Anna and I got back to the city from El Valle on Wednesday and met up with Caleb, Tyler and Mike. That afternoon, we all went to this fancy hotel that has a counter for Aeroperlas Airlines, the only airline that flies to San Blas. We wanted to leave the next day and had an island picked out, but to our surprise all the flights were sold out except for one leaving two days later and to an island we had never heard of. We were pretty nervous, but bought the tickets anyway, for $90 roundtrip. Then we had a huge, fancy Italian dinner including wine for $9 each and hung out at Belsy´s for awhile before crashing at Hotel Costa Azul, which is starting to feel like home.
Anna left early the next morning. Mike and Tyler did their tourist day in the city, visiting the canal and the artesan shops ... where I bought even more souvenirs ... oops ... Caleb and I tried all morning to call this resort we found online to get a reservation on our island, but no one would answer the phone. I was getting very nervous. Then, a HUGE stroke of luck - at Costa Azul on the counter there were little business cards for Cabañas Waica on Mamitupu, one of the islands our plane stopped on. We tried to call a few times and finally got ahold of a guy in Panama City, who said he would check with the cabañas and make sure they had room available. We kept calling him back and finally we figured out that the guy we were talking to was Benicio, the same Kuna guy who works at the hotel who always gives Caleb a discount. Suerte! So when he came into work and realized it was Caleb who had been calling him all day he was all, "OH! no problemo my friend, your friends will get a discount and there is definitely room for them." Amazing serendipity.
So that night, more hanging out at Belsy's to celebrate Mike's last night and then Tyler and I flew out of Panama's domestic airport at 6 am. Pretty low tech all around. The plane was a 17 passenger puddle jumper, and it was kinda like a bus on wings. It stopped on the first island and let off some people and picked more people up, then another island, then our stop was supposed to be next but someone had requested to stop on another island first, so we did that. Up and down on these tiny little green islands, with the sun rising in front of us and crystal blue water all around. Amazing. In the airport this OBNOXIOUS man from Texas had started talking to us. Within 3 minutes he had made an enemy of me by saying with a sneer that "Austin is the San Francisco of Texas ... you know, because of all the homos" but he would NOT shut up despite my cold shoulder. Turns out he had no plan for arriving in San Blas - just a plane ticket - so he decided to simply follow us. We were NOT happy about this, but there was nothing to do. He got off early and followed us when our guide, Pablo, met us. Lucky for him and shitty for us, Pablo did have another cabaña available. So we land on this little airstrip on the coast of the mainland and Pablo and his daughter met us and took us down a dirt pathway to a dock, where we climbed into a very shaky canoe and paddled over to Mamitupu island.
The San Blas islands are part of the Comarca de Kuna Yala, a district on the Caribbean side of Panama ruled by the Kuna Indians. It's just a long strip of beach and jungle-covered mountains and the 400 mostly tiny islands. Until about the 1940s, the Kuna were basically self sufficient and had very little contact with Panama or any white people. Now they trade heavily with Colombian merchant ships who bring them cloth and tar for their canoes and batteries and stereos, etc in exchange for coconuts, which is still their main form of currency. A coconut is about 12 cents. There are 400 islands but the Kuna are very community-oriented and only inhabit about 40 of the islands. They live in bamboo huts with thatched roofs. The men fish and gather coconuts all day and the women sew molas, which they sell very profitably on the mainland, and do the housekeeping. Mamitupu is very small, but about 1,000 Kuna and 0 non-Kuna people live there. Pablo is about 60. He was educated by missionaries and got "too big for his britches" and left San Blas for the city, where he met and married a British woman. They were not accepted back on Mamitupu, so he went with her to England for a few years. He missed home too much and it didnt work out between them, and he returned home like 18 years ago and remarried and bought a chunk of land on the end of Mamitupu. He built the cabañas 2 years ago and now he gets about 20 tourists a month. He has 3 bamboo huts and a larger restaurant hut on the end of the island. It's fenced off from the rest of the island and about 50 feet across and 80 feet long, ringed by a narrow white beach packed with lovely little sea shells, and of course the water around it is crystal clear blue. His wife and two of his daughters do the cooking (all meals are included in the $50/day price).
So we arrived on our little plane Friday morning and Pablo rowed the fat Texan (Bert) and Tyler and me over to the Cabanas. They had coffee and omelets ready for us when we arrived. Then Pablo took us for a walk around the village, which is on the other end of the island. It's all bamboo huts and thatched roofs crowded around dirt walkways, with the execption of maybe 3 concrete buildings -- the school and the clinic, which was scarily rudimentary. Pablo pointed out the medicine cabinet, which was basically a first aid kit. I didn´t even see any anitbiotics. All the men were out fishing or gathering coconuts, so it was just the women and children in the pueblo. All the kids were running around playing, the smaller ones in only their underwear, and they came out of the woodworks to look at the big gringos coming by. They all yelled "hola hola hola!" (which is all of the Spanish most of them know) and wanted to touch our hands. The women looked up from their molas to wave and smile. Here are some examples of what molas look like: http://panamarts.com/index.php/cPath/46/sort/2a/language/es
Girls and boys and men wear regular western cloths, but once girls reach puberty they start wearing the traditional Kuna clothing. They have blouses with puffy sleeves and molas sewed onto the cheast and the back, and skirts of colorful patterned fabric wrapped around. They also wear beaded bracelets all up and down their wrists and ankles. Here´s a photo ... http://www.ms-starship.com/sciencenew/images/June03_Kuna_woman_md.jpg
They hate to be photographed. They also don`t use mirrors.
For lunch, they fed us entire fried fish with rice and actual real vegetables, which are hard to come by here, and it was great. After lunch, Pablo took us all to another island, uninhabited, where we picked up seashells, tried unsuccessfully to avoid the Texan, saw a huge starfish, admired the clear water, swam a little. Tyler found a gorgeous orange conch shell ... but the conch was still in it. Undetered, he spent an hour trying to yank it out. Gross! But Pablo told us the only way to get it out is to kill it first, so he it took back and boiled it. Awful! Dinner was stewed octopus (pulpo) with rice. My first octopus ... it was chewy but really tasty. After dinner we sat around and drank beers and listened to the Texan´s horrible vulgar stories ("You know what you never hear about? Shark shit. They eat fish ...") and had our own stories interupted and ignored, because he was only interested in his own ignorant life. Ugh I hated him. He´s a retired mail man. And just unbelievably inconsiderate and rude.
Gracias a dios, he left early the next morning. Pablo took him to the airport long before Tyler and I were awake, but he didnt come back for a long time. Turns out, dumbshit hadn't informed the airline or the pilot that he was getting off and on the plane on a different island from what his ticket was for, so there was mass confusion and Pablo had to lie and say he was flying back to the states that afternoon in order to get him on the plane. What a retard!
So that day was verrrry relaxed ... we had the whole place to ourselves. We went out fishing in the morning, but nothing was biting. We used a line with a rock tied on for a weight, and a hook with sardines. Very rudimentary, but they don't get very big fish. Then we stopped off at another uninhabited island, swam around this cool coral reef with masks (but no snorkel) and explored the beach, found tons and tons of conch shells. Pablo gathered a bunch of LIVE conches to take back for cooking. More octopus for lunch, in a soup this time, then we spent the afternoon in hammocks napping and reading and watching the palm trees sway and listening to the waves roll in. For dinner the ladies cooked up the conches, which was even chewier than the octopus, but yummy. Had a quiet evening and left way early the next morning to return to Panama City. I slept on the plane but Tyler got motion sickness from the up and down stops.
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