itself anticipating the 9:00pm contest that would soon make fools out of 8 unsuspecting couples. The outdoor amphitheater was packed, as it always was at night, with no less than 300 guests and onlookers, waiting to be entertained yet again as the festivities began. Upon asking for 8 couples to volunteer for the competition, we were picked out of the crowd as one of them (possibly to do with Lyndi’s jumping up and down), along with 7 other couples – all from Central and South American countries.
First was the introductions, and everyone telling where they were from and how long they had been together. As luck would have it, we were last, but also first to realize that we were the only American couple up there, biding for the love and applause of the 95% Central and South American audience. We were doomed.
At this point we both had the same goal: Just don’t get dead last. The first “competition” involved the men standing on the chairs while the women took a ping pong ball up one of their pant legs and down the other. Not too bad, not too racy as all 8 couples didn’t have much trouble performing the task. The audience gave us all courtesy claps, but in this world of instant gratification, they clearly wanted this competition kicked up a notch.
Next competition was one at a time, where the woman sat in a chair center-stage, while the man got down on one knee and serenaded her with a song.
“Oh crap, I’ve never sang for Lyndi before! Also, this crowd speaks Spanish and I don’t know any Spanish songs! Think Aaron, think! (Maybe you should freestyle rap, everyone likes rap, right?) Shut up! The M.C. is calling me to center stage! Okay, breathe. Sing a song that they may know. What is he doing now? Is that a clown hat? He wants me to sing a love song with a clown hat on? Brilliant, just brilliant. Well, here goes nothing…”
So up on stage, in front of 300 plus guests at Decameron, I got down on one knee, and sang Top Gun’s “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling”, and I must say, I nailed it. The audience even started singing along! Maybe we wouldn’t get dead last after all…
After the 7 other couples sang, it was time for the first vote off – all by audience applause. All the couples lined up front-stage and were notified that only four would remain. Four? That means in one fell swoop, they were knocking off half the contestants, once again, we felt queasy. But just like in Rocky IV, when the Russian crowd suddenly started cheering for Rocky over Ivan Grago, so did we start to win the hearts and minds of our audience as they surprisingly started cheering loudest for us! We were floored. In fact, we were the first couple to get a spot to the next round, so upon whittling the competition down to 4 couples, the men were all escorted back stage, and the women blindfolded on stage.
Back stage we were all giving each other high-fives and feeling pretty good, when all at once, we were handed some gold, stretchy pants that look like they would be fitting very tight. Skin tight as it would turn out.
“Where’s my shirt?”
“No shirt, just these, oh yeah and some more goofy hats. Let’s go with the Dr. Seuss looking ones”
“Great, now we get to prance out on stage wearing nothing but skin tight gold spandex and a goofy hat. My dad will be so proud.”
“Alright guys, when you get out there, just mimic what our main dancer, Romeo, here does, which if you haven’t figured it out yet, he’ll be doing most of the moves you would see at a male strip club.”
(all 4 men at once) “Damn.”
So while we are out there, wearing pretty much nothing, thrusting our pelvises towards the audience an alarming number of times, I kept having flashbacks to Lyndi’s and my “we should enter that contest!” conversation that happened less than 10 hours prior.
Next up was “blindfolded women come out and feel each man’s butt and guess which one is her man”. Lyndi was actually only one of 2 women to guess right, but had an unfair advantage as the other men all outweighed me by at least 40 lbs. This proved to work to the other women’s advantage as well, eliminating at least one butt as they all felt and went “Oh, no! No es mi esposo!” My bony ass gave me away.
4th contest was now “blindfold the man, put a water bottle between his legs, and have the woman (cup between her legs) guide her man to the cup and squirt the water in the cup until full”. What we didn’t know was that the DJ was recording the vocals and when it was all said and done, they played back the vocals over the loudspeakers. The audience loved the sexual innuendos.
Final contest: “Man and women break 3 balloons using 3 racy positions to do so.” (At this point in the contest I happen to glance over at my parents. They don’t look too happy.) So now it came down to the big winner. At this point I figured “Panama couple number 2” had it in the bag. The guy was great, always with a smile on his face, and the older couple was cute in an older couple sort of way. Plus, he had home court advantage, the contest being in Panama and everything. Once again, by applause, the audience narrowed the contestants down to 2 couples: Lyndi and I, and “Panama couple number 2”. I was already about to congratulate the other couple on a fine win, when for some odd reason – maybe it was the singing, maybe it was the pelvic thrusting, or maybe it was Lyndi yelling an emphatic “NO!” when asked if she liked George Bush—- we won? I couldn’t believe it. It was the true underdog story of the century, okay of the day at Decameron, but Lyndi and I were shocked as the audience went crazy for us on the final vote, earning us our title as “Best couple at Decameron” (and also some nice gifts as well). The next 2 days on the resort, we felt like celebrities. Everyone walking by, saying “Congratulations!”, or “Hey Aaron, where’s the spandex pants?”, it truly was a memorable experience.
So Sunday finally came around, and the magic of Decameron had come to an end. It was a wonderful week filled with fun, family, games, and goofy hats. Lyndi and I said a sad goodbye to my parents, and thanked them profusely for coming to visit and arranging this wonderful week for all of us. We left Decameron to head back to Panama City for a couple of days, for now we had a new mission: find a way to get to Colombia and start our trek in South America.
