Well, it's been quite a stretch of time since I last checked in on the blog. Since the last time I posted here, not a lot has
happened, but then again, maybe it has.
I’ve returned to my sweet set-up in Cambutal, made friends with the new
owner of the development, and gotten my self into a good routine here. Wake early, grab a quick bite of
breakfast, then find a surf spot and spend an hour or two in the water. Rinse off with a quick shower, then maybe read in the hammock for a bit, most likely fall asleep and nap for a while, then lunch, post-lunch reading and nap, then an afternoon surf if the tide and winds cooperate.
The waves have been awfully good the last month or so, and
I’ve been able to surf most days.
This place has quite a lot to offer in that regard. On the other hand, there’s not too much
on the social calendar here, but there are enough people around to have a beer
or two with on in the evenings, and there seem to be few more people around all the
time.
aaron on a nice one at 411
big wave--tough to tell from the pic but probably a 12 foot face on a really heavy wave
another heavy one at dinosaurios...
I also took a quick bus trip (sans Nookie) back to Costa
Rica to check in on all my good friends in Esterillos. The bus trips from (and back to)
Cambutal were a bit of a grind; bus
from Cambutal to Tonosi, bus from Tonosi to Las Tablas, bus from Las Tablas to
Chitre, bus from Chitre to Santiago, bus from Santiago to David, bus from David
to the Border. Then things got complicated.
At the Costa Rican border, there are apparently no buses
that run down towards the central Pacific coast, so I wound up taking a taxi
into a nearby town, spending the night, and getting on a bus towards San Jose (the
capitol) the next morning, then hopping off at Esterillos. All in
all, a full day and half of bus travel.
And it was roughly the same path (and time) in reverse to return. However, all the bus travel probably
cost me $15 to get across most of Panama with a surfboard, so it wasn’t that
big a hit to the wallet. There’s
also always some interesting things to see on buses in Panama as well, like an
old-timer on his way to a Saturday night cock fight or a young dude on his way
home to his farm in the country with a cock in a box (see pictures below!)
old school hombre taking his prize rooster to a saturday night fight
young guy taking a rooster home to the farm
carrying case for said rooster, aka "cock in a box"--on the 2 hour bus ride with the kid the rooster would let out a loud string of crows every 20 minutes or so, inciting laughter from most of the 15 other passengers.
I”ve also made contact with a couple cruising down from the US west coast in a sailboat. They are planning to transit the Panama Canal sometime in early May, and I’m scheduled to be a line handler for them on this trip--basically you help keep the boat in position with all the other traffic as they transit up and down the lock system. You either have to have enough crew of your own to do this, hire locals to do it, or get gringo volunteers to help you out. From what I’ve heard, it’s a pretty cool way to see the Canal. I’ll have to go through the bus rodeo again to make it to Panama City, but I’m looking forward to that quite a bit.
I shot a quick video on my camera of the beach at one of the great local breaks just for reference/perspective. It's a few weeks old now, and as I was uploading it and watching it, I couldn't help notice how brown everything seemed just a few short weeks ago. Since then, we've had some rain and the surrounding hills and trees have greened up significantly. In any event, I'm posting the video.
Up next--what does the future hold for Nookie and me? Could Nookie be taking another voyage on the water? Stay tuned to find out...
Posts
