The San Blas Cat

San Blas Islands, Panama

Lo

The bus from Panama City to Colon was no sweat. But when I got off there in the dying daylight I had no idea what to do.

Colon is known for being a dangerous town. Back when the United States was running the Panama Canal, Colon was a party town known for it's ex-pats and discos. But when the foreign money fled, many in Colon were left jobless and broke.

People say it's a bad place to be a lost gringo. But contrary to popular stigma, I had no trouble at all. Some random guy hailed a diablo rojo (literally "red devil" - a local bus) for me, and I hopped aboard trusting to his goodwill.

When I boarded there were still seats available but it quickly became packed to the boiling point. Everybody's face was in somebody else's armpit and if you had both butt cheeks on one of the brown vinyl seats you could count yourself amongst the lucky.

It took us nearly 4 hours to travel the 50km from Colon to Portobelo. Mostly we sat in traffic and pled with our bladders. When we finally hopped off the bus around 11pm, I struck up a conversation with a fellow backpacker.

His name was Lo and he was a Dutch medical student in his early 20s. Turns out he was taking the same boat to Colombia as me. We met up for beers and burgers at my hostel and discussed how much booze to bring on the boat.

The trip was supposed to take 4 days and 3 nights. I had been planning on 1 liter of rum, but Lo told me I would surely need 2 liters because what else were we going to do at sea for 4 days. I ended up buying a liter and a half.

The Matron

There are two routes by boat from Portobelo to Colombia. The route I was taking hugs the coast and arrives at Capurgana, near the border. The other cuts across the open sea to Cartagena.

Due to rough seas, the Cartagena boat on the day of our departure was cancelled and we inherited one of its passengers.

She was a Swiss woman about my age but somewhat more mature and infinitely better prepared. I met her on the beach as we were waiting to board The San Blas Cat - the catamaran that would carry us into Colombia.

There are several boats that carry passengers from Panama to Colombia, but because we had all booked on short notice it seemed we had landed on a boat that carried some risk.

According to the internet, this captain had sunk a boat on a previous trip, and there had been an issue with the life boat being too small. Other people had complained about personality clashes with the captain.

We were supposed to leave at 10am, but our boat had to wait for the dock and then load four motorcycles onboard. We ended up leaving 2 hours late.

Fritz

Our captain was a human turd from Austria named Fritz. He had a moustache, a goatee, and a scrunched up face that resembled a sphincter. Upon departure he immediately offended several of the passengers by making sexist jokes while explaining the rules of the ship.

One of the passengers was a Russian girl with a shaved head and massive breasts. Fritz made sure to single her out and comment on her English, which was pretty poor. He explained the necessity of this with an anecdote about a passenger he once had who was the perfect woman - the only word she knew how to say in English was "yes.

Later during the journey he would argue with women passengers that women didn't deserve equal pay for equal work, because they were liabilities due to their capacity for childbirth.

He was also a raging racist who couldn't understand why Africans who bred like rabbits didn't expect to die like rabbits. He was of course a fan of Donald Trump.

As a sailor he seemed competent but not expert. He emitted a steady stream of "sheisses" and "fucks" and at times said things like "I have no fucking clue how we're going to get out of here." There was one other notable occasion where he told everyone within earshot, which was only a handful of people, to "hold fast" in anticipation of a crash that luckily never occurred.

He had owned other ventures in the past, and in general he impressed me as a wealthy man with a superiority complex who felt entitled to whatever he could take and who didn't give two shits for anyone else.

The Party Boys

The rough seas which had caused the cancellation of the Cartagena-bound vessel turned out to be pretty rough indeed. The first day was the most brutal, and before nightfall half of the passengers were seasick and vomiting.

I managed to keep my food down, but I was too nauseous to do any drinking. There were a few guys on board however who drank till 5am every night regardless of the sea conditions.

One of them was Lo, the Dutch medical student I had met on the bus from Portobelo. He maintained an irregular sleep schedule where he would periodically nap on a bench and then wake up ready to drink more rum and cokes at any hour.

Another was a Belgian guy in his late 20s with some sort of mohawk/man-bun hairdo going on. He had one of the motorcycles and was partying his way from Mexico to Argentina.

The third was a Danish veteran backpacker who was full of wild partying stories from all over the world. He told a story about exchanging money on the black market in Venezuela and then fighting off guys he had partied with who decided to mug him armed with screwdrivers.

All three of these guys were super-friendly and posi, constantly telling stories about themselves and passing around bottles of rum.

Roberto

The only other American aboard was Roberto, a software developer in his 40s or 50s who was taking time off work to drive his super-expensive motorcycle across the Americas. He obviously was doing well financially, but he impressed me as surprisingly stupid for a computer programmer. He'd never even heard of AWS. Guess that just goes to show how strong the job market is.

He told a story one night about driving his bike through protests in Honduras. They had just had a disputed election there, to which he was oblivious. He showed everybody a GoPro video he had taken of driving through two different barricades.

The video showed long backed-up lines of traffic, which he drove around, and intersections barricaded with burning tires. He drove through those too.

At the second barricade he actually had a policeman escorting him. The protesters stopped the policeman, but Roberto just kept going. He explained that he "had gone too far to turn back." He said it was the most terrified he had ever been traveling.

To me it looked like a bunch of Hondurans sitting in traffic and one entitled American driving around them and through the barricades. I pointed out that his video showed no violence and nobody had threatened him, at which point he got super defensive and suggested I should drive through a barricade of burning tires if my balls were so big.

*

The San Blas Islands are a chain of a few hundred islands off the coast of Panama, 50 of which are populated by indigenous people. One night we visited one of the inhabited islands in the dark, and Roberto's camera was very popular with the village children.

The scene on the island was strange. All the men were in some city hall type of building holding an assembly. The women were in their homes and completely ignored us. Packs of kids followed us around posing for photographs and speaking to us in Spanish, which not everybody on the island spoke.

Roberto took tons of pictures of the islanders. I feel pretty weird about that. In this case the kids enjoyed posing for photos, but to me taking pictures of indigenous people is like making them objects in the landscape. It seems dehumanizing.

I took a few photos of the kids anyway. They were super cute.

The Newlyweds

The newlyweds were a British couple on an extended honeymoon in Latin America. Becky was a bombshell who worked for a non-profit that advocated for women in the developing world. She at one point told our douchey captain that if he didn't stop making sexist jokes we would throw him overboard.

Her husband was clever and quiet and not nearly as attractive, so I forgot his name and pretty much everything else about him.

Our second night at sea I was super drunk and talking to Becky about a thought I'd had about stars.

My thought was that stars have meant different things to people at different times. Thousands of years ago stars were gods and magic.

I then digressed to something our shitty captain had said that I'd been thinking about. When he was degrading people of color he had mentioned the large family of one of his crew members and that his siblings were all pretty stupid.

I was thinking there's probably some truth to that, but I didn't think genetics had much to do with it, and I was reflecting on how important an education system is in fostering critical thinking skills.

I then circled back to how when I look at the stars I think of how there are 100 billion galaxies each with 100 billion stars and how we as humans have only studied this one star and how little we really know about our world.

Becky's response: That's not what I think when I look at the stars, but I probably don't think as much as you.

My response: I'm just drunk.

The German Guys

On the third day one of the anchors turned up missing. Fritz immediately blamed the indigenous people from a nearby island. He claimed they had it out for him because he had abandoned a boat that got stuck on their reef. The anchor cost $500 and surely they'd try to sell it back to him the next time he came through.

Still, just to be on the safe side, the crew as well as three German guys who were traveling together all donned masks and flippers and started diving down to the seabed to look for it.

And what do you know, one of the Germans found the anchor. For free. Frugal Fritz didn't even buy them a beer.

The Crew

Besides Fritz there were 5 other crewmates.

One was a beefy racist Swiss dude who used the n-word when referring to some locals who helped us unload the motorcycles.

Two were the wives of the beefy racist Swiss dude and Fritz. The wives looked like biker chicks. They were tattooed and tan and super-drained all the time. They were the kind of women who I imagined were once tremendously beautiful but had been used up by life before the age of 45.

The other two crew members - Rafa and José - were Panamanians. When we would dive off the boat and swim to an island they would follow behind in the motorized lifeboat.

Our last night at sea we made a fire on an island and were buying beers from a makeshift bar somebody had set up there. I didn't stay out too late, but apparently the crew did.

José blacked out and became enraged, cursing in Spanish that none of the party boys (who were the only people still awake) could understand. All three of them had to restrain him and keep him from falling overboard until he passed out.

I'm not sure what José was upset about. But I can't imagine it's an easy life working for an imperious slob who thinks you're racially inferior.

The Minimalists

Fritz had advertised that he would carry motorcycles from Panama into Colombia for $350. Turns out that meant he would illegally drop them off in Sapzurro, Colombia, where you cannot legally import the bikes. From there the bike owners would have to arrange a separate boat to take them to Turbo, Colombia, where they could legally import them.

The owners of the bikes were incensed at learning the cost of importing their bikes was going to be twice what they had been sold on, especially a Canadian woman and her French boyfriend who were travelling together.

But their anger quickly turned to fear when it was time to unload the bikes in Sapzurro.

Initially the crew tied the boat up to a dock and was going to roll the bikes down a ramp. But the sea was too rough and one of the ropes broke, at which point Fritz gave up and went back out to sea.

Plan B was to pay some locals to come out in a motorboat, tie up to the Cat, and then lower the bikes by hand with the aid of a rope tied to the masts.

The Canadian woman, a tall vegan and outspoken minimalist concerned with ecological footprints, was nearly in tears. Despite her commitment to the natural world, it seemed she also had feelings for her motorbike.

The bikes eventually did get unloaded, with minimal damage, but it took a long time and Fritz told us the immigration office back on the Panamanian side of the border would probably be closed.

He took us back into Panama anyway and left us in a small village there. We found the immigration office, which actually doubled as somebody's house, and convinced them to stamp all our passports.

Then we had to pay for another boat to take us back into Colombia. We all crammed into a tiny motorboat and then held on for dear life bouncing over waves for an hour en route to Capurgana, Colombia.

The German Girls

My one night in Capurgana I went out with the 3 German guys and 2 German girls - Rike and Claudia.

After 3 nights at sea it felt great to have solid ground under our feet and cheap beers readily available. We went to a hip cocktail bar on the beach and ordered pizzas from a nearby pizza joint. The Germans were all typical polite Germans and spoke in English for my benefit.

After pizza we went back to the hostel, picked up some beers, and then walked along the beach drinking the beers. I became pretty friendly with Claudia. We were hanging back from the others and brushing arms and whatnot. I never made a move though and nothing came of it.

*

The next morning we were supposed to get processed by Colombian immigration before catching the boat to Turbo, but unfortunately the power went out in all of Capurgana.

After some cajoling by a woman who worked at our hostel, an immigration officer came up with a plan. He collected all our passports and told us to wait. He came back half an hour later to return them to us, all with stamps. I think the idea was that it's okay not to do any background checks if nobody can see you not doing them.

An hour later I was on a boat to Turbo, where I would catch a bus to Cartagena. There was a Colombian girl sitting next to me who got seasick and threw up in one of the provided barf bags. I didn't feel nauseous in the slightest. After 4 days aboard the San Blas Cat, this was nothing.