Hello, South America!

After leaving Panama in the evening, we "set sail" (there was no wind for 5 days straight, so they had to motor the whole way). We sat and chatted with Cecile and Daniel for a while, then went to bed. They've been living on the Basta for several years, spending most of their time in Latin America writing about social issues and have some cool stories.

We woke up here:

After breakfast, we swam to the island in the top photo. I was thinking swim there, look around a little, swim back, so after 2 hours or so making a sand castle without sunscreen, we were all lobsters. We wrote "Fuck Pirates" on the sides of the castle's gate, so that's as close to a name as it's getting. This asshole tried to claim it:

The sunset that night was pretty cool too:

We chugged along through the second night too, and woke up in time to see the Farside Island:

We stopped in the middle of 3 islands similar to the guy below, and spent the day swimming and chatting, and went snorkelling while Daniel hunted dinner for us.

That night and most of the next day, we motored towards Mamitupu, the biggest island we visited, where Cecile and Daniel spend some of their downtime. Turns out I never took any photos of Mamitupu, then next ones in my camera are of the nasty as fuck blisters Callum had on his back when we got off the boat near Colombia and had to carry our packs.

In the evening we had dinner with Don Pablo, a friend of C&D's that runs the closest thing to a hotel on the island, a few comfortable little huts with a restaurant. That night we learnt a bit about life on the Kuna (the indigenous inhabitants) Islands. They people are self-governing, and live mostly in 3 comarcas, the biggest of which is the Kuna Yala, or Kuna Islands. The men of each island elects a saila, or chief, upon the death of the incumbent. The saila leads a weekly or twice-weekly congress in the meeting house in the middle of the island (all the paths are bordered by tall wooden stake fences, and don't have much sense to their design, so it's labyrinthine). He lies in his hammock and settles day-to-day disputes and issues with the running of the island, as well as serving as religious leader of the island by singing and reciting the Kuna history and tradition. His recitals are then interpreted by a group of advisors, as they're recited in a different version of the Kuna language. 

Despite the fact that each community is led by a man elected by men, the Kuna culture is reasonably matriarchal. All landowners are women, and land passes from mothers to daughters, and husbands move in with their wives, thereby contributing the the wife's family's welfare. Outsiders aren't allowed to own land or live on the Kuna Yala either, so all land is owned by Kuna women. 

Kuna culture is alive and strong, but that's not to say it hasn't been changing my modern conveniences. A few years ago, the Panamanian government helped furnish each home with a small solar panel, so each house has lighting, and some have radios or TVs. On Mamitupu, there was 5 or 6 little shops where you could buy coke and biscuits and whatever household necessities are necessary. Except there's no garbage disposal, so even though the islands are fucking beautiful, and the Kuna know that they live in a paradise, trash gets left around the edge of the island on the more populated islands. It's a huge shame, but there isn't really any solution short of sending around a boat to pick it all up, but that's not profitable so who's gonna do it? 

We spent most of the following day on Mamitupu, chatting a bit with the Kuna and reading and so on. Then early in the morning, we left Mamitupu to be dropped at Puerto Obaldia, the closest town to Colombia with Panamanian border control. There was only 3 little hotel-ey things in Obaldia, and all were full, so we set off along the beach to find somewhere to camp, only to be stopped at the military post on the path to the next bay. Turned out you can't walk between the bays at night or really leave the town, or you might trigger a military response to traffickers or paramilitaries or whatever. But the beach was supposedly safe, so we set up beds and chatted and watched the sunset with our last Panamanian beers...

In the morning someone offered a ride in his boat to Capurganà, the Colombian equivalent of Puerto Obaldia (there's 2 more towns in the bays between Capurganà and Puerto Obaldia: La Miel (the honey) for Panama and Sapzurro for Colombia). We negotiated a price, and told him we had to go to migration. When we arrived at migration, we were told we needed 2 photocopies of our passports each, and that the net cafes would be open. Neither of them were, so we waited outside until they were. The guy came out for a smoke while we were waiting and said to us that they were open. We told him no they weren't. He said it's 8:15, they open at 8, of course they're open. We told him no, we visited and they weren't open. Finally one opened and we waited another half hour in line for about 3 people, then returned to our friend with the boat and headed around to Capurganà. 

That day we didn't do too much - had our first Colombian bandejas, one of the only cheap non-fried things I've seen so far here. It's basically a plate with rice, a little salad, a fried plantain and your choice of meat. Pretty good really, but gets a little old after a month or so. The next day we walked to Sapzurro for lunch, then Callum and I continued on to the duty free store at La Miel to pick up some cheap rum. Shit's so expensive in comparison in Colombia. 

The following day we got a boat from Capurganà to Turbo, one of the motors of which decided it wouldn't work properly, so after half an hour or so we stopped for almost an hour while they fixed it. Then the first bus from Turbo to Cartagena broke down about 15 minutes out of its destination for about half an hour. Joyous day. But we arrived at Cartagena, and there was space in the hostel we'd chosen, so not a total disaster. 

Bonus pic: Callum's back:

Who needs more than 48 hours in Costa Rica?

After we left La Biósfera, we had about 2 weeks to get from northern Nicaragua to Panama to catch the boat Ariel had found to take us to Colombia. Nothing too strenuous, but a lot faster than we'd traveled before, and we wanted to do some awkwardly positioned things.

We went back to León for a couple of days with 2 others from La Biósfera, Gaby and Vicenc, in Gaby's 4x4. We had a pretty good start to the drive, with the brakes failing as we were coming in to Matagalpa, and Vincenc's quick reactions on the handbrake saving us from rearending someone. This stopped us for a few hours while the mechanic fixed the brake pump, so in the end we arrived in León a lot later than planned.

I didn't do a lot in León, just wrote the last blog post while Cal went volcanoboarding. We planned the next few days around the ferry schedule to Ometepe, an island made of 2 volcanoes in the middle of a lake near the Costa Rican border, followed by San Juan, Costa Rica, and a visit to the sloth sanctuary on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica (The costa rica? Who knows, but one would assume it refers to the Caribbean).

So a couple days later we got up early to bus to Managua and arrive in time for the 2pm ferry to Ometepe. We arrived at the terminal at about 1:45, and read the sign that said the ferry actually leaves at 5pm. We were also a bit pissed that foreigners have to buy "first class" tickets, so here's hoping that that money goes to helping the locals/the environment in some way instead of just being a shitty way for a company to get more money from foreigners. But I digress. A fun 3 hours of waiting later we boarded for the 4 hour trip to the island. While on the nearly-empty "first class" deck (identical to the second class, except with far less people), the TV was tuned to the news, most of which was about the civil defense emergency unfolding on Ometepe due to some ridiculous quantity of rainfall. We couldn't hear, and probably wouldn't've been able to understand anyway, but we could see the pictures of flooded towns and people moseying between houses in boats, and we wondered what we were walking into.

When we arrived we were planning on getting a cab with 2 other travelers the 2km or so from the dock to the nearby town, Altagracia, but when we arrived there were no cabs and we walked. It quickly became apparent why there were no cabs. That road was fucked. A couple of people went past on motor/bikes, but some pretty big chunks of road were missing completely. We checked into a hostel after bumping into Elif, a Turkish woman cycling from the US to I'm-not-sure-where. Elif told us she'd spent a couple days at a hippie retreat type thing closer to one of the volcanoes, but the rain had meant she couldn't camp and she left. It didn't sound like a terrific time to climb the volcano, which was about the only plan we had, so we decided to leave the following day.

So we got up and got some breakfast and conflicting reports about whether there were buses running to the other side of the island. The ferry to Altagracia only runs a couple of times a week, while there's hourly or so ferries from Moyogalpa on the western side, which don't go to Granada. After talking to someone that actually worked on a bus that told us there weren't buses to Moyogalpa, we thought we'd wait until the ferry that returned to Managua at midnight that night, when a local in a 4x4 pulls up and offers us a lift to Moyogalpa for $5 each. A little steep, but it beat waiting around all day. In the end I think he probably earnt his $5 (plus $5/other passenger, plus I'm pretty sure he would've spent the whole day being a bus, good day for this guy). That road was fucked.

There were several places where the road was covered in rocks impassable to anything except a motorbike or a 4x4, which our friendly driver hurried over, the normally blasting music turned down to something more socially acceptable while there were others around. Then we stopped on this pile for maybe 20 minutes while the excavator excavated a bit and finally made us a ramp to get past:

Due to the distances between the power poles and the lack of houses, we figured they know where the stuff from the mountain flows. 

Looking up towards the mountain. 

We had a wee lunch in Moyogalpa, and a couple of hours later checked into a cheap boarding house-type thing in Rivas. We found a place with pupusas for dinner (fuck yeah pupusas, hadn't had them since Salvador), then chilled for the evening.

In the morning we were planning on hitching to San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, but the border was less than an hour away so we decided to use our waiting-for-ride time on the other side since it was another 7 to San Jose. By the time we got across the border it was pissing with rain, so we ended up getting a bus to San Jose as well, and after checking in to the hostel there Cal and I wandered the city centre a little bit.

We'd noticed a lot in the past but never really talked about the fact that people in Latin America spend a lot of time in public doing nothing much except socialise. The central park (almost all towns/cities have a big square in front of the cathedral/principal church that's called the central park) was full of people just hanging out, and Cal commented on what would happen if the same thing were to suddenly happen in, say, Garden Place, at like 10pm on a Tuesday night, and then every night forever. I have a bit about how Latinos' senses of time seem to be different to those of non-Latinos, but I think I needa think about it about more so it's not some ugly mess.

In any case, in the morning we left the hostel and took two buses (which naturally took much longer than anticipated) to the sloth sanctuary, where we were greeted by this guy:

We arrived just in time for the last 2-hour tour of the day, which started with an hour's boat trip through the jungle.

Bananas/plantains (pretty sure they're plantains)

There's many monkeys in this photo.

There's two there!

After, we were shown what were apparently the most sociable of the sloths they have there. Something like 25 years ago the sanctuary was started, more for birds and other wildlife, until someone brought a hurt sloth, and they realised that no-one knew anything about taking care of sloths up until that point. So they taught themselves, and people started bringing hurt sloths to them from around the place. If possible, they just help them heal and then re-release them, but many that they get are tiny, and the first year of the sloth's life is the most important, when the mother teaches them to sloth. As a result, they can't release a lot of the sloths, which often show up as children, sometimes abandoned by the mother for whatever reason. They also get a lot of animals that've been poorly treated by assholes in whatever manner, and usually they can't be released as they don't know how to sloth either.

So we saw 5 or so sloths, as the rest apparently get agitated when there's unfamiliar people around. In spite of their justification for not releasing them, which to me is reasonably sound, I'm not sure why they can't fence off a bit of their forest and release them there instead of keeping them essentially in cages, which is pretty sad. In any case, sloths don't really move a hell of a lot anyway, so I imagine they're content, and they get let out onto a playground type thing a couple times a week.

This guy only has one arm, he lost the other grabbing a pair of power lines, which is apparently a reasonably frequent cause of death for sloths. When he came in he was malnourished and had apparently been watching things eat his dying arm. No-one had ever anaesthetised a sloth before, so the doctor said "she'll be right," and put him to sleep for 3 days. 

The first sloth they were brought, which started them being a sanctuary for sloths.

After the tour, we stayed in Puerto Viejo, towards the border with Panama. In the morning we bussed to the border, then got a couple more buses to a cool hostel/lodge in the middle of Panama called Lost & Found. L&F was pretty cool, in the middle of nowhere, with reasonably cheap food you can buy and cook yourself. They also have the craziest dorm I've stayed in so far, with 3 tiers of beds that reach for the sky. Half the beds were doubles too, so there was the inevitable talking couples all night (thankfully no bangin while we were there).

The few from outside the dorm. 5 minutes later it was completely grey, cloud forest be whack.

We also saw a wild sloth, which was much more exciting than visiting the sanctuary. Even though he didn't do anything but scratch himself slowly and eat a lil.

The day before we left, we went for a walk through the bush. The day before it'd rained all day, and it looked like it was going to when we left, but luckily it didn't.

Treebeard the Tree.

Most of a day on a bus later, we arrived in Panama City, and met Ariel at a hostel after eating dinner and buying a bunch of beer. The next day we visited the canal. I can only think of half a dozen things I'd even heard of before leaving on this trip that I wanted to do, and visiting the canal is definitely one of them. I think if we had more time we could've visited the other locks and so on, but seeing one set was impressive enough!

Apparently there's a hydro plant around the locks somewhere, but I didn't see anything that looked like it'd be related except this rather large spillway...

There was supposed to be a pair of ships going through an hour and a half or so after we finished looking around, but then it sounded like they were saying they were delayed for the rain. International shipping in the 21st century is delayed by rain, in the tropics? I hope we misheard.

The next morning Cal and I wandered around Casco Viejo, the area of the city in which our hostel was located.

Buildings in various states of decay. Casco Viejo is the swanky hip place to stay/live, but 5 minutes walk away it's essentially slums, and many of the old buildings in CV are just facades, while others are partially or completely demolished.

Looking towards the financial district.

Rows of ships waiting to go through the channel.

That afternoon, we got 2 buses to get to Portobelo, where our boat to Colombia left from. We arrived and the place was a lot busier than we thought it would be (though the one hostel in town wasn't near full). Talking to the people in the hostel, we found out that it was the beginning of the Black Jesus Festival (for wont of a better phrase). I can't remember the details of the story, but it goes something like this: sometime in the town's past, an artist made a sculpture of Black Jesus, which was thought to be sacrilegious and thrown in the ocean. I'm pretty sure bad things started happening then, until the sculpture washed up on the shore, and it was decided to keep it. So now, every year, criminals and sinners make a pilgrimage to this tiny town, either walking on feet or knees, or even crawling, to repent before the icon of Black Jesus. Sadly the pilgrimage was happening a couple of days after we left, I imagine it would've been quite spectacular.

The following day, we met the owners of the Basta (Spanish for "enough"), Cecile and Daniel, the French journalists that would take us to Colombia. Turns out we got dropped a couple of bays over from the Colombian border, but the photo above is our last view of the bits of Panama that have roads to them.

I could continue and write about the boat ride through the San Blas, but it's been 3 hours (uploading photos be slow...) and I'm hungry. Suffice to say if you imagine a Caribbean Paradise with coconut trees and thatched huts on desert islands, you'd be pretty fucking close to the San Blas Islands.