How We Picked Panama

I do a lecture on the ships called “Escape to Paradise” in which I answer the question people have been asking all cruise, “Why did you choose to retire in Panama?”

Folks have asked me to publish several of the slides I use on my blog . . . so here goes.

When we first started talking about the possibility of retiring someplace other than where we were living in Ventura, California, both my wife and I sat down independently and drew up a list of “15 things” that we wanted in a place to retire. Then when we each had our own list we sat down and shared our lists. Interestingly, everything that is in yellow was also on the other person’s list.

Our next step was to merge the two lists into one list.

OK, so we now knew what we wanted in a place where we could retire. We didn’t want much, but we knew we wanted . . .

Now when I’m doing the lecture on board ship I usually digress a little here, launching into a sermonette . . . I think the reason why a lot of people are running madly around through life, searching here and there, looking for this and that, wanting more, more, more . . . is just because they really have no idea what it is that they want. And if you don’t know what you’re looking for, how will you know when you have it??

OK, we have the 15 things . . . but sometimes in life you can’t have everything that you want. And obviously some of these things are more important than others. So our next step was to say, “If we had 100 points to ’spend’, how would we allocate the 100 points?”

So this is what we came up with . . .

We were living in Ventura, California, and if we were ever going to be able to retire, let alone retire early, we needed to drastically lower our cost of living. And, getting older, of course health care was important.

Aside . . . I took the photo in Santorini. I would loveto retire in Santorini! However the cost of living was horrendous – worse than Santa Barbara/Ventura and getting there is such a hassle and so expensive that my kids would never be able to visit. So that’s just an example of some of the more obvious considerations to use in paring down your list of fabulous places to live to a short list of a few places that might work for you.

Here’s what we came up with as a short list.

Ventura, California – Made the list because we were already living there. Maybe we had already discovered our “paradise.” And frankly, in many ways we had! California’s “Gold Coast” is the stuff movies are made of, and where many of the movies are made, and the place where many of the “rich and famous” choose to call home. The problem there is the “rich” part. We didn’t qualify! We had a nice little home with a pool and backyard full of avocado trees. We looked out over the Pacific Ocean. Every morning I could see how big the waves were at the beach! Life was good, but expensive! 29% of my income went for housing! 39% went to my spendthrift Uncle Sam and his cousin in Sacramento.

We’d been to Costa Rica and had heard a whole lot about Americans retiring there. So Costa Rica made the list.

We had been visiting St Thomas for almost 30 years on cruise ships and visiting with our friends, Jack and Ella White, when they lived in St Thomas and Jack pastored the church in Charlotte Amalie. I love St John, and St Croix . . . well, it was also an option.

When I give my “Escape to Paradise” lecture on board ship, people always want to know how Panama got on my short list of countries when we were looking for a place to retire. So here’s the abbreviated story . . .

I was serving as Protestant Chaplain on the ROTTERDAM which was doing the 10-day Southern Caribbean itinerary round trip from Fort Lauderdale which includes going through Gatun Locks and into Gatun Lake, the same itinerary I am now doing on the ZUIDERDAM. Today the ship enters the Canal through Gatun Locks early in the morning, disembarks guests going on tours in Gatun Lake, and then the ship turns around and goes back through the Gatun Locks to meet guests returning from tours at the pier at Cristobal, Colon. In those days the ship remained in Gatun Lake until guests returned from tours.

My wife saw this “Authentic Embera Indian Village Tour” and wanted to go. It was expensive and I said, “It will just be some hokey, touristy thing” – not that Holland America would ever do a “hokey, touristy” tour, but we had been on some othercruise lines that did offer some “hokey, touristy” tours. So I told her, “You go, I just want to go ashore and say I’ve been in Panama.” So I paid $30 to get off the boat and go ashore to the “Gatun Lake Yacht Club.” Talk about a misnomer! There was . . . and is . . . absolutely nothing at the “Gatun Lake Yacht Club”. No yachts, no canoes, nada, nothing. There were a few Embera Indians there selling baskets and somehow I got in a “conversation” with one of the Embera guys. Interesting since I didn’t know Spanish and he didn’t know English. But somehow we began to communicate.

Perhaps because paying $30 just to get off the ship was kinda “hokey, touristy”, the shore excursion operator began serving free beer to ROTTERDAM guests. So I got some beer, and brought some back to my new Embera Indian friend. Soon I met all his brothers, and soon I was getting beer for everyone. Pretty soon the shore excursion operator began serving the beer to me and my new friends.

So here we all are drinking beer with the ROTTERDAM in the background . . .

Well it turned out that my new friend, Erito, was the chief of this particular Embera Puru village. His younger brother, Auselio, was in love and wanted me to take a picture of him and his girl friend.

Auselio took a liking to me and gave me some Embera beads. Not having anything to give him in return, I gave him the ROTTERDAM shirt off my back. And he said, about the shirt and this beautiful bare-breasted Indian girl, “I can’t wait to get back to the village so I can put my girl friend in the t-shirt so she will look sexy like American girls.”

And I had to explain that in America we try to get the t-shirt off !

Well, they got my t-shirt, my 24 Hour Fitness gym bag, and they would have gotten my shorts, but I figured if the Chaplain came back on the ROTTERDAM wearing nothing but a red loin cloth, I’d never get invited back on Holland America!

Five hours later my wife returned from her Indian Village tour (which by the way turned out to be fantastic! and that is still the reaction of our guests on ZUIDERDAM who take the tour today!) and found her half naked husband and his Indian amigos. They kept saying to me, “We want you to visit our village.”

When I went back to Ventura I went on line to try and find out more about the Embera and their village and in the process, by accident, I stumbled onto all the information about retiring in Panama and the benefits of retiring in Panama. So that’s how Panama made the list!

It’s because of Erito and his brothers that we live in Panama today! And we’ve remained good friends with Erito and all the folks at the Embera Puru village at San Juan de Pequini. We’ve visited them and they have visited us. And, as an aside, this is Erito and his brother-in-law Fernando, when I had them visit on the ZUIDERDAM at Christmas.

As always, I welcome your comments and questions.  Please understand that if I am on a ship, due to limited Internet access on board, that there may be a delay in responding.