A Cartagena Surprise.

Old Town, Cathedral on
right, Botero on the left.

Buy a coconut, carriage
ride, or colonial balcony.

Cartagena has three main sections (plus the long expanse of skyscraper hotels and offices stretching off down the coast). The Old Town is the primary tourist section, with museums, shops, and discotecas, where old walls, either crumbling or restored, line the narrow streets with colorful exuberance and colonial history. (There’s an expensive restaurant where the slave market used to be.)  Rooms here cost 3-4 suitcases full of money.

San Diego.

To the northeast is San Diego, for the still-affluent but not extravagantly so. The buildings are all in good condition, the paint new, the personality slightly bleached. A relative bargain, it only takes one suitcase full of cash to spend the night here. This is where the well-to-do Colombian tourists seem to stay.

Then there’s Getsemani. Guidebooks describe neighborhoods like this as “gritty.” There are stray dogs, homeless, expanses of rotting garbage, and flocks of backpackers cramming into party hostels. A meal here costs about $4, there are real people in the street and plazas, and you don’t get hassled nearly as much.

Getsemani. Home sweet home.

I got lucky when I rocked up off the boat, Australians in tow, and ended up at the quiet one. There is no real common area to meet people, and there have only been a few other travelers. After a few days the Aussies left and, missing human contact, I went to look at other options. Each time I found a typical backpacker hostel, crammed with drunken kids chasing into each other’s underwear, for about twice the price. I’m too old and spoiled for that crap right now.

So I’ve been enjoying the quiet comfort of the Hotel Familiar (remember, it's Spanish). I got lucky though and met a little group of travelers in a restaurant a couple nights ago, so get to hang out with people as long as I want, then have a quiet place to sleep. We also made friends with the restaurant staff, who have been hanging out with us after work.

Today I ran into one of the waitresses out front (the restaurant is 2 doors down) waiting in the blazing sun for her shift to start. It was brutally hot and I offered to let her wait in my room, which has no aircon but does have a good fan. She hung out for about 10 minutes, checked her facebook on my computer and talked at that machine-gun speed about her family (talking to Colombians is maybe the world’s most challenging and interesting Spanish class) then went to work.

After she left the hotel staff informed me that there is a charge of 15,000 Colombian pesos (about $8) for visitors.

Sorry for the distraction, they just have
such kickass doors here. I have dozens
of pictures like this.

What?!? They pointed to a small sign up in the corner saying as much. Oh. This was one of the stranger things I’ve encountered…it took me a few minutes to figure it out.

Prostitution is legal in Colombia. Apparently the way it works here is they go to the specific bars, pick their girl, then either take them back to their hotel or to another one, which charges an hourly rate. Saying this, I suspect that is how prostitution works all over the world, but I hadn’t really thought about it as being different from the European Red Light Districts, where they have their own little rooms.

Once I started thinking about it I got a new impression of the rooms upstairs, since there is no stairwell that I have seen, nor any people up there, other than what I assumed was a couple getting intimate up there a few days ago.

For the last week I have been living in a brothel.

Well, not really a brothel, per se, but still. The “visitor” charge must be for prostitutes, but since it’s a general-language rule, they’re going to charge me for letting a friend browse her facebook here for 10 minutes. I can’t think of a more peculiar way to throw away $8.

Sailing to Chichime for dinner.

There is not much wind down here in May, but we managed to sail for an hour or two (and I didn’t mind the tenuous wind because it meant I got to help tack and reset the sail a couple times) on our way to Chichimé island, where we would spend the night.

Chichime is actually 2 islands. I‘m not sure which one (both?) is actually Chichime, and I suspect no one really cares, although one has more Kuna huts than the other. Both islands are small, covered in palm trees and white sand, maximum elevation of about a foot. There is technically a third island, although since it’s about the size of a dorm room, it doesn’t count (but it's a nice place to swim to).

Not Javier's boat. No one was quite sure where that one is.

The islands have a great little lagoon in the middle, and the whole shebang is enclosed by a reef and sandbar ring that makes it a fantastic port. The area gets extra credit from the two visible wrecks, one a thoroughly mangled small hull, the other a looming lump of rust out on the reef.

There is a third wreck nearby, that of the local legend Javier.

Javier was another one of the local captains, ferrying tourists back and forth between Panama and Colombia. Then he got into drugs. The details get murky, but at some point he sank his own boat here…and killed somebody, faked paperwork for the purchase of their house and tried to basically take over their life. Some say they caught him up in Costa Rica, some say he’s still lurking around somewhere.

Within a few minutes of pulling into the lagoon the Kuna dugouts were alongside us. The first was two women selling molas and bracelets. Unsurprisingly I was more interested in the women than the bracelets. Wait, that doesn‘t sound right, let me try that again.

Unsurprisingly, I was more interested in the women’s traditional Kuna dress and ornamentation, than the tourist kitsch they were selling.

Better.

I fear treating people like they’re exhibits in a zoo, so didn’t take any good pictures of them, but here is one of the women heaping the colorful crafts onto the deck. It’s hard to see, but she had a black line tattooed down the front of her nose, long strings of bracelets wrapping her forearms (and ankles), and more color in her clothes than most of Western Europe combined (no offense K). Some of the women we saw also had gold nose rings, which I’m guessing signifies marriage?

Kuna men dress western (or in speedos) and I can’t help but wonder what their traditional garb was like.

Kuna: "How many do you want?"
Fermin: "Well...all of them."

Several men arrived a few minutes later selling fish and conch. Fermin asked for lobster, and an hour later they were back, this time with a hull full of live “langostas.” I think they were surprised at Fermin’s requested purchase.

We saved the lobsters for the next day, and that night dined on paella, salad, and conch ceviche. I ate conch in the Bahamas too, and remembered it as chewier than calamari, not much redeeming value. That impression was reinforced. Not my favorite food. It's an entire animal made of stringy tendon and snot.

Everyone lends a hand on the Andiamo, but the galley was too small for more than a couple bodies, so my chore was cleanup. It was a…unique…cleaning situation. The extremely small amount of counter space was heaped with dirty dishes, a tiny sink, a semi-functional foot pump bringing sea water up to wash with, at the end I unearthed lumps of raw chicken where we’d been setting the clean dishes, and everything was coated in conch slime.

Conch look good in their shells.
I think I'll leave them there from now on.

Conch slime. Conch are snails. Sea snails. So this is slime so thick, so tenacious, so Hollywood ooey-gooey that it coats shifting sand underwater. Not the easiest stuff to get off, especially with just a thin trickle of salt water to work with. (I tried not to wonder how far the sink pump’s intake was from the spout where the pump toilet flushed raw sewage out.)

By the time I finished in the sweltering confines of the ship I was dripping sweat and fairly determined not to use any of those dishes again. (This ship clearly needs a woman, if I may gender stereotypically say so.)

My cabin was directly beneath and behind where they'd been running a generator for a few hours, so once the fumes cleared out I brushed my teeth (with foot-pumped salt water) and went to bed. Sleeping on a rocking ship was a surprisingly peaceful experience, despite the clammy heat of the confined space.

I awoke before dawn and stood up out my overhead hatch to take this picture, already in love with another day.

Good morning, can I interest you in a transcendent moment?

I guess in love with it is a good way to start a day.

Turns out breakfast on the Andiamo was whatever you could rummage up by yourself, and I wrapped the sublime joy of waking up in a place like that around myself  like a protective blanket during my breakfast of a white (white!) bread sandwich filled with 2 individually wrapped slices of that petroleum-product “American cheese.”

“Andiamo” means “let’s go!” in Italian, but we had redubbed her the Spettiamo (“we wait”) or the Princessa Sedentaria, and again, if I started to feel impatient with the lack of movement, I just had to remind myself of the color of the water, the shape of the palm trees, and the smiles of my shipmates.

I was playing cards with those shipmates when Jessica pointed over my shoulder and exclaimed “dolphins!”

2.6 seconds later I was in the water, swimming that way as quickly and softly as I could, although there is nothing like a dolphin to remind you of how clumsy humans really are in water. I had seen some dolphin fins outside the reef the day before, but didn’t think they’d come inside the lagoon. The water in there was surprisingly murky, and as I peered into the gloom, my mind saw all sorts of shapes about to emerge from the silt, but none of them quite did.

Then I heard it, the clicking sound of dolphin sonar.

Then I saw it, a shape of unimaginable grace and power, swimming straight towards me before curving and twisting downwards in a corkscrew to pursue a fish.

Good morning. I’m swimming with wild dolphins.

No me gusta.

Fastforward to Cartagena for a minute.

Too hot, even for the fruit vendors.

The city wants to make sure I know the meaning of the word “enervating.” Apparently it often rains during this month, but none this year, so the city swelters, humidity like a punishment, sweating in the shade and stunned in direct sunlight.

I got a haircut in Leon less than two months ago, but they say your hair grows faster in hot places, and already it feels like a warm washcloth riding around on my head. Plus, K flies down here in a week, and I’d like to look sharp for her first sight of me in months, so off to the barber shop.

This one melted entirely.

Colombia is the ninth country I’ve gotten a haircut in, and all of the other ones went well (Nepali barberji’s assassination attempts notwithstanding) so I wasn’t nervous as I took a seat in the hair-covered chair and told the guy my usual bit about short on the sides and back, and longer on top, with gestures. Since I speak Spanish, I assumed if it went well in Poland, it would work out in Colombia.

The guy grabbed the buzzer and quickly took off most of the hair on the sides and back of my head, standing a pace back and reaching the buzzer towards me like he was offering meat to an alligator. He was fast. Really fast.

Okay, I thought. Feels cooler already.

Then faster than you can say “dagnabbit“ he put the guard one size longer on the buzzer and chopped off the rest. He never even touched the scissors.

I now have basically a buzz cut. Military style. Bullethead.

It wasn’t a haircut, it was a sheep sheering. And it looks baaaaaaad.

I haven’t looked like this since college, and there was a reason I stopped.

I sat in front of the mirror, covered in my own dearly departed hair, slightly wide-eyed, telling myself “well, ain’t shit you can do about it now” as he picked up the straight razor, clearly NOT changing the blade from the 637 guys before me, and scraped bare my sideburns and neck.

Now I hope all I got from him was a bad haircut. How do you say “hepatitis” in Spanish?
(It’s “hepatitis” just with Spanish “titis”.)

The whole incident can’t have taken longer than 4 minutes, and then I was slinking back to my hostel, where thankfully I have a private room. Suddenly all I can think about is our old family dog, Tila, a big old sweetheart with long red-brown hair, including big haunches of it behind her back legs.

We used to take her to the groomer now and then, and she would come home stinking of perfume and with those haunches shaved off, and would immediately slink away to hide in the corner, an expression of embarrassment and reproach in her gentle brown eyes.

So I guess it could be worse…at least he didn’t spray me with perfume.

I’m sorry for my appearance K. I’ll be the army recruit waiting outside your gate in Bogota next week.

Crew and company on the Andiamo.

Our lancha (small motorboat) to the Andiamo was called “Fliper 3” which is a darn good stab at dolphin homage. As the rest of us gathered our things and paid for our Kuna lunch, Fermin (the Venezuelan) stood shin-deep in the water and without fanfare or expression shouted “Fliiiiiii-per!” then climbed aboard.

Captain Robert

We followed after and were soon climbing onto the Andiamo, where we were greeted by Robert, the new captain of the ship. Technically from The Netherlands but raised in Aruba and the US, I enjoyed chatting with him a bit in Dutch. We found each other’s accents entertaining.

The old captain was Fabio, from Italy, who was heading home in a few days for the first time in years. He looked sun-worn and water-weary, though surprisingly young. The third crewmember was Dino, who felt like the team’s anchor with his calm Kuna self assurance and rare facial expressions.

Robert gave us a little speech, trying valiantly in Spanish until we told him that our most-spoken language was English, at which he was relieved, although he had trouble adjusting, with Spanish phrases relentlessly creeping back into his spiel. He took the wheel and we pulled away from the island just as the Mission Impossible theme came on the sound system (aka Fabio’s Ipod). Dino baited a hook and let it fall into the water to trail behind us to start shopping for dinner.

I’d been onboard only a few minutes but it already felt like someplace I wouldn’t want to leave.

Where should we go? I dunno. How about...that one?

This notwithstanding the impressively casual attitudes of the crew. I had an English student in Belgium who was taking a sailing class, and used to explain to me what he was learning as practice. Charting a course on precise maps, compensating for current and wind, calibrating the compass to adjust for the variance between geographic and magnetic north, calculating depth from tidal charts, and navigating via reference points and harbor stats. None of that on the Andiamo.

When Fermin asked Robert where the map was, he pointed at Dino and said “he’s not allowed to fall overboard.” When we asked where we were going, Dino waved vaguely off to the right. (Sorry: starboard.)

We cruised for awhile on diesel then cut the engine, Dino showed me which rope to heave on, the sail was raised, and we were sailing in the San Blas Archipelago. Absence of combustion engine noises, the slap of water, wind all around, soft soft, and our bodies relaxed. The crew facing forward while the passengers chatted about Carnaval.

Lotsa swimming, few pictures. Fernando & Mariana
on the boat, Jessica swimming by El Diablo Rojo,
the boat's dinghy, which trailed along after us. 

We had the Argentinean couple, gently peaceful auras and nothing but kindness in their lives as far as I could tell. Instantly likable, they were exactly the kind of people you want as companions on a tiny boat at sea.

Jessica was my valued companion from before, who I met a few hours after landing in Nicaragua on my first day, then who reappeared a month later with superhero timing as I began to flounder in the Meat Market Madness of Bocas del Toro to save my sanity with intelligent conversation and mature companionship.

Fermin can look comfortable anywhere.

Fermin rounded out the passengers. A Venezuelan former cell-phone magnate of some sort, he fled the country when Chavez came into power in 1999. He had the extrovert ability to chat and playfully harass anyone he met, and had an interesting perspective on anything the conversation touched. He could also eat more lobster than anyone I’ve ever seen. When a Kuna canoe pulled up next to us the next morning with a hull full of live lobsters he told Robert “you take what we need, I’ll buy all the rest.” He had five of them for lunch, and shared several with the rest of us. I've never had peanut butter and jelly...and lobster before. (Actually I had never eaten lobster before Bocas del Toro. The ship was my second time.)

Made for an odd combination.

Panama City to the San Blas Islands

The boat I am no longer on is slowing its pitch and roll in my head, so I guess I can try this typing thing now...but I may need to take a break if I get landsick, okay?

This guy apparently really likes his lawn mower.

We rode to the coastal town of Carti (small enough to not show up on Google Maps) in a well-worn land rover, air conditioner blasting before sunrise, and a mildewy smell to attest to the habit. Already seated in the middle row were two young girls who apparently did not feel like talking to anyone, answering questions in curt, single-word answers and generally pretending they were alone in the car. Turns out they're just Israeli.

Remember Jessica, the 40-something year old in Bocas del Toro who had just submitted the last part of her thesis? She was on the boat too, and turns out her thesis was on the role of Israeli defense forces in perpetuating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She sat in the front.

We picked up an Argentinean couple whose freshfaced glow immediately shouted honeymoon! to me, then a Venezuelan, so we were 8 in the car, the middle bench comfy with me and the Israelis, the back nook crammed with Argentineans and a Venezuelan.

The road to the coast is an intensely winding string of cracked pavement, one side is Panama, the other is Kuna Yala, a semi-autonomous indigenous region. The Panamanian side is a freshly clearcut horror already eroding away under the road while the Kuna side is healthy untouched jungle where I spotted at least one bird that looked an awful lot like a toucan as we went by.

I felt a tap on my knee and looked up to see a pale and sweating Israeli girl asking me in a breathless voice to get the driver to stop. We pulled over and she took a breather in the bushes. The driver said my seat was better for carsickness than hers, so we switched and set off again. I gave her one of the ginger candies they gave us on the Clipper, neglecting to tell her it had been riding around in my bag for the past two months. It wasn't enough as a minute later she needed a second stop, then a minute after that the Venezuelan in the back needed one too. He barely made it out of the car before blasting.

Fernando and Mariana, my favorite
eternal Argentinean honeymooners

I switched with him, and found myself squished in back with the Argentineans, whose happy glow protected me from motion sickness as we descended to the coast. The Israeli girls were not coming on the boat with us, and as they pulled away in the car the Argentineans confessed that they had thought Jessica and I were a married couple and the Israeli girls were our kids! They added "I thought they were very mad at you, and that is why they would not talk."

Most of the Israeli's I've met traveling, these ones included, are about 20 years old, and have just finished their two year service in the army. I found myself wondering, do I look like I could have 20 year old children?

I in turn voiced my guess that they were on their honeymoon, to find that nope, they've been married three years, have a little boy, and are on a couple day excursion after the husband, Fernando, finished some work in Panama City. I wonder if my people-watching guesses are ever correct?

We passed the sleepy guard with a battered rifle at the Kuna border, paid the $2 Kuna territory entry fee, then the $10 Kuna port fee, then the $30 driver fee, and staggered, stunned and with lightweight wallets, to the dock for our lancha boat to our sailboat. Along the way we examined the Kuna flag, which looks like the Spanish one, only instead of an archaic coat-of-arms, the Kuna have basically a swastika (totally unrelated to Nazism of course). Maybe a good thing the Israeli girls didn't come with us.

They took us out to where to boat was waiting for us... Or rather, where the boat was supposed to be waiting for us. Luckily the Venezuelan, Fermin, had reception on his cell, so we called and discovered that the boat was stuck in customs, and would be a little late. So we swam ashore on one of the Kuna islands, walked around the white sand and palm tree paradise, swam over the rusting wreck offshore, got to know each other better, and had a lunch prepared by the Kuna guy in his palm frond hut.

Turns out the Kuna are like everyone else, and like to make a buck off the tourists. Entry onto the island: $2. Can of soda: $2. Lunch of rice and smoked fish: $10. Being there, and with those people: priceless.

We looked up to find a new sailboat rocking just offshore, and were soon ferried out to climb onboard the Andiamo, which we did with an ocean of excitement tempered with a spoonful of trepidation.

Welcome to the San Blas Islands

Suddenly shipping out to sea tomorrow...

The plans are still evolving as I go. To get from Panama to Colombia there are three options:
1: Fly. Expensive, quick, normal experience.
2: Take a passenger-type boat. They stop in the San Blas Islands along the way, the trip takes about 5 days. Live on a boat for a week as it crosses the lower corner of the Caribbean. Not cheap, but figure in the cost of accommodation for 5 days plus food, and it suddenly ain't so bad.
3: Try and find a cargo boat to take you. Would be the most adventurous option. But. Tales of drug smugglers, robber/pirate-style shady characters etc are rife. Along the lines of "me and one other guy paid for passage to Cartagena and were dropped off in the middle of the night on some random beach. When we finally made it to civilization they said we were incredibly lucky not to have been murdered and dumped over the side." This after spending an hour or so listening to tales of murder on the high seas hereabouts.

There are only a few boats for option 2 around right now, since we are edging closer to hurricane season. The big reputable cargo companies for option 3 most likely don't take on passengers, leaving the smaller and more desperate (ie sketchy) ones.

I was wrestling with my desire to have the best adventure to tell you about, versus my desire to maintain my physical being in a state of reasonably good repair, when the Universe gave me a hint in the form of a friendly Guatemalan lady who runs a boat trip out to the San Blas and back. They can't take me to Colombia, but they can take me out into the islands and leave me on the one farthest out, from where I should be able to catch something for the rest of the trip...

So the car to the port leaves tomorrow morning at 5:30 AM, and I will be at sea for 5-6 days most likely, depending on how the transfer(s) go.

Talk to you next week.
I hope...  ; )