Depending upon who you are, the word Panamá may trigger little more than Canal or the funny word Isthmus that refers to the long and skinny stretch of lands that connects the Northern and Southern Americas. But if you are lucky enough to visit the skinny piece of land that lies next to the Darian Jungle at the southern tip of the country, along the Caribbean sea, you just may think that this is paradise.
"Panamá," laughed Puerto Lindo's minimarket owner MacKenzie with his Jamaican accented English, "IS paradise. It is the only place where a poor man can truly live like a rich man." He could have been referring to the bathtub like waters, the abundance of corral reef, the excellent snorkeling and scuba diving, and the jungle that surrounds it all. Here you can fish in the morning and eat your catch in the afternoon, and listen to the monkeys hooting in the trees, eating the bananas, next to the mango tree.
During our 2 day stay in Puerto Lindo, we walked by locals, foreigners and a surprising amount of foreigners who have decided to become locals; we found them strolling through town at the pace of the sloth we saw hanging in the tree at Roger and Binny's house, cutting coconuts off trees if they wanted something sweet to drink, diving off the pier when it became too hot.
Getting There….
"So how exactly did you get here?" It was a common question among the locals. Mother Nature has done a pretty good job blocking transit between Central and South America by stuffing the tip of the isthmus and the entryway to Colombia with enough jungle to uproot any attempt at laying road. The Darien Jungle, we were told, contains more nature per square foot than the Amazon; it is virtually a no-mans land, with the guerrilla controlling the territory to the South and happy Carabineers controlling the paradise to the North.
So we tell the people living in this paradise that, like the French, Chinese, Americans and Spanish that have settled in the region, we just sailed in. A few of the locals had seen a motorcycle disembark on the docks of Puerto Lindo, but it was sure not a regular event, and Roger and Binny, who watched us from the terrace of their home in the hill worried for a minute that our iron hulled sailing boat would come crashing through the rickety pier.
With the wind….
There is the saying that goes, "A watched pot of water will never boil." There should be another one that says, "A watched wind will never blow". For 4 days the wind did not blow; the San Blas islands of Panamá stood out like little smudges on the horizon as we watched Panamá from the sea: 6 crewmembers, 3 guests, one motorcycle, 3 sails and the motor-less iron hull named "Tara". The 250-mile stretch from Cartagena, Colombia to Isla Grande, Panamá evolved from a 48-hour journey to a 7-day crossing.
Paciencia. In the windless sea there seems to be very little to do except for lay in the sun, wait until your skin reaches extremely hot temperatures and then jump into the warm sea to try and cool off. Each of us broke new records for time spent just lying around. But even when there seems to be nothing to do, and silence fills the air like dense humidity, the sun dips down at 5 o'clock and an entire dolphin school swims up to the prow - dozens of shiny smooth gray dorsal fins become inverted white belly salutes as the dolphins swim like a group of corkscrews. And when the sun finally sinks behind that same vast horizon we have been staring at all day, we can see both the Northern Star and the Southern Cross and lightening shows that surround us as if we were in one of those 360 degree IMAX theaters.
With this much time, decision-making could be a long slow process. One day we took so long to decide on lentils and rice for lunch, that by the time the cooking crew headed below deck to get the pressure cooker going a giant king fish had tugged strongly at our line. This caused a huge commotion and once slow moving people began to move fast, and the huge fish was hauled out of the sea, and the lunch menu revised into pasta a la peche (king fish in a light tomato cream sauce). We sat down to a steaming plate of food within 30 minutes of the catch; it was probably one of the freshest fish anyone of us had ever eaten in our lives.
Our crew was great - Olivier, the Capitan brought the best of France with him when he left - a love of iron hulled ships, and the ability to bake French bread on board. Juan may make the entire crew famous; he spent a good part of our ample leisure time making a video of life aboard the boat for a new Colombian television series: "Real life - Sailing in the Caribbean." The rest of the crew will perhaps be the stars of the show: Chile (from Chile, but naturalized Colombian), Tatia, Fredi, Javier and Juan from Colombia - and when we left, the last of the guests, Marco from Italy was still there…. Perhaps he would stay on board and join the show….
Our plan was to sail through the San Blas Islands, an archipelago of 378 tiny islands, populated with little more than white sand beaches, crystalline waters, coconut trees and the Kuna natives - it was to be a rare chance to visit one of few "little discovered" places in the world. Instead we spent 4 days watching half a dozen silhouettes of palm tree covered islands against the horizon. At the end of the 6th day, the wind picked up and began pushing us towards the little dots on the horizon, that became bigger and bigger. That night, we tried to sleep in a berth that was inclined at 30 degrees, in a wind that kept pushing us along at a steady 7 knots, while the San Blas islands disappeared into the horizon behind us. I don't think anyone of the crew wanted to risk running out of wind and not being able to make it to shore before the provisions ran out. By morning we were navigating our way into the passage of Isla Grande, where we would be able to take the motorcycle out of her web of chords and set her on pavement again. Enric and I began talking about when we would return to the San Blas Islands.
After 6 days of looking for a boat and 7 days of sitting on one, I could hardly believe we were going to be disembarking. The sun was going down as we sailed up to an arrangement of logs and planks that they called a dock. Colorful people ran out of equally colorful little houses along the shore to watch us disembark. The 6-person crew turned into a pier construction team, lifting plank after plank over the rickety pier so that Enric could push the motorcycle across. When the crew and Enric and the motorcycle finally reached the end of the pier we all cheered.
I stared up the hillside to the long terrace of a big wooden house with large picture windows and what had to be a fantastic view of the harbor and the sea. I was hoping that it was a hotel, because we did not know where we were going to stay for the night, but was told by the crew that it wasn't, and that furthermore, there were not hotels in Puerto Lindo. So much for my fantasy, but I made the joke anyway that "Those people on the hill didn't yet know that we would be staying with them."
By the time that I was walking up a long staircase that connected the harbor with that same big wooden house, I was only looking for a place to park the motorcycle for the night - we figured that we would just find a place to camp. I ran straight into Roger and Binny, the American couple who had been watching that "heavy boat" ride up to the pier, and had seen a motorcycle be unloaded. I think they were pretty happy to meet the latest arrivals; Roger seemed pretty thrilled to meet an American/Spanish couple. "My daughter is about to marry a Brazilian," Roger told me, "It is this Latin man thing, isn't it?". The two of them had been traveling the world for years in a sailboat and finally decided 2 years ago to plunge their anchor in the bay at Puerto Lindo and make Panamá their home. The have built their home from scratch with the help of locals, and in true American fashion, they have stocked it with more appliances than I have seen in my 2.5 years in Mexico and 4 months traveling through South America! With Roger and Binny we found not only a place for our motorcycle, but a comfortable bed in the extra apartment they had constructed for their children's visits. We had a wonderful time viewing the Caribbean from land and observing the wildlife at their house. "We have sloths and monkeys and mangos and papaya and almonds and orchids," and I understood why they chose this place to settle down.
Getting used to land.
In theory we were back on land, but at night the great king sized bed that Binny and Roger loaned us turned into a giant square raft, floating in the water. I had read the book "Shipwrecked" while at sea, and when I woke up on that floating raft, I could only think about the sharks swimming in the water that separated me in my raft and the toilet - where I desperately needed to go.
By the time I got used to land, we had spent 2 nights on the "raft" at Binny and Roger's, had visited the beautiful and modern city of Panamá, had driven the length and width of the Panama Canal, and had ridden through the coffee plantations of Boquete (a small town in the North of Panama just at the base of the Volcano Barú). In a tiny isthmus of only 2 million people lives a population as varied as its geography. Yet each night, no mater how far away we got from Puerto Linda and Tara, I kept returning to a raft, floating in the sea.
