David, Republic of Panama

When last you heard from us, we were languishing in the Cayman Islands, waiting for the "last" of our engine repairs to be made. And so they were--our little engine has been running great since we left there. Our mechanic, a local man named Schister (pronounced "shy-ster" but he wasn't one), diagnosed and fixed a shaft alignment problem that may have been the cause of several other problems we've had. We also stopped the last of our oil leaks (though since then we've developed a teeny new one, but it's very minor).

Isla de Providencia, Columbia

We departed the Caymans and had a rather uneventful 6-day passage to Isla de Providencia, a Colombian possession in the western Caribbean. The passage involved some dicey navigation through various shoals and banks off Nicaragua, but we're getting pretty good at that kind of thing. We're also getting a lot better at managing the squalls, i.e., we take the sails down before they hit. Much less exciting that way, though.

Providencia was cool. It was a British island for a long time and a good percentage of the local-born inhabitants still speak an English creole and are proud of their English heritage. British warships were still providing emergency aid during crises as recently as 20 years ago (the island has been Colombian for about 100 years, though largely ignored).

The island is very mountainous and most of its 3900 people live around the perimeter in about ten little hamlets; the coast road is eight miles around. We spent a little over a week there, catching up on sleep, reading, searching for internet access (no luck), eating at various little restaurants, circumambulating the island, meeting some local folk (our sincere thanks to Beverly for her help) and tooling around the island's one road over and over on a rented scooter. Erika, though very skeptical at first, grew to like the scooter, a lot. I think she now understands why I rode a motorcycle for three years.

Colon, Panama

We left Providencia and had a 3-day (mostly motoring) passage to Colon, Panama, which marks the Caribbean entrance to the Panama Canal. Our autopilot died on this leg, and there's no repair in sight. Now whenever we motor, we have to hand steer (yuck). Colon has a reputation--which appears to be well-deserved--for being a dangerous city, but we managed to walk around a bit anyway, going to the internet cafe and the Chinese market for veggies.

There happened to be a garbage-collector strike in progress, so huge piles of garbage were everywhere, making a city that already wouldn't be profiled in Conde Nast even worse. To top it off, animals and people tore into the garbage bags to rummage through the contents. Did I mention that it was hot? When the wind was right we could smell the city in the anchorage, over a mile away. The collectors were striking to get their $300/month wages raised to $500/month. I'm glad to note that by the time we left, the garbage was getting removed and the strikers had gotten their raise.

Our cab-driver/immigration-consultant/canal-bureaucracy-assistant was a colorful character named Ellington who'd spent years in the States in the army.

The Panama Canal

To go through the Panama Canal, you must 1) have your boat measured, 2) pay for your transit, 3) schedule your transit, and 4) procure the services of line-handlers (you need four total, plus the helmsman). So we needed three extra people. We called for measurement and got an appointment for the next day. Four days later the measurer actually came. Though late, he was extremely professional, and explained the cause of the delay: with the transfer of the canal from the US to Panama at the end of this year, the Panamanians have instituted a hiring freeze to minimize their budget, so they are short-staffed. This doesn't bode well for the efficient administration of the canal in the future.

We ultimately hooked up with three young itinerants (staying at a youth hostel in Panama City) who agreed to be our line-handlers in exchange for the fun of transiting the canal for free. Apparently, tour operators charge $135 a head for a ride through the canal on their boats. Andrea was a photography student from Germany; Kirsten, also from Germany, a computer guy; and Daniel, from Melbourne, Australia, had been working at a golf course but was now seeing the world. All were doing several months in Latin America on the cheap. Andrea had even spent two months in Tierra del Fuego.

Our canal transit started off with a bang. First set of ascending locks, first lock, we were in the lock behind a 700-foot-long, 110-foot-high car-carrier. Water came into the lock and up we went. There was some turbulence, but nothing scary. The front doors of the lock opened. Now the ship put its propeller in gear to give it a thrust forward into the next lock, an impressive sight indeed from our vantage point about 50 feet behind their 20-foot-wide prop.

In a matter of seconds a huge surge of water came tumbling back at us and Saros obligingly lurched backwards. All of a sudden--Crack!--our forward starboard line had snapped like an old guitar string and our bow was swinging rapidly toward the cement wall on our port. After an instant of stunned surprise, Daniel quickly pulled the slack line aboard to keep it out of our prop so I could engage the engine. I motored forward and to starboard to try to keep the boat in position, but the water was surging past us far faster than our motor could push us forward and the turbulence made steering almost completely ineffectual. Our canal pilot ordered me again to go full ahead and hard to starboard. I regretfully informed him that we were ALREADY full ahead and hard to starboard. He looked at me skeptically then offered a fatalistic shrug. The combination of the remaining three lines and our engine full astern managed to hold us about ten feet off the wall. We had a nail-biting, pants-wetting (this is meant figuratively, of course --Erika) three minutes or so until the car-carrier moved ahead and the turbulence died down. It turned out a canal-worker had tied an improper knot (i.e. not a proper bowline) at the end of that line and the knot had slipped and released.

After our first lock, the rest were relatively easy. We pre-knotted all our lines and I got much better at using the engine and the rudder to minimize shock on the lines. It ended up feeling something like surfing in a dinghy; indeed, the turbulence has been likened to a 20-knot whitewater river.

The rest of the day consisted of motoring across Lake Gatun and descending the locks on the Pacific side. Descending is easy, no turbulence at all. We ended the day taking a mooring at the Balboa Yacht Club. Well, it's not exactly a yacht club anymore. It recently burned down, and in somewhat suspicious circumstances, we hear. Now it is simply a fuel dock and 80 or so moorings, for which they charge incredibly high rates. We and our guests had dinner and fell exhausted into our respective bunks. The following morning our crew split up, but we got together one more time for a celebratory dinner in Panama City.

Panama City to Bahia Montijo 

We spent a couple of days in Panama City doing various errands and a bit of sight-seeing. We walked the length of the city one day, and followed the Via Espana to Panama Vieja, site of the ruins of the original 16th century city of Panama. Then we moved on, threading our way past 30 or so anchored ships, then heading for Otoque, an island in Panama Bay. Otoque was a small island with no roads or cars, just two villages along the shore with a trail between them. We walked the hour from one village to the other, mainly to see if we could buy soda--Coke, if you must know--since there were no stores at all in Village #1. No Coke to be had, but we settled for Fresca.

Next, we had several daysails between miserably rolly anchorages. Along this coast, very large swells from the south were continually rolling in, and even in normally sheltered bays there was a surge that made the boat seem like it was at sea. It is no fun when you get queasy at anchor! Another annoying factor was the immensely high tides: as much as 21 feet from low to high at Panama City. This meant that you could anchor in 25 feet of water and find yourself aground at low tide--see below.

From Otoque we sailed to Isla Iguana. Isla Iguana is supposed to be quite neat eco/biologically (coral, fish, reptiles, turtles, etc.) but the anchorage was so tenuous that we set an anchor watch to make sure we didn't drag, i.e., one or the other of us was up all night. And we weren't willing to leave the boat to go ashore. We did see several humpback whales travelling along about half a mile offshore, though. Very cool.

From Otoque we went to Puerto Aguadulce, a couple of miles up a river. Here we hoped to leave our boat overnight for the first time in months, to visit an inland town called El Valle. And here we had our first real adventure with the local authorities. We arrived at a small port facility near sunset. A large freighter, which I could hardly believe had made it up the tiny river, was moored at a 30-foot-high dock. A little further down, a Servicio Maritimo (Coast Guard) patrol boat was tied to a fishing vessel at another tall dock. Our Panama cruising guidebook said to anchor upstream, so we motored by, waved to the folks on the docks, and went upstream to anchor. Soon after getting the hook down, we were closely approached by the Servicio Maritimo boat with several men aboard, a couple with machine guns. They seemed friendly enough, but wouldn't slow down their Spanish enough for us to really follow. We showed them our passports and cruising permit, which they seemed satisfied with, once we'd agreed to visit the Port Captain and Immigration offices ashore the following morning. But they remained very concerned about where we were anchored. They repeatedly warned us about the current and tides (hardly novel concepts to us, I might add) and also about the mala gente ("bad people") apparently waiting to victimize us in some way. After a while they motored off.

Not ten minutes later they returned, more or less insisting (armed gesticulations have a certain insistence, don't you think?) this time that we come back down the river and tie up to their boat at the dock. So we weighed anchor and came on down, and they helped us tie up to their giant, floating-roach-motel of a boat. Since we were now right in their backyard, they suggested we go ahead and see the port captain and immigration officer. The port captain was satisfied with our cruising permit but the woman at Immigration was concerned that we didn't have "shore passes." What we eventually pieced together was that the only boats ever that ever found themselves up that little river were cargo boats, picking up sugar from the sugar plantation in town.Cargo ship crew, it seems, carry shore passes, not visas. As cruisers on a small, private boat, we didn't fit into any normal paradigm. In the end, we persuaded the official that since we had actual visas (visas being even better than shore passes, depending on how you look at things) we didn't need shore passes. Once this was sorted out, she was extremely friendly, and even helped us get a taxi into town a couple of miles from the port (sure she did--her husband was the cab driver --Erika).

The following day we untied, nervously anchored upstream again (though closer to the port, this time, so as not to alarm anyone), and came ashore for our inland trip. The tidal range made tying up the dinghy too complicated an endeavor, so we ended up dragging it completely out of the water. Some fishermen warned us again about mala gente and insisted on helping us move the boat to the yard of a nearby house, whose owner would watch it while we were gone (for a fee). We were not ungrateful for all the assistance, but we were very eager to be on our way before anyone else tried to help us!

At this point we were a little spooked after so many warnings, about tides and bad people and doubtless a number of other horrors lost in translation. We wondered if Saros would wind up sitting on dry mud at low tide, get washed away by flash floods, or be stripped clean by the baddies, and we dared not hope our dinghy would be waiting for us on our return. But we decided that if the likelihood of the boat being robbed or destroyed was so great that we could never let it out of our sight, then we needed to rethink the entire trip, since there'd hardly be any sense in visiting a country if we couldn't see it!

So we went inland and stayed in El Valle de Anton, a picturesque, chilly mountain town nestled in the caldera of an extinct volcano. The entire town was extremely well manicured and nearly everything had grass and moss growing on it, giving the town a fairyland feeling. Even the drains along the edges of the roads had crystal clear mountain water running through them. We figured that in the last year we had spent all of two nights in a hotel, so we splurged and stayed in the best place in town. It still cost less than the crappy Day's Inn we stayed at on our last trip to Florida! We walked all around town, went to the weekly craft fair, visited a local waterfall, and basically mellowed out. Apparently a lot of affluent folk from Panama City have country houses in El Valle, and the yards are indeed nicely laid out and the houses somewhat larger, but not contructed any differently than more modest houses around the country.

We returned somewhat apprehensively three days later to find our boat...exactly as we'd left it. No flash floods, no vandalism, no theft. Imagine that.

The next several days were spent rounding the Azuero peninsula to Bahia Montijo. This coast is high and rocky, and quite dramatic, with frequent waterfalls flowing into the Pacific. It reminded me a lot of the coast we had seen in Northern California along the Pacific coast highway.

In Bahia Montijo we made our way to Puerto Mutis, a small fishing village up another river, where we hoped we might leave the boat to travel to Costa Rica. We needed to spend 72 hours in Costa Rica in order to get another 30-day Panamanian visa. The first night in Puerto Mutis, we anchored upstream of the town in what the cruising guide said was five feet of water at extreme low tide (these only happen a few days per year). When we returned to the boat at what was a normal, not extreme, low tide, we found her at a 30-degree angle of heel with the keel in the mud and seven inches of bottom showing. Fortunately, a couple of hours later she re-floated herself, no harm done, and we went back downstream a little to deeper water. So much for the cruising guide. (I'm kidding. The Zydlers' guide to Panama has been excellent. We literally couldn't have done this part of the trip without it.)

Puerto Mutis is pretty rough around the edges, but it turned out they had an unused town mooring off the fuel dock, and with plenty of water under it! This was a perfect place to leave the boat for the five days we'd be gone. An employee at the fuel dock agreed to keep an eye on the boat for us for $5/day, and even arranged for the night shift to do the same. They did a great job, and when we returned we found that they had even bailed the rainwater out of our dinghy.

In Costa Rica, we went to another small mountain town, continuing a trend of visiting places high enough to be cool enough for long sleeves. (Because of the humidity along the coast, we're always ready to go up!). This town, San Vito, was founded in the '50s by Italian immigrants, so it has something of a Tuscan feel to it. There wasn't much to do there, which suited us fine after several more rolly anchorages and snotty weather coming around the Azuero peninsula. Mainly we studied our Spanish. On our last day there, we went to the Wilson Botanical Gardens, a world-class conservation and botanical research facility created in the '60s by a couple from Coral Gables, FL. It is now associated with a Caribbean-wide scientific research organization. Very nifty place.

Bahia Montijo to Boca Chica

Upon our return, with new 30-day visas, we greatly eased up the pace and spent a couple days at various anchorages in the Bahia Montijo (Isla Leones and Isla Gobernadora), and continued on to Bahia Honda. Bahia Honda is an immense, completely encircled bay which is almost entirely cut off from the rest of Panama. All serious transportation is by boat; by land, only 20-mile horse trails lead back to roads. This place was so pleasant we stayed three days, and visited a local finca (farm) owned by a man named Domingo. He took us hiking on his property to see a pre-Columbian archaeological site.

From Bahia Honda we went to Islas Secas, a group of uninhabited islands. These were an even more idyllic setting (our first with reasonably clear water) and we stayed two days, snorkelling, kayaking, and walking the pebble beaches. From Islas Secas we went to a small fishing village called Boca Chica at the mouth of another large bay, Bahia de Muertos, originally intending to go to Pedregal 25 miles further up the bay. Here we hoped to leave the boat again for a final trip inland to yet another mountain town, Boquete.

At Boca Chica, there was a funky little restaurant/cabin resort run by a German named Frank. We learned from him and from other cruisers that Pedregal was no longer safe for overnight stays due to theft, but that Boca Chica was very safe. So, just this morning we left the boat on a double-anchor rig, locked it up tight, and departed for Boquete. Frank, the resort owner, gave us a harrowing ride on his pickup into David. The ride reminded us that Germany has no speed limits. The fact that we weren't pulled over reminded us that Panama doesn't either.

Now we are en route to Boquete, and have scored a secure place in Costa Rica to leave the boat for the winter while we are working in New York.

Some Observations

We've been in Latin America for going on seven or eight weeks now, and these updates, mine at least, have been more about what we did than what it has actually been like. So here are some random things that struck me as interesting.

 People

First and foremost, the most impressive thing is that we've '''really''' liked virtually all the Providencians, Panamanians, and Costa Ricans we've met--most of them in purely incidental circumstances. In fact, in a lot of cases, folks were actively helping us out of kindness. Beverly from Isla Providencia, various kids from Ensenada Naranjo & Isla Leones, Senor Mohica from Montijo, Jorge from San Vito, and Gilbert, also from San Vito, are just a few notable people who have taken a friendly interest in us. This was not what I expected, especially given the disgusting history of U.S. involvement in Central America. Common sense would suggest that in any population, you'd expect a range of attitudes from geniune friendliness, to neutrality, to some outright hostility. The most negative feelings I've gotten from anyone, whether talking directly or just passing by, could at worst be described as a sullen lack of interest. Even with some of these, a wave brings back a nod and a bemused smirk. OK, there was one somewhat weird encounter at Islas Secas, where a lobster boat with four young men came alongside and tied on (without explicit invitation) and stuck around for 45 minutes or so. The small talk remained small and only one of them seemed to be acting normally. The rest all seemed vaguely threatening. They asked questions about various items we had on deck (outboard, anchors, bike bags), but didn't seem to be interested in us at all. It could have been pure paranoia on our part, but we had by that time had several boat-alongside encounters that didn't set off any alarms at all. We cautiously (and slightly guiltily) locked our boat from inside that night, though nothing came of it at all. We still can't figure out if they were just socially awkward, or if they were casing the boat and decided against making a theft attempt.

We've found that having local kids out to visit the boat is a good way to break the ice when the adults are somewhat standoffish. Besides, it seems to be easier to get through the language barrier with kids.

Of course, the other population we've interacted with are the expats of various stripes. Most of them have been cruisers, given our mode of transportation, but we've struck up conversations with numerous others: Scott & Sonya off Calypso; Tom & Tyra (who run charters to Isla Coiba, a combination penal colony/national park!) in Puerto Mutis; Dennis & Sonya at Gobernadora; a German family on an 18-foot sailboat and Bogie & Carol on another boat at Bahia Honda; Bob & Barb at Boca Chica. This has been another surprising and interesting phenomenon while traveling: getting to know people, often from other generations or social strata, that we wouldn't end up meeting back home. Sure, it's a little strange that all we have in common, at first, is that we speak English and we're from the States (or England, Australia, or New Zealand, since they amount to the same thing: English-speaking developed world), but it has often been eye-opening and very pleasant. Sometimes you have to travel far from home to find out where you live.

Transportation

One word: driving. Simply put, the most dangerous aspect of travelling here is the almost suicidal norms of driving. Bus drivers, taxis, Frank the German, and private cars where we've caught a ride: no one appears to drive in anything resembling a sane fashion. Why? I don't really know for certain, but several theories have presented themselves. Perhaps Latin Americans are keenly aware that they are "behind" the developed world in "getting ahead" (whatever exactly that is) and they're trying to make up lost time? Perhaps the poor quality of the roads just makes everyone feel they must go faster to make up for the inherent delays in road travel? Perhaps driving suicidally proves how macho you are? This last, at least, seemed to be behind a game of chicken I witnessed one bus driver engage in with another bus driver from a competing company. Perhaps only insurance and litigation induce bus companies to control their drivers? Perhaps the apparently complete absence of any traffic police contributes to a free-for-all approach to transportation? Perhaps people just haven't accepted or understood that fatal accidents can really happen to them; after all, they haven't been killed yet. At least in the case of bus & taxi drivers, maybe they are trying to get more runs per day completed, so they can make more money? Maybe, just maybe, there isn't a higher traffic fatality rate here, and U.S. norms are needlessly cautious. Whatever the case may be, it seems to me that this represents a major problem, and a lot of people are probably losing their lives because of it (or at least being scared witless).

The buses here work well in concept, though, and the public transportation system is very well developed. You can pretty easily get anywhere you want for very little money (assuming you arrive alive, that is). Each bus has a driver and what I call a "maitre d'". The bus driver doesn't talk, or lift bags, or collect money, or find seats for anybody when the bus is almost full. All he does is drive (which is probably necessary, given my observations above). The maitre d' does all of these things, with a savvy, hungry look in his eyes. He even tries to stir up impulse customers, although it seems unlikely to me that anyone hearing one of these guys say "Hey, you wanna go to Chitre?!", is going to say to themselves, "You know, I came to the bus terminal to go to Penonome, but I guess I do want to go to Chitre, after all."

Environment

Panama has an immense amount of its land designated as national parks, but apparently this is in name only. People still live in the parks and practice slash & burn agriculture. Logging companies still actively log without control. I would have said "under the eyes of the government," but the government doesn't have any eyes. For example, Darien National Park, about the size of Rhode Island, has three forest rangers. These rangers have no vehicles, no guns, and no budget. They apparently spend much of their time foraging for their next meal. It will be interesting to see what the new presidency does.

First hand, I have seen that a very large percentage of the lowland countryside is almost completely deforested. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't also obvious that the heavy rains here are producing massive erosion. Much of Ohio has the same type of hilly farmland, and it hasn't all washed away in the last 200 years, but the order-of-magnitude difference in rainfall here will be fatal. Some "reforestation" projects are going on, but it isn't clear if they are actually just tree farms, destined to be cut again, or not. Certainly the projects we've seen were straight monocultures (one species of tree, row after row).

Culture 

Littering is endemic. Nobody thinks anything of throwing any trash whatsover, anywhere. Well, almost anywhere. We saw a mother scolding a child for throwing his cup in the street--he should have thrown it in the ditch instead. Neither of them went back to pick up the cup, though.

Newspapers and TV news here show absolutely graphic photos & video of fresh corpses. I think it is actually pretty healthy. It means you can't ignore that people are really being shot, or knifed, or dying of heart attacks. In the U.S. we're permitted to dreamily ignore such realities in the name of decorum.

Three more words: Pink Fuzzy Coffins. Same material as fuzzy dice hanging from the rearviw mirror. I kid you not, in the window of a small-town funeral parlor.