In the second part of their journey to recce the route of a new group tour in Latin America, Richard Dunwoody and James Henderson cross the border of Colombia into Panama and sail to the San Blas islands. This time their blog comes from the edge of the Panama Canal.
We’ve finally reached Panama City. Well, Richard has. James passed through when he peeled off a couple of days early. And the recce is complete. It was a cracking journey and proved the worth of a recce – who would have thought that alligators lie happily stacked on top of one another, in a game of reptilian pile-on, or that we would arrive at one village by surfing in, or that the Caribbean Sea can be so rough?
Our first port of call in Panama was a lovely Kuna Indian village, Armila. Except that there’s no actual port, so arrival involves a careful approach, surfing in on a lancha. They switch from the 45hp to the 75hp engine, ride carefully between the green waves and then slide off the front of the white breakers. Departure is more like a funfare ride, as waist-deep men point the boat directly at the waves to get you moving – which was fine, until a wave smacked us angle on and heaved us, bow twisting, to 45 degrees off the horizontal. Very exciting… Oh, I nearly forgot – Armila, the village. Delightful. Really quite simple and traditional. There’s one phone, around which everyone sits and they have had electricity for about a year.
Next we set off for the San Blas islands, sailing west along the coast of Panama. This proved something of a challenge. Neither of us has sea legs, that’s for sure. Devoted to the recce duty as we were, at this point there was nothing we could do but spend the day prostrate on deck, burning to a frazzle, barely daring to move for fear of an urgent barf overboard. And we’re assured that this was actually quite a gentle sea – blinking sailors…. Still, a few seasickness pills and we gradually became human again.
The water surrounding the San Blas islands is calm and they really are small moments of tropical perfection, tiny outcrops of coral that gather passing sand and then burst with palms like a diagrammatic explosion, a cliché despite themselves. We slithered off-board, swam lazily ashore and then struggled into a hammock. A beer miraculously appeared. Very cool.
Then it was back into the fray of the mainland and a transit to Panama City. A quick turn around the old city, which is just being restored and is set to be a gem, and of course the canal. There we stood over the Miraflores Locks just outside the city, as vast ships bobbed up and down, attended by minuscule-looking but actually massive trains holding them in place. It’s just the sort of place that James Bond ends up on a bad day.
Football was a bit of a theme in this trip (and this from a rugby player) – but hey, it was the World Cup, and we were in Latin America. And so, after the Brazil v Colombia match, we watched the various quarter finals in tiny, remote towns in north-western Colombia, to the surprise and general delight of the locals. The Germany v Brazil semi we saw in Puerto Olbadia, the incredibly remote frontier town on the Panamanian side of the border, in a thatch-roofed bar, among a crowd that quickly changed from aghast to incredulous to hands in the air exasperated at Brazil’s performance.
It’s slightly spooky when an unknown man buys you a beer, gets you in conversation… and then introduces himself as the Head of Immigration (particularly when you think this is one of the principal drug smuggling routes in the western world). As it turned out, he was urbane and surprisingly good company and we bought him a beer in return. Such is the random nature of travel, then…
