“Tell me if you want me to drive more slowly.”
 
From my non-driver’s seat I’ve already pumped imaginary brakes a few times as the pickup glides from Tocumen Airport onto the Carretera Interamericana for the two-hour drive to Valle de Anton.
 
I’m sweating, mostly from the damp heat that cloaks you as soon as you exit the COPA airlines Boeing. Through the windshield, clear-skied sun-glare I see yellow grasses, shanty towns, produce stands, small, brown-skinned people waiting at bus stops, trash-strewn roadsides, motorcycle policias.
 
“I’ve seen every known perversion there is.”
 
This wasn’t my driver’s conversation icebreaker, but we got there quickly enough. Salt-and-pepper beard and ponytail, tranquilo, German. We speak English though, since he rejected his country three decades ago for life here. We cross the Puente Centenario at the Pedro Miguel locks, me craning my neck to glimpse the canal far below. There are politicians on billboards everywhere, a national election next week. Talk turns to the political, the personal, levels of corruption, levels of consciousness.
 
“People tell me I get my facts wrong….I say ‘close enough’”
 
We head inland from the Pacific coast. It is greener, hillier. We stop at a lookout and peer down on the foliage. I remark on the bird calls emitting from the surroundings. Ponytail takes a drag of his cigarette;
 
“That’s the croak of the golden frog, actually. And in fact it’s a toad. You know what else? They paid over $100,000 for this lookout. I’m sure it only cost about $10k. They pocketed the rest.”
 
We get back in the Kia Sportage and he engages the 4×4 to make it up the impossibly steep, winding, final mile to the house built on the inside slope of the defunct volcanic crater. My home for the next three months.