Siesta-Time By The Seashore

Juan Pablo walks the beach at Pavones at low tide

No doubt some of you have realized, my posts have been sparse in here of late.  Plain and simple, it´s a law of physics applied to human endeavor:  what goes up must come down.

Perhaps call this the two-month lull.  Whatever you call it, after about two months on these journeys I deflate as far as writing or picture-taking or just plain traveling.  It becomes an effort just to pick up the camera and compose a shot, much less stow my duffel on another bus or dig out the passport and check into another hostel  Yes, the dreaded globe-trekker burn-out had set in.

After two months, your humble correspondent in yet another bus station

Give me a wracked up back, a tropical cold, a rumbling and phizzing in the intestines (all of which I had in the pic above) but don´t give me that!  The onslaught of burn-out takes the mind, you understand, and that´s the main reason for going through it all anyhow. 

This time it hit me on the Pan-American Highway, approaching the Panama/Costa Rica border.  Juan Pablo, the olive oil farmer and country gentlemen from Italy who I had been traveling with, much more of a world traveler than I, knew the treatment immediately -- one week at the seashore.

By coincidence, he had a friend who lived along the Pacific Ocean relatively close by.  We got our passports stamped at Paso Canoes border crossing, sailing right through for once, and hopped the next bus for the coast.

Endless banana plantations en route to Pavones

What Juan Pablo didn´t tell me was that it would practically be a marathon getting in there -- three changes of buses, all of them jammed, with hours of waiting involved.

The route itself wound over dirt roads with protruding rocks and huge potholes.  My back took a pounding and I was yelping with pain and muttering at him by the time we got there, well after dark.

However, the isolated and quiet little town by the sea was just what we needed.  Both of us slept and slept...Besides eating and gabbing our main activity was taking long walks in the evening along beaches strewn with black volcanic formations.  This is why so many sunset pics accompany this post -- that was about the only time I picked up the camera!

Pavones, the name of the little beach town, was just what the doctor ordered, in other words, for weary travelers.

After such a time getting in there, this seems a good place to insert my patented Five Rules For World Travel.  By popular demand and all that.  Count this as a bonus to my faithful readers because someday these only will be available in my book, The Consummate World Traveler, and you´ll have to pay big for them.

At any rate, in abbreviated form, here they are:

1. Prepare
2. Get There
3. Execute
4. Record
5. Reflect         

For example, the arduous bus journey into Pavones was a clear exercise of rule Number Two.  No matter how tired you are or how you feel, sometimes you have to draw upon whatever resources you can, inner or otherwise, and get there.  Suck in the gut, in other words, and do it.

Dare I say it, faith plays a role...Get there and things will work out.  Or at least that´s the way it works for me.

Carol of Carol´s Cabinas

This time, after getting there, I landed at a place called Carol´s Cabinas.  Its owner is a New Zealander, a "kiwi" as they call them.

In general Carol was pleasant of personality, but with mouth that´d make a First Mate on a tramp steamer blush.  She had a knack for working the f-word into sentences two and three times, and often that was in addition to obscenities already interspersed.

A bottle of liquor was centered on the table when she and her girlfriend had lunch, and with good reason.  It was dolloped at intervals into their tropical juice drinks.  

Despite her saltiness, she made available the little things, the mark of a good hostess.  A huge bunch of bananas, for example, hung in the communal kitchen area, available for the plucking to anyone wanting smoothies or a snack.  Mosquito netting, fine-meshed and treated with insecticide, was draped over the beds and her personal laptop was available to guests wanting to use the Internet.

She was a little lax on the pruning, so the jungle had grown in upon the entrance walk to my room.  I had to part huge waxy leaves, usually dripping with water, to get inside.  Maroon flowers festooned the lushness here and there, and in the morning you didn´t have to go far to get a show with the wildlife.

I´d wake up and shuffle out through shafts of sunlight to the kitchen area to the distant calls of monkeys.  Huge red parrots, called scarlet macaws, would hop from branch to branch, reminding me of cardinals back in Penna., only with tail plumage longer than their entire bodies.

Most spectacular were the butterflies.  Some are called mariposa azul.  Their brilliant blue made us gasp with delight every time we saw them. This image -- of these sapphire-like jewels flapping erratically through that vegetation -- remains one of the most vivid of the whole trip.

Pavones itself was a surfer town with almost no surfers.  The big breaks don´t materialize until spring, so the guest houses and restaurantes were almost deserted.  This was good for us because the prices were down, especially for lodging.  My room at Carol´s with private bath and hammocks out front, and all the goodies thrown in, was $10 U.S. per night.  For most of the week, there was only two guests.

The surf-point-with-no-surfers thing was interesting in itself.  The artwork about-town especially.  It was like wandering a temple and viewing faded frescoes of the gods.  Images of bronzed young men with washboard-like stomachs (or women in bikinis) clasping long boards loomed from wall after wall, making me feel small and out of shape.  Carol talked about waves that were only a few "hands" tall, a surfer term that means "feet," and how it was low tide there as far as business.

It also was a good time to put into practice Number Five of Jim´s Rules of Travel -- Reflect.  Through the previous two months I had been in three countries, met a lot people and done a lot of things.  There had been a few rough times but generally it had been a fantastic experience.  Colombia, especially, was some of the best travels I´d ever had.

New Year´s Eve, bonfires flared up here and there along the beaches.  As I watched them crackle and burn through the waning hours of 2010, I passed this plethora of experiences through my mind, one by one.  Most I savored and some I cringed over.  As best as I could, I let them work back into the receptacles of memory, to where the good stuff is stored.

If I had a wish or resolution for 2011, it would be that I could remember it all for a long, long time.

Last bonfire of 2010 -- New Year´s Eve at Pavones Beach

 

Low tide at Pavones Beach

Passage To Panama, Part III

Our unofficial prison at the edge of the Darien

With Yours Truly stranded on foreign shores, however temporarily, it seems a good time to resurrect that pesky question often put to me, "Jim, whyfore do you travel so?"

Sometimes it takes a while to get to, but generally I answer with my tried and true statement:  "The mission," I explain, "is to explore other peoples and other cultures."  

This, then, is what I set out to do that first full morning in Puerto Olbadia, to explore and to experience the culture there.  And it is unique -- maybe not the most exciting, especially to adventure-seeking turistas, maybe not the tidiest, but unique nonetheless.


One reason that I set off along this coast in the first place was to visit the San Blas Islands, which are farther up along the Darien Coast.  Here live the bulk of the Kuna Tribespeople -- tribus or tribals as they call them here.  In fact, this whole stretch is sometimes called the "Kuna Coast." 


Puerto Obladia, as it turned out, was home to several families of Kunas, and I got to see and learn some about them close up.  This was not a Kuna village per se, you understand; more like a few were sprinkled into the local population.


They didn't want their pictures taken, at least close up.  So check the Internet for a good look.  Kuna women, in particular, are walking bazaars of color.  Among the most colorful people I've ever seen.  Their philosophy seems to be that no patch of skin will be left unadorned.  Even the stretch between the ankles and knees is encircled with sheaths of eye-popping bead work.

They speak their own language, with a little Spanish thrown in.  So I was not able to communicate with them.  I decided to be more like a voyeur.  Or as Yogi Berra would say, you can observe a lot about people just by watching them.  As it turned out, I had lots and lots of time to do just that.

A "coaster" coming to call

One of the big events in P.O. was the arrival of "coasters" or local freighters.  You could tell when one got there as the locals would scurry toward the waterfront.  This was almost opposed to their usual gait, which was kind of a flip-flop shuffle, usually with gaze cast downward.


As beat up as I was, these craft aroused something in me, I will admit...something beyond my usual penchant for boat rides.  It seems that the Darien itself had been working my mind.  Like a siren doing a seductive dance of danger and intrigue, it had cast a spell over me and was drawing me farther and farther...of which coasters were a means to that end.


For what it´s worth, when I mentioned this to Juan Pablo and Santiago, they thought I was coming down with something. 

Almost everything comes in via the water here, from clothes to electronics to most of the food.  Which was a surprise -- you would think that such a place would be fairly brimming with tropical fruits and vegetables.  But this was not the case in P.O.

I saw a few scraggly tomato plants here and there, a few papayas, but that was about it.  I never did find out why, as the soil seemed fertile enough to grow all kinds of things.


Our hang-out was next to door to Pension Cande, a place called Restaurante Las Tres Ls.  Its owner and chief-cook-and-bottle-washer was a lady named Lorenca.  I took a can of tuna into her once, thinking such an establishment surely would have a can opener.  To my surprise, she whipped out a bright and shining butcher knife.  With teeth clenched, she ripped it around and open with that big thing as nice as could be.  

She spat out words in Spanish like a machine gun, which I figured was a plot so I wouldn´t know what I was ordering.  And no wonder.  The first night she served deep-fried pig´s tail.  That was it.  No second choices.  Her main course was served with rice, beans, maybe a few slices of carrots, and called plato del día in Spanish, plate of the day.


The second day it was deep-fried cow´s intestine, sliced up into strips.  The third was deep-dried spam...spam, deep fried, I say.  The plates pooled with so much oil you could lubricate a crankshaft.

Juan Pablo and Santiago preparing to depart

Two things I´ll remember about her place:  First, walking in there before the power came on for the evening with diners sitting around woofing her plato del dia by candles.  Every table was a little island of light, including in the kitchen where she was serving.  Which was kind of romantic, until you saw the place with the lights on.


And second,  finally seeing one place where the food overall was worse than the American diet.  And from the size and number of bubble butts (and bubble guts) waddling around, it appeared that Lorenca´s fare was typical for P.O.

The third day was marked by the appearance of the mysterious Mad Russian.  How he got there, no one knew.  He was walking the streets, hands clasped before him, mumbling like some sort of de-ranged Byzantine holy man.  He´d approach some one, babble a few words, and then dart away...Kind of a hard fella to get to know.

Our team was divided on him:  Juan Pablo thought that he was another Dostoyevsky, the great Russian writer.  Santiago had him as an Argentian poet/philospher of renown.  For my part, I thought he was just another nut-job from Eastern Europe.

His name was Vladimir, we did find out.  He had an interest in tribal cultures and earlier in life had worked at the famous Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.  He somehow wangled his name in front of ours on the passenger list with Air Panama, which didn´t go over well, as long as we had been waiting.  When we protested, he exclaimed, "I am reserved, I am reserved!" and slunk away.

In general, we found it best to steer clear of the Mad Russian.  Like most of the residents of P.O., they tolerated us and we tolerated them, both parties knowing that we wouldn´t be there long.  But the Russian did provide some entertainment as our time there finally, mercifully was coming to an end.


If there's a moral or whatever out of the whole thing, it probably has to do with patience.  Waiting, fortified with patience, is so much of the daily routine here.  The locals always seem to be practicing it -- waiting out the rain, waiting for the catch of the day to come in, waiting for a plane.  This would drive most hurry-and-do-it Caucasians crazy, as it almost did us, but in P.O. it's just life.

Airport waiting lounge -- Puerto Obladia

A few footnotes:

• Flying out toward Panama City, miles high over the Darien, you can see why the government has concerns.  The green-clad hills and valleys go on and on, broken only by looping rivers and swelling lakes of brown water, where the lowlands were flooding from all the rain.  It`s still a wild and untamed land.  To expect Panama, very much a Banana Republic, to exert control down there would be asking something that possibly not even the U.S. could manage.

• Upon landing in Panama City, the whole planeload of us (18) was declared "passengers of interest" by the govt. and our passports seized as we disembarked.  We were put into a hot, stuffy room...no food, no water, the restrooms locked, with armed guards nearby.  One by one we were grilled by security officials -- what were we doing down there, where had we come from, who did we know there, etc.  P.O. had seen an upsurge of insurgents of late and the govt. feared that some might have gotten onto the plane.  Only when our passports were handed back four hours later, were we finally free to go.

• With two weeks gone by now, it appears that I may have escaped contracting malaria, despite all the mosquito bites.  Santiago, however, the youngest of our trio at 26 and who only received a few bites, has been displaying symptoms -- waves of fever and chills, muscle aches, nausea and so on -- and has had to seek medical attention.  As a result, he has had to cut short his epic journey up the length of the Americas and head back to Argentina.                                          

The agent of our deliverance -- Air Panama

The Mad Russian leads the exodus on, followed by a few tribus, among others