G´day there folks...long time, no email....again!
So here is the next instalment of Wheres Daz Now, from San Blas in Panama back on April 10 until my exit from Colombia, this time last Saturday, as here I am in Quito, Ecuador. Apologies in advance to the trees felled in printing this baby but if it comes across half as good as my time in San Blas and Colombia then hopefully it is worth it!
Thanks again for the feedback on the last email and for those people requesting the soundtrack from the Nica Bus I have one word for you...I-Tunes. Now there is a shameless plug Apple that has to be worth a new I-Pod on my return. Anyone out there work for Apple?
If I try and recall last email about a month back I was lapping it up like a pig in mud in Panama City, slurping alcoholic smoothies, kicking Panamanian ass on the pool table (again...go figure, new career perhaps...got the pool-room set up yet Colonel, "The Castle" style I trust?) and eating barbeque chicken like it was going out of fashion. And before you could say "Here Come Ted and Alice...Again" I was heading for the San Blas Islands in the Carribean off the Panamanian Coast.
The San Blas - "Wa Wa Wee Wa"
Two hours into the bus journey saw us come to a rather abrupt halt, calls of "get outta the cab" were answered as we admired the Panamanian roadside for the next hour while our driver hitched back into town to get the required parts before returning to make the running repairs and then we were off again. Not before we had to transfer into a jeep for the jungle part of the journey, where I managed to sit in the back on a wooden plank and chew my kneecaps for 2 hours with 14 of my closest Panamanian amigos. That road was something else, I have no idea what it was but a road is really stretching it. And then it was a transfer into a wooden boat for the half hour to my home for the next 3 nights, Yandup Island in the San Blas Archipelago. In fact this was one of 400 islands in the San Blas...think Fantasy Island, 400 times over!
To give you some background, the San Blas are solely inhabited by the indigenous Kuna people and are a solely autonomous region within Panama. There is no electricity on all bar one island (yeah, the one with the hospital which has got to be a good thing), same for running water, no mosquito´s, there are no cars and each island has a Congress, comprising the men who make the decisions on what does and does not happen on the island. They have their own language (Wa Wa Wee Wa), customs and culture best exhibited by the Kuna women. Their faces adorned with black line from the forehead to the tip of the nose, gold ring through the nose, really colorful clothes and their legs adorned in tiny colorful beads from knee to ankle. Add to this many rings, bracelets, necklaces and you get the picture...most worn to ward off bad spirits. As for the Kuna men, think Western, think tank tops, shorts and mobile phone.
Let me say it upfront, San Blas was, and no doubt still is Paradise. The best place bar none that I have been to on my trip so far. And it all started with the hospitality of the local Kuna family whose island I was sharing...Archimedes, Aron, Nyxia, Enrique, Arnoldo down to the local kids who came by every morning and night. As they say in Kuna, Wa Wa Wee Wa! For three nights the hammock was my bed and with not a mosquito to be had (and thanks to Nancy´s tip to sleep on the diagonal) the sleep was top shelf. The food was all fresh from the lobster, the freshly caught fish (sometimes picked up smoked from an island on the way back home for the day), the rice cooked over the coals with fresh coconut added, freshly baked bread and eggs every morning along with a coffee.Gold! Add the serenity of no electricity or cars with only the glow of the light from candles along with the millions of stars carpeting the sky directly above.
To shower you grabbed your soap, towel, filled the bucket up with fresh water, grabbed the ladle and headed to the bamboo encased shower perched right over the ocean. There is something to be said about showering with a bucket whilst admiring the Carribean sunset over and through the bamboo that sealed it for me. With toilets also perched over the water I did the ocean a favour and decided not to "drop the kids of at the pool" whilst on Yandup, and no you do not swim off this island for fear of a "Caddyshack style - Chikito Bar" incident. What is amazing is that as soon as I arrived back in Panama City, bang, my boughs were like clockwork again. I digress, and apologies to those currently eating!
So lets try and paint a picture of the San Blas. For starters the weather was great (it had been raining for ten days prior to us arriving) and the company was sensational thanks to the local Kuna, Kelly, Linus, Nancy, Julia, Tom, Hollie and Jerome. As they say timing is everything as the week before there were 35 gringos and rain on Yandup, however my first night saw only Tom, Kelly and myself, with the other gals and guys joining us over the next few days.
Each day had a strong hint of groundhog. You rolled out of the hammock, chucked on the boardies and tank top, grabbed the daddy longs (thongs or flip flops for those wondering what the!), snorkel and mask and slapped on a bit of sun screen. Next up breakfast, strong coffee, eggs, bread, quick brush of the teeth before jumping into the wooden boat complete with outboard motor to take us to our island of choice for the day. Guided by public opinion we headed to Isla Diablo (devil in Spanish) with the only horns being below the waist. These islands are hard to take, in the case of Diablo it was Archimedes´ father, the amazing 80 year old Jimmy and his wife as the permenant residents on the island surrounded by palm and cocount trees, ringed by soft, white sand beaches with the amazing warm, turquiose blue waters of the Caribbean lapping at the shores. And hammocks, what island is complete without hammocks. And man, could Jimmy cook!
To walk around Diablo took about fifteen long minutes, maybe 30 if you stopped to admire the surrounding islands both near and far, including the island comprising one coconut tree and requiring a 10 second walk from one end to the other. Just off Diablo was a shipwreck waiting to be snorkelled, the trick being to get there before the passengers from the mother of a cruise ship beat us to it. In fact the arrival of the cruise ship was our cue to get outta there and head off to Isla Pelicano (yeah you guessed it, Pelican in Spanish). Don´t ask me why but this even shaded Diablo for title of Paradise. Was it the setting being even more isolated than Diablo, a quick 5 minutes saw you walk around Pelicano or the water which was an stunning shade of blue? Pelicano was the scene of my video to show you all back home Paradise in the flesh, however this operator somehow managed to produce a black and white video with the only colour being the green of the trees. Serenity now, serenity now!! I have attached a couple of pictures to try convey everything I have described above.
There was nothing about this whole experience that disappointed. From hour long boat rides back to Yandup at the end of a hard day, sitting on the bough of the boat as the sun set across the San Blas horizon. Stopping off at islands on the way home to pick up the smoked fish for dinner, one island literally containing a hut for smoking fish, next to the hut for sleeping with room on the island for nothing else, not even a coconut tree. And should the motor fail every once in a while and we have to cruise slowly back to Yandup at sunset, (apart from using the mobile phone and yeah, this technology is everywhere), well all I can say is wa, wa, wee, wa! What is not to like about dinner by candlelight and a sky bursting with stars every night, the days catch on the table, 75 cent cold beers from the old man up the street (beware his wife though as her bite can be worse than her bark) and who can forget Jefferson, the sixty something "Water and Weed" man providing those two basic provisions.
Nights were spent watching the local Kuna children put on a dance performance for us, listening to Linus, a master of the violin who gave us an impromptu rendition surrounded by the locals, the Lithuanian pied piper in action as the local kids followed him around with amazement. Just taking a walk around the island inhabited by 40 families through up something different every night, like the sound of the Kuna witchdoctor reverberating around the island one night as he administered his magic to a nearby local. And then there is Jefferson´s work, as Linus so simply summed up, "Good weed man!" All for a dollar, then again everything is a dollar here in San Blas.
Well I trust I have given you all a mental picture of this amazing four days, a place that is hard to leave, Linus being proof of that. Linus´s original plan of 5 days became about 30 days on the San Blas. Thanks to the Fantasy-Island setting, the amazingly friendly people and lifestyle like no other. Fish for a living, trade coconuts, swim and lie in a hammock...yeah this is one place I would definately go back to. Wa, Wa, Wee, Wa!
Panama City - "If you knew Zuly like I knew Zuly"
And before you could kneel and say "de plane, de plane", Julia, Nancy, Tom and myself were heading back to Panama City and in my case Zuly´s hostel where I was meeting up with Dave from Melbourne fresh from a victory at the Hippodromo (racetrack) in Panama City, before we flew to Cartagena in Colombia. The last night in Panama City saw six of us Australians head out to the scene of my first night in Panama City, Unplugged. Free from the pounding Reggaton beat, swapped for Chilli Peppers, Nirvana, vintage Bon Jovi, and The Offspring telling us to "get a job" it was time to step up to the pool table and challenge the locals. Once again my rich vein of form (if this does not follow me home I am gonna look like the boy who cried wolf...I have witnesses I tell ya!) combined with Dale from Perth led us to whip the locals for a couple of games...even without managing to pop the black as the locals did that for us. All the while being hassled by Panama´s most annoying man who insisted on high fives (one is my limit these days, and even that is a stretch), drinking our drinks when we weren´t looking, pimping his girlfriend and dancing around like someone who had a bit too much of Colombia´s finest. And our winning streak eventually came to an end, one guess who beat us, it was back to Zuly´s and the final night in Panama City.
Come Saturday and having jagged a cheap flight to Cartagena it was time to farewell Zuly and her hostel, jump on the local bus and sit in traffic for the next two hours as we crawled to the airport. For everything great about Panama City, CA´s best big city by a mile, the traffic bit big time. The ever present status symbol of a four wheel drive clogged seemingly every street, and forget peak hour as leg speed will win everytime here. And good luck spotting a four wheel drive that contained more than one person and had been driven off road. Rare species indeed. And then after 18 days in Panama and 89 days in Central America it was time to pull stumps and head into South America, beginning with Colombia, the country every traveller I had met said was their favourite country in the South..Adios Panama, Bienvenidos Colombia!
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