Author: Juan

Looks like it’s time for an update, folks. This is what’s been going on in the past 18 months.

Tiny house

As suggested in my previous post, we intended to set a more permanent (or at least less ephemeral) base in Northern California. With that goal in mind we got ourselves a tiny house, which we named Adelaida, and set it in our friends’ 1-acre property, which they named Rosalinda. Adelaida is technically an RV, built on top of a trailer, and it has about a quarter of Ñandu’s footprint.

Delivery day was as stressful as docking Ñandú to a mediterranean moor under crosswinds, a strong current, and half the town judging your skills… which, thankfully, I never had to do. Turns out that even though I had measured the front gate’s horizontal clearance, it was plenty spacious only in theory. In practice, the street wasn’t wide enough for the truck driver to maneuver and back up with the tiny house lined up with the driveway. Every attempt required stopping the mid-morning traffic of a somewhat busy street. On the last one the driver calmly declared he was stuck.

He got off and said to me: “I cannot go forward or backwards without destroying something.” At that point we had a dozen cars waiting on each side of the truck-plus-trailer rig, in addition to the city bus, for about 10 minutes.

“How can you be so serene!?” I complained to him in what was not yet the apogee of my panic.

“Well, it’s just that there’s nothing I can do”. Good point. But his Zen attitude had zero soothing power on me, because at that moment I saw the garbage truck joining the traffic jam. My panic climaxed, because the next vehicle I imagined I’d see was the police’s. In my desperation I went to get a sledgehammer to bring down a portion of the fence, but when I was back someone had had the great idea of dislodging the gate itself, which was perhaps a slower but non-destructive solution. That gave us the extra inch of space that made all the difference. So after about 20 minutes of holding the traffic the tiny house was finally inside the property. It was still a long way to the back, pruning trees and occasionally backtracking, but we had the entire day for that.    

Before

Then came the déjà-vu of our boatyard days with a long list of arduous tasks to make the house habitable and reasonably comfortable:  appliances, paint, flooring, plumbing, decking… Tiling the shower in particular solidified our relationship: if that didn’t kill it, nothing will. Even though we are still not done (are you, ever?), the (tiny) sofa and (tiny) closet that we got just a few weeks ago made all the difference to make it look like the cozy, tidy and inviting place we wanted.

After

Panama

As the end of 2019 approached it was time to execute our plan of dodging the cold months and move to warmer latitudes. We chose to start in Panama, not because Ñandú was there, but because Kathy wanted to go to Chile first and, well, Panama is more or less half-way between Chile and California. More importantly, Kathy bought a ticket with Copa and it was very cheap for her to add a Santiago-Panama leg. So Panama it was, and we don’t regret our choice for a rendezvous point. Coincidentally, it was during our stay in Panama that Ñandú got sold, and to our knowledge, she’s now in Florida.

Panama City

Bocas del Toro

Costa Rica

Our last accommodation in Panama was our good friends’ boat, Anahita, in Bocas del Toro. From Red Frog Marina we took a water taxi to Isla Colon, then a Ferry to the town of Almirante, then a bus to the border with Costa Rica. We then crossed a bridge by foot to Sixaola, where another bus and a transfer to a van finally got us to Puerto Viejo.

From there we rented a car and drove across half of Costa Rica to the lush Arenal Volcano area.

Honduras

Next, a flight and a ferry took us to the island of Utila in the Caribbean, where Ada and a friend of hers joined us. We spent a month and a half freediving almost every day to get our master’s certificate. We reached new depths (4om or 130ft) and breath hold times (4m40s hers and 5m30s his—she held the family record for a few, agonizing hours). Those numbers make me proud, but not nearly as much as getting an official picture id with my religious headwear.

After a couple days in neighboring Roatán we came back home right in time for the first covid-19 lockdown.

California

The pandemic derailed some grandiose travel plans we had, which included Ecuador (for Kathy), France, and a total solar eclipse in Chile. We made the best lemonade we could out of the life lemons we got. Regardless, we acknowledge it would have been so much more difficult had we still been cruising on our sailboat, as we’ve received some harrowing reports from stranded cruisers.

A new Ñandú in the incubator

With no international travel in sight, we put in action plan “camper van” one year earlier than we originally intended. We ordered a Mercedes Sprinter cargo van, and during the long wait to get it delivered we drove to Montana to check a shop that would convert the van into a second, tinier tiny house. We made a multi-week, multi-national park trip out of that errand.

Nevada

Wyoming

Yellowstone

Idaho

We selected the Montana shop to do the job, so a month and a half later we were doing the 2000-mile round trip again on our brand new flashy red van (and came back on a rental car). This time the weather was much colder, and we stopped only one night each way.

Epilogue

Just as we were eagerly waiting for Ñandú to be ready five years ago, now we are anxiously waiting for our camper van (for which we need a name, by the way) to scratch our wonderlust itch. We are hopeful it will be easier to dock than both Ñandú and Adelaida.

I’ve decided to continue blogging here with an occasional update of our whereabouts, travel stories and a bunch of pictures. If you were here for the sailing adventures, then please accept my apologies for the bait-and-switch and feel free to unsubscribe. Otherwise, see you soon (-ish).

I’ve had several people asking what happened. The answer is, nothing. When asked at the beginning about a timeline I’d say something like “I want at least five years, she wants at most three”. We agreed, from the get-go, to evaluate after each season whether we’d continue one more year; this time we simply did not renew the contract with Poseidon for the next season.

“What happened?”, they asked, with a tone that suggested they expected to hear something tragic, a health event or perhaps a divorce, had interrupted our idyllic adventure, the one everyone wants to have, or at least everyone who has never had to deal with boat maintenance. Nothing tragic happened. No health reasons involved, although, come to think of it, too much sun, too much salt and not enough sleep (and consequently not enough sex) can’t possibly be good for your health, can it? No divorce either; not even much of a reason to think of it. Although, being with your partner—even the lovely partner I’m so lucky to have—no more than 41 feet apart 24/7 can’t be good for your spirits, can it? True, you can make that 47 feet if you get inventive with hypotenuses and consider the engine room a habitable space, but still. I want to miss my wife, alright?! Or at the very least, have the opportunity to miss her once in a while. Isn’t that a fundamental human right, anyway?

There is a list of other things that I also had in excess, other than the wife, but, unlike the wife, I will never miss. First and foremost is the almost constant restlessness, the epitome of which was our first evening in Willemstad, Curaçao’s capital. We were anchored close to the rocks, in a tight spot where we could not give out all the chain I wanted to feel confortable. We rowed ashore and left the dinghy in a place that looked somewhat seedy (in fact, a month later two cruisers where robbed at gunpoint at exactly that spot). We rented a car and drove to Willemstad, but we didn’t have local coins to feed the parking meter. We parked anyway and went to try to get some change, unsuccessfully. At a time when I should have been enjoying the exploration of a beautiful new town in company of my entire adorable family, my mind was instead preoccupied with the likeliness of various potential calamities involving the three means of transportation I was a captain of: the anchor could drag, the dinghy could get stolen, a parking ticket could be waiting. In the end, we didn’t get a ticket, the dinghy was still attached to the dock, and Ñandú didn’t wind up on the rocks, but there was a lot of thinking and introspection that night.

Another thing that made me lose sleep was the noise. All sorts of noises, which you learn to identify out of necessity. Ah, that must be the squeaky shelf under our bed; I thought I had fixed that one… guess the fix wasn’t quite permanent. Ah, we left the swim platform’s ladder down. Damn, I forgot to raise the daggerboards. Oh, that’s the anchor bridal rubbing against the bobstays (I don’t really like it, but there’s nothing I can do; worse is the mooring buoy hitting the hulls, which happens on calm nights at the turn of the tide). And then there was the whining boom, another tough one to find and eliminate. What seemed to be the wind piping through the boom turned out to be the topping lift acting like a gigantic guitar string hammered by the wind, the boom working as an amplifying resonance box. If you tried to design such a musical instrument, I’d bet you couldn’t do better than what we unintendedly had. The solution was to wrap a thin cord a couple of turns around the topping lift to disrupt the air flow. There remained one unsolved mystery, though. More than a sound, it was a shudder, an occasional 4.5 tremor in the Richter scale. The entire boat shivered briefly, as a wet dog shaking water off. Perhaps it comes with my Chilean genes, but I kind of like the gentle vibration of mild earthquakes with the soothing effect of a rocking cradle, and if this had not been my boat I would have enjoyed those shudders too. But it was my boat and it still bothers me not knowing where that odd thing came from.

There are, of course, many things I will miss. Not having to wear anything else than a t-shirt, shorts and sandals. Getting up at dawn to enjoy the sunrise and my coffee at the same time. Having an aquarium under our feet. Rowing the dinghy to explore a new place. Having everything in tune for the boat to placidly slide under sail. Being constantly ten steps away from swimming in tropical waters.

I am thankful also for a valuable lesson I learned. I envisioned this multi-year trip, in part, as a way to shop for a tropical place where to eventually set some roots, perhaps seasonally. But no matter how warm and wonderful any of those countries were, something was amiss, something that I figured I could only find in Northern California, in spite of its painfully frigid seas and lack of those warm nights that I love. This is where I feel my tribe is. Where things like “naked rally for legalization of psychedelic medicine” are posible. Where Burning Man happens (okay, that’s in Nevada, but still, it all started in California). This is the place of ecstatic living and human awareness (“through the willingness to be vulnerable and surrender to the innate wisdom of our hearts we can heal ourselves, each other, and our world”). This is where you may heal your childhood wounds; where you may find a way to unravel your traumas and put everything back together in a more forgiving and compassionate manner, one that at least makes some sense; where you can find yourself, as schmaltzy as that may sound to you.

From San Blas we sailed through the night to the mouth of the Chagres River, which is the Panama Canal’s main source of water. As such it can claim the unusual feat of draining to two oceans. The river is navigable from the lower dam to its mouth in the Caribbean Sea. It’s part of a national park and we were eager to explore this “magical and mystic place”.

The only difficult part of navigating the Chagres River is the entrance. There’s a dangerous reef smack in the middle, and you have to decide which way to round it. To the left there’s a narrow and winding channel, to the right a wider but shallower and more difficult to identify pass with potentially breaking waves. On top of that the two nautical charts we had didn’t exactly agree on the location of the reef, and, while everyone swears by one of those charts, there were a couple of locations in San Blas where it was the other chart the one that was correct.

While pondering our options that early morning, we saw an outbound sailboat go through the narrow channel. We assumed they knew what they were doing, because they surely dodged the reef on their way in. Since the boat’s instruments were transmitting their position we could see their route on our chartplotter, and decided to follow it in the reverse direction. Until they called us, and told us with a German accent, “if you intend to follow our path… don’t! We hit the reef hard and now have to stop and snorkel to check for damage”. We thanked them profusely and wished them good luck.

We regrouped, carefully plotted a course that best agreed with both charts, and then waited until the sun was high for, hopefully, better visibility of the sea bottom. With Kathy at the bow on the lookout for underwater obstacles (mostly for my own false sense of security, since the water turned out to be quite murky anyway) I followed our plotted route. Half way, it became obvious the other boat went straight through the reef. No wonder they hit it. Six turns later (two of them very sharp), we were safely in!

We didn’t have to go much further upriver to confirm that the place is indeed magical and mystic. And we had it all to ourselves.

We spent three days essentially anchored in the middle of the jungle, listening to the loud cries of parrots and howler monkeys, exploring the small tributaries in the dinghy, and hiking through the forest (always wary of a potential encounter with a crocodile).

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And… that would be all folks! Rio Chagres was our last anchorage for this chapter of our lives. It was a hard decision, but our beloved Ñandú is for sale in Shelter Bay Marina, close to the city of Colón. We are now in search of new adventures.

The San Blas Islands is an extensive archipelago of more than 300 islands situated in the Caribbean side of Eastern Panama. The tropical landscape of coconut trees that overcrowd a multitude of small islands is framed by a mountainous background of pristine and mostly unexplored rain forest that lies further inland.

The archipelago and the mainland’s coast are inhabited by around 50,000 Kuna people. The Kuna have managed to preserve their ethnic integrity and lively traditions fairly intact, in spite of the early attempts of the Panamanian government to suppress their culture. Since a revolt in 1925 for their right to self-determination, the Kunas have autonomously governed San Blas (or Kuna Yala as they prefer to call it) with minimal interference.

Foreigners cannot buy land, settle, or marry native Kunas, and that’s why the entire comarca remains devoid of resorts and modern developments. The few attempts by foreigners to circumvent the rules and offer high-end experiences for profit have not gone well. In the mid-60s a condescending gringo bypassed the main Kuna authority and built a fancy pseudo-Polynesian resort; clashes with the community led to the resort being burned down twice, and the guy expelled from Panama.

Even though the political power formally resides mostly on men, Kuna’s society is strongly matriarcal. When a man gets married, he is ceremonially abducted, and he moves to the bride’s home; whatever he harvests or produces belongs to the bride’s family.

The transition to adulthood that they celebrate is that of girls. And they do it big, with a multi-day chicha party. Chicha is a beverage fermented from sugar cane, and the party starts when the chiefs determine the chicha is ready, so you don’t really know exactly when the party will start until just a couple of days before. From what we gathered, the first day of the party is ceremonial, the second social, the third is of revelry, and the last of recovery. We were invited to one such party, but sadly, iffy anchorages and a sudden spell of bad weather conspired against us attending it.

When you enter Kuna Yala you are transported to a different era, where people live in thatched-roof huts, fish with age-old methods and move around in dugout canoes powered by paddles and sails. Only that they all have cell phones, and the pervasive presence of plastic trash is perturbing. With minimal infrastructure, the Kunas have a serious problem with trash—in that regard, modernity came too quick for them to adapt. We saw signs of hope in that the younger generations are conscious and active about the problem.

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In spite of the beautiful waters and breathtaking scenery, the best of San Blas for us was the human factor: the people we met, both local Kunas and foreign cruisers.

Cruisers

There was, for instance, the very first Namibians we’ve ever met, who are also the only people to correctly guess our Chilean background from the name of our boat (I can barely place Namibia on the map and these Africans knew about ñandús!). A couple slightly older than us, they spent years on their boat in Venezuela when most people were fleeing the economic and social chaos (“we had a great time there”). And then, on a whim, they just biked all the way to Patagonia. “Unlike boating, it’s simple”, he explained, trying to prove that it was no big deal. “You just have to mount your bike every day and pedal. And when you get tired, you just stop and rest.” They planned to spend this entire season in San Blas.

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There was also young and inspiring Mike 2 (*), the age of our daughter, still searching for his passion. He took a break, borrowed a boat and went on a short cruise. Eager for company (“solitude is overrated”), he kept inviting us in his dinghy to the best spots he had discovered in the surrounding reefs, and making plans to share the fish he caught (it was mostly the delicious and invasive lion fish, so we all felt contributing to the reef’s health by having it on our plates). We were impressed by his unlimited energy and enthusiasm, by his desire to share, and by his knowledge and confidence in all things relating to the seas, all at his tender age. We were touched also by his openness to share with us his life struggles and dark places he’s trying to remain away from.

And then there was child-in-an-adult-suit Mike 1 (*), who had a bellicose youth growing up as “a white boy in Hawaii”. He was cruising on a dime with his lovely Latinamerican wife and one-year-old daughter. He thought we were experts in anchoring, when he saw Ñandú swinging close, but not too close to a huge coral head we hadn’t even seen—and worse, we hit head-on when rowing on the dinghy. He told us countless stories about being pounded by waves and cut up by razor-sharp coral in his everyday surfing life in Hawaii, about gangs and bar brawls, about Hawaiian ghosts and miracle plants. He looked up to his older brother who thought was going to find enlightenment when he conquered a particular wave in Oahu, only to feel no different at all once he did; even worse, nobody witnessed his feat, and in his disappointment he gave up surfing for years. Mike shuns all rules and conventions and does things his peculiar way: he snorkels without a snorkel, he cruises without cruising guides, he doesn’t know how much anchor rode his boat has (“I don’t know; I just gave it all out”, he said when asked how much chain he put in the anchoring spot he chose). And he hadn’t formally checked in to pretty much any of the Caribbean countries he stopped at. I truly believe he has the protection of some Hawaiian god, and that being the case, he should just continue doing things the Mike way. It works for him.

I am not sure it was just a coincidence that all of the above were avid apnea divers.

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* Names and some details have been changed, but yes, Mike 1 and Mike 2 have the same first name.

Kunas

We got to meet many Kunas during our stay in San Blas, and it was always a lively and enriching interaction. Some of them only speak their native tongue, many speak Spanish with varying degrees of fluency.

From our anchorage in Cayo Holandés we rowed in the dinghy to the neighboring Diadup, a small island with a Kuna hamlet of four or five huts. We timidly approached the island with the uncomfortable feeling we were intruding, until we saw a display appear out of nothing: where there was just grass and palm trees a moment before, there was now a full exhibit of molas and crafts, plus three women.

Molas are hand-made textile pieces fashioned with several layers of cloth, where each layer is cut with intricate patterns to reveal the color of the layer underneath. The cuts are then sewn down with extremely fine, invisible stitches. They are part of the women’s traditional attire, and most of them are authentic artistic masterpieces.

In spite of their nonchalant attitude, it was patently obvious the women were expecting us to approach them. Only one of them, Marisa, spoke Spanish, but that didn’t prevent an animated conversation, which mostly followed this pattern: Kathy asks a question. We all look at Marisa, who thinks for a while and then says something unintelligible for us. The women giggle and chat friskily, occasionally glancing at us. We all look at Marisa, who comes up with an answer to Kathy’s question.

We selected a few molas to add to our treasures, and as soon as we left the display got dismantled, even more quickly than it was set.

Venancio and his brother approached Ñandú one morning on their dugout canoe to offer their molas. Venancio had a vast and amazing collection he claimed to have made himself. We knew molas are traditionally made by women, but we also knew Kunas embrace gender fluidity, and accept your gender according to how you express and identify yourself. Venancio made us look at every mola he had with a genuine concern to make sure we’d select the ones we liked the most. The whole process took easily two hours. It was really hard to buy just a few. So hard in fact that we failed, and bought more than just a few. We later learned that Venancio doesn’t really make the molas, but buys and resells them all over San Blas. We are slightly pissed to have gullibly fell, but the molas we got are still incredible pieces of art. Just not Venancio’s art.

Later on, on every anchorage we had more molas offered, but unquestionably made be the women offering them, so none of them had four barrels full of molas as Venancio had. Notable among them was Lisa, sweet, friendly, funny, and chatty. She said she likes to be called Mola Lisa, and upon knowing that we had bought so many molas from Venancio she grimaced and said, in a self-compassionate and accepting tone, “yeah, that’s been my problem my entire life: siempre llego tarde (I’m always late).” We couldn’t help it: with Lisa’s visit, our mola collection grew even more.

On a windy day, one of our last ones in the area, we saw a couple slowly approaching our boat, the old man struggling with his paddle to overcome the force of the wind. We thought they were coming to offer more molas but something seemed odd. It turns out that they came to ask us if, by any chance, we were going to Nuinudup that morning. They live there, upwind, and needed a tow, since it would have been impossible for them to get there paddling against that wind. Ricardo did not speak any Spanish, but Elia was quite fluent. He was a saila (a political and religious leader of the community), and they were both curanderos. They had come to Chichime the day before to collect some medicinal plants for Ricardo’s ailments. We welcomed them aboard and decided to put Nuinudup in our plans for that day. While I prepared things to weigh anchor, Kathy gave them some food as they hadn’t eaten much since the day before. And then off we went, their dugout cayuco tied to our stern. It was a smooth ride for their small vessel… until it wasn’t anymore. The last turn before reaching the destination put it sideways to the wind. The chop rocked the little canoe, which started to take water in. The more water it took, the lower it rode, and the more exposed it was to take even more water, with the few things inside tumbling around and barely retained by the waning sides of the canoe. We had to act quickly or all the contents of the canoe (mostly paddles and shoes) would be lost. I won’t get into the details of the operation, but we lost in the process one of Elia’s sandals and a plastic bottle. Yeah, more plastic trash floating around, but the amount of trash we recovered during our entire stay was several times that.

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We entered the anchorage with the canoe’s gunwales and the waterline being one and the same. We tried several ways of bailing the water out, to no avail. At some point I went to the cockpit; I have no idea what Ricardo tried, but when I came back to Ñandú’s stern, the canoe was upside down. By then it was clear that the only solution was to use a dinghy to tow the canoe just as it was to the beach and deal with it on solid ground. We recruited the guy on a nearby boat, whose dinghy was already on the water, to finish the operation.

Armodio, our fish provider, had infinite patience to teach some Kuna words to Kathy

Cheil proudly showed us his island, Rio Azucar. The large thatched structure is the Congreso or town hall, put together exclusively with materials harvested from the jungle—not even nails in it.

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Our experience cruising the islands was powerful and dazzling. We left Kuna Yala with wonderful memories (and some plastic trash).