Forget me yacht

Something I didnt know before I got to South America is that you cant leave the continent by land. The territory around the border between Colombia and Panama is run by drugs smugglers and wild animals. Most outsiders that venture into the region end up kidnapped or eaten. To avoid these fates I took a four day sailboat trip from the Colombian coast with the promise of a few days spent on islands en route.

As far as I could see, the only possible risks with this choice were high seas and bad company. As it turned out, I got a bit of both.

A few hours into the trip I began to realise that being on a small boat with a lot of passangers in a fucking big ocean is not an ideal situation. In hindsight I think the problem was that my ideas about being on such a boat were based on eighties pop videos.

The waves were very high. Almost all of the eight backpackers on board started to feel pretty queasy. A few went green. The captain´s wife, veteran of over 100 such trips, chucked up over the side. Instead of standing up by the mast watching dolphins, with girls in bikinis bringing me pina coladas, I was curled up below deck trying to overcome the nausea felt every time I opened my eyes.

What´s more, the captain, a fat bearded Mormon from California, with, as we later found out, a reputation for extreme stinginess, was constantly on our back for breaking apparently obvious rules. Except he hadnt told them to us and nobody had been on a boat before.

Steering badly, steering too agressively, not flushing the toilet, over-flushing the toilet, wasting water, standing in the wrong place, moving cushions, throwing away used tins, eating the wrong bread and not eating the right bread were just some of our misdemeanours. Each one was met with a stern telling off.

After a hellish night spent falling out of the same single bed as a 16 stone Australian, failing to steer the boat correctly and listening to christian rock, I was relieved to arrive at the Islas San Blas. Nothing to do with Andy, or Brian for that matter, the archipelago consists of hundreds of tiny sand islands the larger of which are populated by Kunas, an indigenous people with unique rights of governance of the whole area.

Kuna society is like a model of good comunism. Everyone seems equal and appears to work only for the good of the comunity, who democratically enforce laws and distribute wealth. Travellers who break laws (for example stealing coconuts) can be punished by months of detention on the islands without the Panamanian government being able to help.

Of course, that might not be such a bad thing, since the islands look like a sort of text-book paradise with glass-clear water and mayonaise coloured sand. Or crystal clear if you prefer. And there were reefs with all sorts of tropical fish so snorkeling was good too, although by this time we had forfieted our right to use the captain´s spear-gun because of bad behaviour so it wasn´t the sub-marine shoot-em-up we had been promised.

As a consequence of the island´s proximity to the Colombian coast, the Kunas, who typically wear only a small cloth and carry a wooden stick, often run into large quantities of cocaine, stashed on the islands or dumped in the sea by persued smugglers.

´what do they make of it?´ I asked Leni, a Spanish speaking Kuna I met on an island.

´ We sail to the mainland and sell it´ he replied, as if it were obvious. ´We don´t take drugs. hahaha.´

The tension between the tavellers and the captain continued to grow on the islands despite us having more space to avoid him. Aswell as chucking out bollockings left right and centre he had a habit of talking annoying nonsense (like the advantages of his country´s liberal gun policy or how the US has helped the country of Panama). Taking into account his tendency to mock his 26 year old Colombian wife´s poor english, I decided I hated him.

After one of the group left his volleyball in the wrong place the tension exploded and a large argument ensued, let by a softly spoken English literacy teacher called Laura and a brash Queenslander called, strangely, Doggy. After the munity we sailed the remaining day to Panama in complete silence. Neither Simon le Bon nor George Michael were anywhere to be seen.


The Panama Canal is useful; getting a boat from the Pacific the Atlantic would be a lot harder without it. The convenience comes at a price though; large boats pay up to 200,000 dollars to go through. And they often have to wait days for a space in the queue.

Realising the obvious advantages of such a waterway a lot of people spent a lot of time trying to build the canal, before it was finally completed in the early part of the 20th century. The French lost over 20,000 men to accidents and malaria so gave up and let the Americans get on with it.

This wasnt the first American involvement in the region. During the gold rush Americans from the east coast sailed down to Panama to cross to the pacific and sail to the west, because hostile Indians in the midwest meant this was safer than crossing overland. Many of these died of malaria too, but some survived by covering themselves in grease to prevent bites. Allegedly, when they got to the other side they would strip the grease off and sell it to someone coming the other way for a slight reduction.

Me and a Swedish guy called Eric watched as a huge ship from Glasgow carrying a lot of boxes that said Maersk spend a good couple of hours getting through just one of the many locks along the length of the waterway. Apparently the Pacific is three or four metres lower than the Atlantic.

Panama City has skyscrapers and looks like no other Latin American city. Of course, theres still great poverty, it´s just effectively kept from showing its face in the centre, where it might annoy richer people or, worse still, foreigners.

One clear signal that I wasnt in Minnesota or Kansas or Pheonix were the numerous old US school buses fitted with powerful sound-systems and painted with giant brightly-coloured images on both sides. Before I jumped on one to visit the old-town I noticed the huge mural across the front and sides depicted Moses parting the Red Sea. The words Jesus is the Saviour were emblazoned in huge letters across the top of the windscreen, and several crucifixes hung from the ceiling around the driver´s head.

The driver might have been religious, but he certainly liked Fifty Cent as I, the rest of the bus and anyone within a mile or so radius found out. And as I got off I noticed a second mural on the back, this time a striking painting of a slim, semi-naked, blonde woman with huge tits posing alluringly and sucking her finger. It was Shakira apparently.