December 18, 2013
The beach is necessary.
While my friend Sam was visiting me here in Panama, we decided to take a little trip to the beach! After spending some time looking through all of the beaches within an hour or two of Panama City, we stumbled upon Playa Coronado and immediately just decided we wanted to go there.
This is when the adventure began.
To set the stage for what went down, I want to put you in the position that we were in and I want you to think about what you would do in these situations…
We were in downtown Panama City at the time in the RIU Plaza hotel when we made the decision to go to Playa Coronado.
We decided to walk down and ask directions on how to get there, and found out it was going to be about $120 to get to the beach from where we were… wowza.
We got into a taxi because I was curious how cheap I could get us to the beach. I started negotiating a bit with the taxi driver and had a number I was willing to pay($70)…
he rejected the initial offer and the negotiation began.
him: $115
me: $70
him: $100
me: $70
him: $90
me: $70
him: $80
me: $70
…it went on like this for about two minutes and Sam was sitting there wondering when I was going to accept the offer for $80. I didn’t.
We ended up talking him into driving us to the Albrook bus stop where we could catch a public bus to the beach.
Wandering around the bus stop, we ended up running into the proper place and getting both of our tickets to the beach…
for $5.60 TOTAL!!!
crazy, right?
Talk about a huge money saver by taking public transportation. We then took the bus and really weren’t 100% sure where it was going to drop us off. Sam ended up seeing a sign for Plaza Coronado so we got out and starting wandering around looking for the beach.
We walked for about a mile and ended up walking up to a gated community. This led me to using my wonderful spanglish skills to talk the guy at the gate into letting us into the community. (you are supposed to have reservations to come in)
we then ended up at a hotel that we’re pretty sure no one has ever stayed in… it was brand new
The first room they put us in didn’t have a working Air Conditioner and I mentioned that to the front desk and they moved us to another room… that was missing light bulbs and smelled like it had been painted the day before. I asked again if there were any rooms that weren’t recently painted because I didn’t want to get sick staying in the room.
I know, I know… complaining quite a bit here.
so I asked… “is it possible for you to upgrade us to a suite for the inconveniences?” and they had to call the manager, which confirmed that yes, they could upgrade us for the same price as the normal room. Badass, right?
So we got put in the “Fitness Room” which had a treadmill in it.
Pretty crazy, right?
Wait until you see the view from the room. It was quite beautiful if I do say so myself..
The beach wasn’t anything too special, although we did lay out for about two hours until it started sprinkling a bit and then the tide came up and soaked us when we weren’t paying attention and got our towels and clothes all wet.
It was a fun little trip for sure and the staff at the TRYP Panama hotel were very accommodating. All of the staff seemed to greet me by name after that first night with the little issue and I think they may have googled my name and found out about the co-founder of Facebook and thought it was me… gotta love that!
and yes… we did take an awesome picture on the roof of the building the day before we left after seeing the #followmeto series on Instagram by https://instagram.com/muradosmann
