Don't Stay at Ina's Cabanas in San Blas!!!!!

River where we got the boat to San Blas

Our 4x4 ride from Panama City with Francisco

Very wet ride to San Blas

Our room at Ina's

Can you see that our Cabana is in a pond?

It was hard to find things to do in the rain...

Jon's buddy

Coco

Ina's boat

The main house is in a foot of water

 

Tuesday, April 24 2012

Marcie and I awoke at 5:00 am in the dorm, grabbed our packs and headed downstairs to meet our ride out to the jungle dock to catch our boat.  We were heading out to the San Blas Islands in the waters of the far southern Caribbean Sea off of the north east coast of Panama.  The San Blas archipelago is made up of about 370 small sandy coconut palm covered islands, about 40 of them inhabited by the Kuna Indians.  The Kuna are one of the only indigenous groups in the America’s that autonomously and successfully manage their own government and affairs.  There is little interference from the mainland Panamanian government.  Linguists claim that the Kuna language is descended from other indigenous tribes from mainland Panama and other groups from more northeast in Central America.  But the Kuna oral tradition claims that they come from Colombia as refugees from either a famine or a war (I can’t remember which).  The Kuna women still dress in their traditional style with pierced gold nose bull rings, extremely colorful blouses and skirts, and intricately beaded forearm and calf bands.  The men wear western style t-shirts and shorts. 

The first stop was at the tour company office to pay the $50 each (it's a 2.5 hour ride thru the jungle by 4x4 to the dock) and then to the grocery store for supplies.  Then it was a long bumpy ride thru the pouring rain in the jungle for the next few hours.  We arrived at the boat ramp and waited with the other travelers there under a tin roof bamboo walled lean-to while the rain turned the jungle dirt to mud all around us.  After a little while our boat came to pick us up.  We hopped in to the 8 seater and headed down the rain swollen river out to it’s mouth where it meets the sea.  Our boat was not fortunate enough to have a roof like some of the others going to other islands did so the guys working on it gave me a piece of plastic sheeting to hold over myself while we motored out over the Caribbean to the island of Narranjo Chico. 

Rite when we hopped out of the boat on the shore of this tropical island inhabited by the Kuna Indians it really started to rain hard.  So hard that you had to yell to be heard over the roar of the drops hitting the palm fronds overhead.  We checked into Ina’s Cabanas in a bamboo walled thatch roof sand floor room that Ina told us was brand new.  It may have been brand new but nobody told the rain that because pretty soon we had a small river running thru the sand under both the north and east walls and a small ankle deep pond developing on the west side.  

The food that Ina’s family made us was really good.  We had Caribbean lobster for lunch.  It was the first time that Marcie and I have eaten meat in over a month.  Here it’s not a restaurant.  You just eat the only one thing that is cooked, but it is usually pretty good. 

After lunch as we were leaving the big house where there is wood instead of sand floors and a tin instead of thatch roof I saw a girl from Holland who was staying in another of Ina’s cabanas running across the property to get somewhere out of the rain.  She did not see the rope tied between two palm trees in front of her and she was clotheslined by a clothesline.  She never saw it coming but when she hit it she snapped her head back and ripped the glasses from her face.  She groped around on the ground at her feet searching visually impaired for her glasses, but I could see that they were still hanging from the clothesline!  I felt fortunate to be able to witness such an action packed moment.  Like when you see a bird fly into a window or someone step on the end of a rake. 

We spent the rest of the nite playing dominoes, reading and trying in vain to stay dry.

~Jon