Panama is a tiny country everyone knows a little about, but most of us don’t know very much about. We all know about the Panama Canal, which revolutionized world transportation and shipping when it was completed by the United States in 1914 after 10 years of construction, following a failed attempt by the French to do the same thing.
The importance of the canal cannot be overstated. It saves about 8,000 nautical miles in making the trip from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.
What else can you tell me about Panama? It is the country that inhabits the narrowest piece of land between the Atlantic and Pacific in all of the Americas.
Panama is also the country that produced Roberto Duran, one of the greatest, toughest, most brilliant boxers ever.
Birth of a Tour Operator
I learned more about Panama as a tourist destination last December at the U.S. Tour Operators Association’s Annual Conference & Marketplace in Marco Island, Florida, when I met Iván X. Eskildsen.
Mr. Eskildsen was Panama’s minister of tourism from 2019 through 2023. In his pre-minister life, he also had a travel and hospitality company which he divested himself when he became tourism minister.
After he retired from office, he and his partner Maria Amelia Pezzotti founded a new company, which they named Ogaya Travel. It’s a destination management company for Panama. It’s focused on providing travel arrangements made to order for each client. They call their product transformational experiences. They describe themselves better than I could.
According to the company’s promotional materials, it was inspired by the personal travel experiences of the partners. Eskildsen and Pezzotti, “were profoundly transformed by their deep connection to Panama’s pristine natural landscapes and its rich ancestral cultures.”
Their travels were transformative, and “revealed to them the immense value of immersing oneself in untouched nature and the profound personal growth that comes from connecting with the cultures of indigenous and rural communities.”
The company defines its mission as “curating high-end journeys that allow them to share with others the life-changing power of travel.”
Life on Earth
Another overriding mission of the company is to promote sustainability. They hope that by providing regenerative travel, they can help inspire travelers to join in efforts to protect and preserve Panama’s natural and cultural treasures.
Ogaya calls itself “a regenerative travel operator that connects travelers with up-close and personal encounters with majestic nature, authentic culture, and rural communities, so they can have high-end transformational experiences while doing good for humanity and the planet.”
Panama is only about the size of South Carolina, or West Virginia. But it has the second largest tropical rainforest in the Americas, after the Amazon, which is the largest in the world. Panama has a population of 4 million. That’s about half the population of New York City proper. (What is called the New York Metropolitan Area has a population of 19.5 million as of 2023.)
In that small region, it has a huge metropolis, Panama City, with a population of 2 million, about half of the entire country. Beyond the city is the Darién Rainforest, at the border of Panama and Colombia, one of the most biodiverse rainforests in the world. It covers 3,300 square miles.
Panama City is a concentrated urban center, with glass and steel skyscrapers, surrounded by wilderness. The Panama Canal is one of the most strategically important places on earth. That gives Panama its duality of big city life and native country.
Ogaya specializes in high-end immersive experiences. Visitors will arrive via the city. Most will briefly get acquainted with the city, then go to some of the remote areas where it really gets interesting. There you will experience things that are rare in the entire world.
Beyond the City
There is much to explore in Panama when you go beyond Panama City. Despite the fact that the Panama Canal is such an important point for world markets, the country has managed to leave many of its indigenous people undisturbed. They now are a treasure to the world. Ogaya Travel offers a way to meet and encounter native people in Panama.
At a time when our own cultural practices have reached a point where they are in need of some serious repair before they can even be called sustainable, it’s possible that we could learn something from cultures that have been around for thousands of years without destroying their own habitats, as we seem to do.
We used to call such pre-industrial indigenous cultures “primitive.” As we watch our own civilization being washed away by floods and burned down with fires, it’s a good time to be open minded about what is primitive and what is not.
One of Ogaya’s specialties is setting up meetings between visitors and indigenous people. That’s a specialized service, and it requires rare qualities to be able to cultivate the contacts. But it can give us Westernized folks a window into another way of looking at and living in the world.
Although you can build your own tour to your own preferences, the Ogaya website has a lot of programs you can choose from, or you can just read them for ideas. The titles themselves can tell you a lot and spark the imagination about what is beyond the descriptions.
Here’s a sampling that gives a sense of the range of possibilities:
- Hiking in the Panama Canal Jungle;
- Indigenous Wisdom Immersion;
- Skyline Sunset Kayaking in the Bay
- Indigenous Ngäbe Wisdom Immersion & Coastal Treasures
- Ride the Perfect Wave in Venao
- Farm to Table Cloud Forest Experience
- Reef Conservation Diving
- Birdwatcher’s Jungle Paradise
- Discover How Panama Changed the World
- Hike to a Natural Water Temple & Participate in a Cacao Ceremony
- The Emberá, Guardians of the Panama Canal Jungle
Shooting the Moon
Of all the things I learned about Panama from Iván X. Eskildsen, the wildest story was a story of something I never heard of, but I don’t know why it never came to my attention before. It seems it should have been a big story.
Panama was a training ground for US astronauts learning how to survive in the wild if they land back on Earth in some jungle.
In the ‘60s when NASA was training astronauts, it set up programs for survival training in some of the world’s most challenging terrains, such as dense jungle. One of the programs was in Panama. It was the Tropical Survival School at Albrook Air Force Base in the Panama Canal Zone, also known as the Panama Jungle School.
According to Eskildsen…
“NASA looked to the Emberá chief Manuel Antonio Zarco of the Choco (Embera and Wounaan) nation in Panama. Chief Antonio was a senior elder of this entire indigenous society of some 30,000 people [in Panama and Colombia] and was helping the US Air Force Tropical Survival School in their jungle survival program.”
Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, John Glenn and others underwent training there in survival skills such as crafting clothing and tents from parachutes, finding food and water, and identifying venomous snakes.
According to Dr. Michael A. Schmidt, founder, CEO, and chief scientific officer of Sovaris Aerospace, who has worked with NASA extensively on increasing human performance in extreme environments, “For all of its advanced technology in building rockets and preparing men to go to the Moon, NASA looked to the Emberá chief Manuel Antonio Zarco of the Choco (Embera and Wounaan) nation in Panama. Chief Antonio was a senior elder of this entire indigenous society of some 30,000 people [in Panama and Colombia] and was helping the US Air Force Tropical Survival School in their jungle survival program. In preparation for the Apollo mission to the Moon, NASA sent astronauts Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, Michael Collins, and Charles Conrad into Panama for jungle survival training.”
There are pictures of John Glenn and Neil Armstrong in the jungle during those training sessions. The story is told during Ogaya’s Embera Immersion tour, called The Emberá, Guardians of the Panama Canal Jungle.
According to Eskildsen, “We are planning with the grandson of the indigenous chief to recreate the jungle survival training that was provided to the astronauts to offer it as an experience through Ogaya Travel, but we not offering this yet.”
This only scratches the surface of Panama. There is a lot to learn about this narrow strip of land that connects North and South America and the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean. I am determined to go there and learn more first hand. It’s a narrow strip of land with a wide range of things to learn and experience.
David Cogswell is a freelance writer working remotely, from wherever he is at the moment. Born at the dead center of the United States during the last century, he has been incessantly moving and exploring for decades. His articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Fox News, Luxury Travel Magazine, Travel Weekly, Travel Market Report, Travel Agent Magazine, TravelPulse.com, Quirkycruise.com, and other publications. He is the author of four books and a contributor to several others. He was last seen somewhere in the Northeast US.