RovingMind: Passage To Panama

Ominous forecast at ferry terminal in Turbo -- which I failed to heed

It was a jinx trip right from the start. About 0830 we left the harbor at Turbo, Colombia, in a panga boat or "ferry" jammed with about thirty people. Twenty minutes out into the bay, through a drenching downpour, we looped back around to the terminal due to some mechanical problem.

This was bad enough because I wanted in the worst way to be out of that place. After visiting seven cities and pueblos in Colombia through the previous five weeks, Turbo came as a shock to me. The people who live there and along the coast are called "castañas" or those with dark brown or chestnut skin. They´re a different lot than those inland, in Medellin and so on, to put it mildly.

Of African roots, the castañas generally are much coarser, crasser of speech and, seemingly, just plain sloppy. Particularly irritating to me, they flick litter wherever they happen to be -- sidewalk, balcony, boat, etc. -- with no consideration or care for Mother Earth.

You can see this particularly in the harbor, which is kind of a cross between a garbage dump and a septic tank. The surface is kind of a sudsy green, interspersed with trash, which roil with black oil swirls when the boats rev up. On a stifling day, what an odor!

Plus the town is boom-box central. Huge speakers blasted tunes in Spanish from restaurants and vendor stands that seemed in competition for the loudest, most obnoxious racket, a racket these people seem to thrive on.

I spent a restless night in a place called Residencia Florida and went to use the ATM next morning. The streets and sidewalks were lined with squeezed-out orange skins, where juice vendors had just tossed them aside by the scores -- and vandals had picked them up. The door to the ATM was spattered, the ATM buttons themselves had been gooed up, and so on. The whole town seemed of garbage and grime and coarse, unfriendly people.

Anyhow, you get the picture. After the sophistication and gentle mannerisms of Colombianos of the interior, and the cleanliness, Turbo came as a shock. As did the castañas. And now here I was being returned to the place in that crowded panga.

Piss on it! -- urinating directly into the harbor at Turbo

Two hours or so passed until the boat was repaired. Over a large tv monitor at the terminal the forecast was for another storm incoming and a continuation of the monsoon that had been afflicting Colombia. For my part, I had seen much rain the previous weeks, lots of landslides, but not anything that I would call drastic as far as storms or flooding. Which, I´m afraid to say, was about to change.

Our panga loaded up and once again we departed that sewer-hole harbor. I was headed north to the town of Capurgana, which I was told was a nice place to visit. A small port, it´s one hop north as you´re making your way up the coast and into Panama.

The first hop involved that over-loaded, over-sized rowboat down in Colombia. Being one of the last to board I was seated in the front row -- which I knew was a bad spot but what could I do? It was the only space left.

After about an hour underway we reached wide-open bay -- and open expanses for waves to sweep on in from the stormy Caribbean. And sweep in they did -- great, gaping walls of green water, crashing in on that scow and giving it, and us, a savage pounding.

The bow was so high in the air, and piled up with luggage, all of it enclosed in black plastic bags to keep dry, that I couldn´t see to prepare myself for the seas piling in and took perhaps the worst of it. The effect became like a crash dummy in a car hitting a barricade. I was flung against the sides, the front...My spine was slammed repeatedly down against the seat. People were crying -- and crying out in pain. With me being one of them. It was no longer fun, this traveling thing. I got seasick, the first time in my life, and spewed over the side time after time.

I shook my fist back at the coxswain (driver) and shot him dirty looks -- all he had to do is cut the throttle, I figured, and slow us a little. But to no avail.

The violence was so bad that the board forming the back of my seat was ejected skyward from its slots. I cowered in fetal position on the floor upon life jackets spread out. Every time a wave slammed us I gave out a pitiful groan as the impact shuddered through me, but at least I wouldn´t blow out a disc in my spine is the way I figured it.

At one point the warm Caribbean gushed over the side...I fingered the straps on my life jacket and wondered what it would be like to have to swim for it. Soon after, with me laying there in the water and puke, the ride calmed as we made into Capurgana at last.

None of this did I see as I had to helped up out by kind and caring hands and was laid out on the dock to cries of "medico! medico!" The ordeal was finally over, or at least that one was, to be followed by another -- taking stock of my injuries.

Pier at Capurgana -- where I was laid out like a slab of meat

At the first, El Delphín (the dolphin) I met Ron from New York City who had been on the same panga. Yet he was calmly sitting there, finishing stripping a fish bare to the head and skeleton and chewing it up as nice as you please. Go figure. He had been seated better and didn´t suffer nearly as much. There was no room at the inn at El Delpín, it turned out; so my guide/porter shouldered my duffel again and led me onward.

We sloshed to a hostel called La Pesquera where a bunk in the corner of the dorm beckoned and I plopped there...basically for two days. During which time the rains were so ferocious that the streets ran with water that at one point seeped beneath the doors. Good god, I thought -- first I get thrashed at sea and now I`m about to get flooded out.

As I laid there those hours, drops flailing the tin roof, I performed a rough assessment of myself: both knees battered black and blue, my back so sore I ached to get out of bed, muscles painfully strained in my right chest, right side of my head swollen and sore...

Wow, no rain in Capurgana

To top it off, Capurgana was another town populated with castañas and they seemed to have even more boom boxes per capita than in Turbo! In addition, the hostel and its crowded neighborhood was barking dogs, squalling kids, crowing roosters...Good god, I lamented, first one wretched place and now another. How I wanted to find that guy who talked me into coming to this coast in the first place.

As they say though, God provides...For hours two Colombian women sat silently in the dorm weaving jewelry and wristbands on their bunks, and their presence was calming, even healing, amid the din.

In addition, Ron from NYC and I shared dinners and drinks together a few times. A Canadian by birth, Ron escapes the pressures of Wall St. by traveling through back regions of Colombia, regions often controlled by FARC, an anti-government, guerrilla faction there. He´s even been captured by FARC and used his wit, and political acumen, to be set free. These conversations were bordering on therapeutic and meeting him was almost worth that god-awful bashing.

I soon fell in with two fellow trekkers in the dorm -- Santiago from Argentina and Juan Pablo from Italy -- who were soon to be heading up along coast to catch a plane to Panama City. Pain in my back or no pain in my back, about then that sounded good to me. After only a few days, I had had enough of that coast altogether.

The only thing was, to get up to the airstrip involved crossing a touchy international border -- as well as another of those boat rides....

TO BE CONTINUED