Pretirement

hi from london! as you know, the blog slowed to a crawl last year and then stopped altogether about six months ago. a lot’s happened, and it’s time i wrote it down.

at the last post, roxanne and i had just taken a boat trip from panama to colombia and were staying in cartagena, loving it and really excited about the continent that lay at our feet, waiting to be explored. we began with energy and enthusiasm, seeing medellin and bogota and some amazing small towns. it quickly became our favorite country. but despite the added energy, we found we were at a crossroads. the vast distances of this new continent were a shock for us. it takes something like sixteen hours on a freezing night bus to get from cartagena to bogota, for example. at that rate, we knew it would take over a year to complete even a modest tour of the continent. money wasn’t an issue – dollars and pounds go very far in the poor countries of the andes. we were both healthy and could easily find another year of things to see. but for one reason or another, we felt we had to get home to see the people we loved.

as with everything else, we decided to make an adventure out of our homecoming. we bought plane tickets from bogota to miami and from miami to seattle, where i began my trip. from there we would pick up my car and do a sightseeing drive across the US, camping along the way, and ending a month later in springfield to spend thanksgiving with my family. we planned the next three weeks to see the eastern US, looping back to chicago where roxanne would fly home in time for christmas with her family in london.

odds are i saw you on that trip. it was like a tour of my entire life and everyone i know.

seattle was great to come home to. thanks especially to andy for being our generous host and constant social director, and to gautam and divya for being good friends to us when we needed it most. it was good to see everyone there and feel right at home, if just for a few days!

we did have to leave, of course, because we had another adventure planned. my car, of course, was essential to the road trip, and after sitting unused for a year, it had some problems. the repairs were relatively minor but delayed us about six days. with every day of waiting we started to doubt a little more what we were about to do. we almost called off the whole trip a couple of times. so when the car was finally ready, we left the city immediately with the late afternoon sun already slipping toward the southern horizon. by the time we bought supplies, packed up the car, ate dinner, and got on the highway it was 9:00 and we still didn’t know where we would spend the night. it didn’t matter. i was prepared to set up the tent in a field an hour south of town if we had to, as long as it meant that we were on our way.

i’m sorry, i have to go to bed! it’s four in the morning here and i have a big day tomorrow and i’m going to try to get some sleep. i’ll write again very soon, i promise. i have so many stories left.
lots of love everybody!
your friend,
phil

Two weeks ago I arrived in Panama City, the average backpacker’s southernmost stop in North America. To go further south would take you to Darién, the Panamanian province that borders Colombia. It’s an area of dense jungle with no roads for thirty miles. Infested with fer de lance snakes and Colombian guerrilla hideouts, the land crossing to South America has only been done by a handful of explorers outfitted with Land Rovers and large expeditions led by native guides. I decided to skip that adventure and booked passage on a yacht sailing to Cartagena, Colombia.

Posters are up all over Panama City and Cartagena, but a Panama City hostel, Mamallena, will do the booking for you. Incidentally, this hostel has a weight bench and free breakfast all day and is a hundred times better than where we stayed: Voyager, the aging Lonely Planet Central America’s top pick for Panama. Extremely helpful Lee at Mamallena told me that two yachts were ready to leave. I signed up to sail with Guillermo on the Tango three days later.

Panama is on the Pacific side of the great Canal, but the yachts to Colombia all sail to Cartagena on the Caribbean side. Crossing the Canal costs a 35-foot yacht about $800 each way, so captains wait for passengers in a scattering of sleepy ports on the Caribbean side. So on the morning of our passage, Roxanne and I took a series of buses to Portobelo where we found Guillermo and the three other passengers waiting for us.

Portobelo has a nice old dilapidated church whose most famous feature is a striking figure of Jesus carrying the cross. It’s one of those life size sculptures Catholic churches always keep behind glass. This Jesus is wearing a purple robe with silver accents, wears a silver crown, and is totally black. Proud street vendors outside the church doors sell little Black Jesus action figures, and one of the chicken buses passing through the town had an image of Black Jesus airbrushed across its hood. Other than Black Jesus and two little forts that were sacked by the dread pirate Henry Morgan ages before he became famous for his crummy spiced rum, Portobelo is dead. Luckily we were the last passengers to arrive so we got underway within an hour of our arrival.

After hearing bad stories about some captains, notably Carlos and John, who took away one groups stash of rum on the first day of their trip, we were immediately relieved to meet Guillermo. He’s an Argentinian who’s been running the Portobelo-Cartagena route for a year on his 34-foot Tango. Guillermo is a competent sailor and a remarkably open, friendly, and interesting guy. I recommend him to anybody taking that trip.

Sailing was unremarkable. Seas were flat and the wind was dead, so we motored all but about two of our 36 hours. We “sailed” through the first night and arrived in the San Blas islands at daybreak. San Blas is home to the Kuna people, an indigenous group that managed to fight off first the Spanish and then the Panamanians to maintain a proud culture and an autonomous direct democracy. Kuna women, with their pierced noses, banded leggings, headscarfs, and brightly colored molas, have in my opinion the best traditional dress of anyone in North America.

We spent three days and two nights in the islands. On the second day we ate smoked fish and coconut rice cooked by the lone family living on a neighboring island. Interestingly, two of the men in the family were a gay couple. Panamanian officials were driven off the islands a generation ago for trying to enforce Roman Catholic values on local people, and this family was enjoying the fruits of that victory. We bought some beautiful molas that we had to hold high above the water as we swam back to the yacht, and then set sail for Cartagena.

Thirty-six hours of sailing, two days and a night on the water. We saw lots of dolphins. Roxanne and two others suffered from seasickness the whole journey, but we arrived on time to Cartagena on the morning of our fifth day since leaving Portobelo. We’ve been here a day and I’m in love with the city. But I’ll save writing about Cartagena for another day…

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