It´s a Big Blue Watery Road

Que tal huellones?

We made it through our boat trip to the San Blas islands alive! It was some rough going living in paradise but we did it.

We left on Saturday the 18th on a boat called Sacanagem captained by a French Brasilian named Frederico. Frederico has 35 years of experience on the water so we felt pretty confident that we were choosing a good boat. It´s a 40 something foot long single hulled sail boat and it ¨comfortably¨fit 10 people plus the captain and his nephew who was Frederico´s assistant. On the trip there were 5 French, 2 Australians, an Irishman and us the 2 Americans. Three of the French were traveling together and the other two were a couple.

We set off and opened up the trip with some outrageous sunsets as we left the bay in Cartagena. The first 2 days were on open sea with nothing to do but sit and talk. Unfortunately there was a major language barrier given 5 French and 5 English speakers were on board. In usual French fashion all 5 of them spoke English very well but they refused to do so most of the time. Bree had a pretty hard time with the first two days and feeling sea sick but she found a spot where she could lay and not feel too bad. About 6 hours into the second day our Irish friend told everyone he can´t swim. Given that 90% of the trip is based around activities involving swimming we were pretty baffled at his decision to come on the trip.

Going apparently was pretty slow and we were supposed to arrive on Monday morning but we instead made it at like 3 pm. At one point the water was really calm so we put down the sails and shot off the motor and jumped in and it was amazing to finally get in the water after 2 days of staring at it. When we got back on board Frederico told us the water was nearly 1000 meters deep where we jumped in. Glad we didn´t know that before hand. The first island we went to, called Holandes by the Spanish, was completely empty and we spent the afternoon snorkeling in the bathwater warm ocean and made a fire on the beach where we roasted kebabs for dinner and started our party celebrating our arrival. The French couple was very intelligent and brought camping gear and spent the night on the island in there tent. Bree and I were jealous we didn´t think of it.

The next morning we woke up to a great pancake breakfast and did some more snorkeling before shoving off to the second island. The second island was inhabited by the Kuna people who own the San Blas islands. The islands are actually called the Kuna Yala now but they are still referred to as the San Blas. The people make there money selling goods to travelers and charging people for docking inside the reefs. They also sell beer and snacks to boaters. The second island was a blast since we had a lot more time there. We were walking around the island when there was a down pour so sat down in the water and stayed warm while watching the rain. Since the water is so flat the rain drops plopping into the sea was really cool to see.

The third day we spent at the same islands until the late afternoon doing the same old relaxing in paradise that we had been doing before. Eventually we made our way to el Porvenir which is one of the last islands where Frederico went and got our passports stamped so we could enter Panama. We went to the main Kuna island and walked around meeting the indigenous people and seeing their culture. If we wanted to a guy offered for us to spend the next night there and he would give us 3 meals. It was a tempting offer but after 5 days of essentially having paradise to ourselves we didn´t feel like being swamped by local kids.

That night Frederico made an insanely good dinner using fresh octopus he bought and we had one last hurrah before we woke up in the morning to head to Panama City. We woke up in got in speed boat and were whisked away to the main land and then brought up a river where a bunch of 4x4s were waiting to pick us up. We thought we were done with curving mountain roads on this trip but no we had 2 more hours. At least this time we were in a Toyota Land Cruiser. We were driving along when we saw another car stopped ahead of us and so we stopped and there was a sloth in the middle of the road.

There isn´t much to update about Panama City. It´s just another city. Bree´s friend from college flew down and is traveling with us for a week. We went to the Panama Canal which was pretty interesting to see how it works.

We are in a town called Boquete for the day before we head to Bocas del Toro. Boquete is the home to some of the best coffee in the world which is pretty exciting. We went to a hot spring today and there was a monkey hanging around and playing with us which was a blast. Everyone at the hostel here gets along really well so we are having a huge bbq tonight. Tomorrow we leave for Bocas del Toro for another week in the Caribbean.