For those tourists and business travelers lucky enough to arrive after 6 PM at our well-organized international airport where everybody is friendly and speaks English, our innovative authorities have a special attraction to further enhance the Bananama experience.

Say, you get here and rent a car. After having gone through endless security checks, passport control, X-ray machines and what not at the various airports, you get to be received by a welcome committee of our National Police! Between the airport and the highway to town this institution, headed by a wannabe Kojak whose only experience vaguely related to police work is that he knows everything about drawing a line of coke, sets up a checkpoint every single night to check your drivers license. Or maybe that other genius in our government, tourism minister Ruben Blades whose only experience in tourism is having been a tourist, thought this one up? Whichever it is, with some luck, you get to wait about 20 minutes before being greeted by one of those fearless police officers or - with even more luck - shaken down for a bribe. Isn't this just awesome? You were already tired of traveling, now you can get even more tired because of Bananama's proverbial hospitality. Panama, it will never leave you!

Some people are complaining about public transport in Panama City. Nonsense. We probably have the fastest buses in the world! Compite Panama!

That, of course, comes with a price, which we should be willing to pay if we value on-time delivery of passengers. A bus may catch fire. Or, in its urge to get there first, capsize, break in half and leave many dead and wounded. The one in the picture, for example, was racing against a competing bus - the wonders of the free market system! - to get at the next stop primero, but didn't quite make it. Passengers were screaming "stop the bus!" and "go slower!" before the crash, killing two and leaving 31 wounded. That's what you get when you distract the driver from his work. No arrests have been made however.

None of this should be any reason not to send your children to school by public transport.