Fall Waning Autumn Moon

Tender last night to Fuerte Amador, a series of small islands considered a cosmopolitan nightspot by Panamanians according to ship’s literature. There were two open restaurants, a couple of gift shops and a gelateria.

After a day with a bad back and an upset stomach I had gotten to feeling better over dinner and wanted to get out, off the ship, so I got in the 90 person tender with three crew on shore leave and we motored through the darkness to a marina filled with sea-going yachts. This was Flamenco Island.

I wandered around for a bit, looking at mostly closed shops, stopping at the gelateria for some dulce eh luche ice cream ($2.50. I gave the clerk $3.00 American and got .50 change. Panama has no paper money, but has permission from the US treasury to use American. The balboas, the Panamanian currency, are strictly coins, including one dollar coin that looks the loon of Canada.)

Eager to spend some money I strolled into a small souvenir shop and began to look at colorful mugs, postcards, t-shirts, a few non-descript molas and Panama hats. I associate Panama hats with the international man of mystery so I bought one. Hey, we all have our fantasies.

Turns out the mystery is why I paid $10.00 more for it that Kate paid for a comparable one from a street vendor. Still, I got mine first.

This small junket began to pale so I went down a slick aluminum gangway, got back in the tender and returned to the Veendam, resplendent in lights with a long lit string from bow to stern outlining the ships silhouette. The tender rides low in the water and I sat near an open door watching the water pulse and curl and flow as we passed through it. Such a pliable and flexible medium, water. Lots of resistance, but not too much, different than trying to drive through rock or mud, it shapes the experience we can have of it. Alan Watt refers to Taoism as the Watercourse Way and it makes sense the more I experience the ocean.

Fall Waning Autumn Moon

At 4:30 am the Veendam had a small tug pushing it toward the south to better position it for entering the Gatun Locks. An upside down sliver moon hung in the sky and the smells of a large oil refinery floated on deck from a brightly lit facility on the north shore of the canal’s entrance.

Out in the ocean, behind us, were numerous ships, all brightly lit, all waiting for their turn in the long canal connecting the Atlantic basin and the Pacific.

Lockmeister Odegard would find this a fascinating journey through the Mother of All Locks. The Gatun can take ships up to 996 feet long and 110 feet wide. Even those generous dimensions long past feel outside the girth and length of the true ocean going monsters, mostly oil tankers, built so big that it still made economic sense to round Cape Horn. That problem with the Canal has a remedy underway, largely financed by the Chinese I think. It will build a third set of locks with capacity to handle these huge super ships on their journey from the oil fields of the Middle East to the oil hungry nations on the Pacific Rim.

The day is warm, though not so warm as the first time Kate and I made this journey. Starboard, our side, has the good fortune of facing north as we sail east to west, so our deck chairs have good shade.

Right now we are in Lake Gatun, the big artificial lake that provides the 51 million gallons of fresh water needed to step a ship up or down through the massive locks. These locks still the same massive doors and valves put in place in the early twentieth century.

Panama, our literature suggests, often gets overlooked by eco-tourists focused on Costa Rica just to the north, yet has as much interesting flora and fauna, more in the Darien Wilderness which begins just south of the Canal Zone.

The full transit of the canal will take us until 7:00 pm tonight after which we dock not far away in Fuerte Amador where we remain for day.

Odd to consider, but on this now week plus a day journey Kate and I have only visited one new place, Santa Marta. At Fuerte Amado and beyond, however, we will be always be in new cities, new countries, new geography.

Just now, at 11:45 we’re headed into one of two narrow passages. The Galliard Cut, one of the two, was the chief obstacle to completion of the Canal. It contained so much rock that reducing it to rubble and moving it out of the way created problems for the engineers.

Mostly the passage way has no other ships in sight except for small craft used by employees of the Canal or the occasional fishermen. Other wise we sail between lands heavily forested, the wild having recovered the battered geography left after the Canal’s creation.

Fall Waning Autumn Moon

The Cuna indians. Native to the San Blas Islands for thousands of years, the 8,000 Cuna live in small villages on islands that have little or no open space. The palm frond thatched roofs cover small, 18×20 dirt floor huts with simple furniture and they form a tight grouping of buildings with wider paths, maybe 10 feet running parallel to the dock for cruise ship tenders and narrower ones, perhaps 4 feet between groups of huts.

The Cuna women wear colorful mola skirts and thin blouses. The older women have gold nose rings with a tattooed line up the nose while the younger women retain the tattoo but seem to have forgone the nose rings. The women make the molas, a primary tourist attraction traditionally done in abstract patterns, but now done in contemporary themes as well. These range from Santa Claus to Jesus Christ, automobiles to fish, birds and monkeys all in bright colors.

The women also visit the mainland every day to gather fresh water. The men hunt on the nearby mainland, the Caribbean side of the famously dense Darrien Wilderness, the only remaining gap in the Pan American Highway, fish and gather other seafood like crabs and lobsters and conch.

Kate and I visited, at the end of our time on the island, a Cuna (Kuna) museum run by a Mr. Davies, a Cuna man who had learned English in Panama City. This is a very modest affair consisting of a single room, dirt floor with various displays on the walls, including the large skulls of several giant tapirs killed in the mountains on the mainland.

Mr. Davies brought the museum to life with his refreshingly uncanned presentation. This is a guy who wanted to share his culture. Among the many very interesting things he told us, four of us were in the museum, it cost $5.00’s, was the role of the hammock in their religion and in their daily life. The mother and father gods came down to earth with a hammock which they gave to the Cuna people. In religious ceremonies there are always two hammocks, one for the father God and one for the Mother God, and the priest sits in one of them and sings the ritual songs.

Cuna are born in hammocks, get married in hammocks, sleep in hammocks and are buried in them. Mr. Davies showed us a mock up of a grave which has a hammock slung over the material items representing the individuals earthly occupation. The deceased is placed in the hammock, the mourners come, look down in the grave and say their good-byes then the grave is covered with banana stalks so the deceased can no longer be seen.

They also fought a revolution in 1925 against the Panamanian national police. “Many police died, many Cuna died,” Mr. Davies said. In the end the Cuna were left alone as an autonomous region, responsible for their own affairs, but still part of the nation.

Cuna culture and practices are intact, continuous with their sacred past.

Cuna men and women are short by American standards, under 5 feet. The men have well-developed muscles and good muscle tone, in part at least from paddling their dug-out canoes in the Caribbean.

These kind of encounters always leave me feeling conflicted, but Mr. Davies helped me. The Father God made us all and he made the tourists to come to the islands and share their money with the Cuna. Sharing is an important part of Cuna culture. So much so that their traditional police take responsibility for the homeless and the destitute, enforcing sharing to see that their needs are met.

A less happy part of this encounter began early with Cuna men and teen-aged boys paddling out to the Veendam in their canoes. We knew they were here because we heard them shouting. I went outside and heard the cries of money, money, money coming up from the ocean below. Passengers throw down quarters and the men and boys dive for them as they float toward the bottom. When I can edit my pictures I will post photos showing this event.

It saddened me to realize that a primary word in our English, learned by the Cuna, was money. On the island we visited, another two words were common, “One dollar.” This was the price for taking a photograph of a cute kid, for a child’s school coloring project or small molas.

We were taken to and from the island in the tenders I mentioned in the earlier post.

On a different note, the captain came on the loudspeaker during dinner and said, “You may have noticed we are not moving. We are having trouble weighing our anchor.” An electrical problem of some kind. Soon fixed and we were underway for a short trip to the Caribbean entrance to the Panama Canal.

More tomorrow as we transit the Canal, Kate and I for the second time.

Fall Waning Autumn Moon

We have come 249 nautical miles from Santa Marta to the archipelago of San Blas islands, a coastal string of over 365 islands, mostly small, off the coast of Panama. Our cabin, it turns out, sits right below the tenders which will ferry passengers from the Veendam to one of the islands where Cuna women will gather to sell the colorful molas. Kate purchased a batch of these the last time we were here and has talked about using them as the basis for a quilt.

With my delicate stomach I will take a meclazine tablet or two before we head off, sometime after lunch. Not sure whether I will get my sea legs or not. I started reading the Voyage of the Beagle yesterday in which Darwin referred to the trip as a “continual puke.” Yecchhh.

I held a skein of alpaca wool for Kate as she made it into a ball. This amused many women who remembered doing that long ago. It also amused many men, several of whom commented, “Well, you’re good for something!”

As we passed many small islands on our way here, several of the groups of islands had large motor and sail boats anchored on their leeward side. These islands were far too small to inhabit though many of them had sand beaches. At least, it looked like they did.

I’ve been expecting a sort of creative bump,.a desire to start writing some fiction or some non-fiction, but nothing yet. That usually requires a good stretch of nothing and with meals, naps and shore excursions we’ve been active.

Today we’ve been away for a full week. Ship board life has a certain rhythm punctuated by meals. And wrestling with the computer.

Fall Waning Autumn Moon

Early this morning we docked at this northern port, Santa Marta, Colombia. The University of the North has a location just off the plaza almas, across from the cathedral. Coming from a northern state, it’s a bit difficult to reconcile the steamy climate, the lush Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains and the Caribbean port with the north, but there you are. We’re in a new location and north means warmer, as does port city on this continent with the Andes.

We took a shuttle through the port, an industrial port loaded with Ford Fusions, piping, Kenworth trucks, BMW’s, a small hill of white bags marked ammonium nitrate and various other items of foreign trade, to the office center for the port. The port offices were two blocks from the colonial part of Santa Marta, the place I wanted to see, so we had to take no taxis, or secure any special tour.

An odd feeling. When we walked into the main part of this old section of Santa Marta, we found ourselves among street vendors, whitewashed churches, references to Simon Bolivar, a population with the multiple ethnic origins common in South America: mainly various indian groups, african and Spanish, plus combinations of all three.

A part of me relaxed immediately, so happy was I to be in a place where I was a foreigner. Not sure what this is, exactly, but it seems to be about otherness, wanting to experience myself as other. It also relates to a need to know, to concretely know, that other people live their lives, their vida contidiana, their daily lives, in languages, locations, and cultures radically different from my own. Why this is so I cannot say.

Colombians come here for vacation now, though just ten years or so ago no one come here because the FARC and other revolutionaries had this region locked up.

The Woollies who read this will recall the movie Mark O. brought to a retreat, the one about the Kogi, the elder brothers of humanity. This is their home Department and they live now not far from here by miles, but quite a difficult journey up the rugged Sierra Nevadas which are, with a 19er, the highest coastal mountain range in the world.

The Museo del Oro here has many examples of Kogi gold work and recounts their lives, showing examples of the conical thatched huts we saw in the movie.

Street vendors whacked the top off coconuts for customers, sold hard liquor from a metal stand, offered many religious statues, lottery tickets, sweets and various fruits, vegetables and food cooked in bready pouches.

Santa Marta is a small port city, an old city, the first established by the Spanish in Colombia. Simon Bolivar died here, of tuberculosis at the age of 47, a dejected man. His body was in a crypt in the Cathedral until it was removed to his birthplace in Venezuela.

This is a charming place. The Sierra Nevada’s rise behind it, green as the mountains in Hawai’i. It seems relaxed, and similar in feel to Merida in the Yucatan. I could spend a week or so here, maybe more, exploring the Tairona National Park, visiting the beaches and getting to know the city. Another time.

Fall Waning Autumn Moon

NB  internet is slow onboard and expensive.  I’m dispensing with titles and have no capacity to edit photos right now.

Card on the pillow last night: a gentle reminder that the ship’s clocks will be set BACK an hour at 2 am. We’ve sailed west enough now to reenter the Central Time Zone. I have no idea why it was a gentle reminder? Is there a harsh one coming if we don’t comply? Odd.

Each night our cabin steward folds a towel into an animal shape complete with paper eyes. I’m not sure why he does this. I do like the piece of chocolate.

This morning we listened to a briefing on ports and excursions available through Valparaiso, Chile. One I”m looking forward to especially is the Cerro Tololo observatory, one of many in the Andes in Chile.

Today the ocean, rather the Caribbean Sea, has little surface disturbance, gentle ripples as far as the earth’s curvature. A light breeze blows along the deck, a light slight scent of salty water and a warm, not hot temperature makes it a perfect time for sitting in our deck chairs, reading, writing, relaxing. Kate’s knitting, a scarf for me for the cooler parts of our trip.

As we spend more time out here, certain people show up regularly, deck walkers doing a series of laps around the ¼ mile deck. Some walk with sneakers, arms pumping, folks who walk regularly elsewhere, others walk with a grim look as if their doctors have said, “Walk. You have to at leasts walk.” And so they do.

There’s the Australian couple, he in black and she in mauve, who walk at a brisk pace, sometimes doing multiple turns, perhaps 8. An older woman, dressed in a nice blouse, expensive sun glasses, wind pants and sneakers strides along a happy look on her face. A few walk at a pace that could be barely be called moving, strides so slow and deliberate that each movement seems considered.

I do my own walking, too, at a much faster pace than any of these, but early in the day, 6 laps this morning, 8 each day.

I’m writing this sitting on one of our deck chairs, the sound of the ocean laps against the hull, the thrum of the Veendam’s huge engines a constant low-pitched noise. Not a bad way to spend a morning.

Fall Waning Autumn Moon

All day Cuba has been on starboard and our cabin, also starboard, has made it easy to track its presence. In perhaps another 2-3 hours we will round the eastern tip of Cuba, sailing to the west of god forgotten Haiti and not far from Guantanamo. It’s a trifecta. An island so close to our shores made invisible not by stealth technology or magic, but by political decree. A quasi-military detention camp sequestered on a piece of land without sovereignty, a place where we store our most feared enemies, a place made impenetrable by the justly famous legal system for which we claim to fight. A nation so benighted and dismal that its catastrophe is a global scandal faces them both.

All three of these miseries lie well within the US sphere of influence, a doctrine announced by President Monroe, a founder become the nation’s chief executive officer. We claim the right to interfere—think Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, even Cuba during the Spanish American War, Panama—but not the right to heal. Cuba’s economy could be healed by trade with the US. Guantanamo could be healed by habeas corpus, by the very rule of law we abrogate there. Haiti could be healed by careful and long term support, foreign aid. Remember foreign aid?

I know people who have been to all three, I have not, but the time for action for all three is long past overdue. These are thoughts I had sitting on the deck tonight, watching the lights of Cuba twinkle ashore.

Aside from these solemn and gloomy reflections, perhaps unvacationlike, but there nonetheless, Kate and I had our first formal evening. I put on a blue dress shirt, a silk dragon tie, a navy blazer and gray flannels slacks. Kate made herself up with a deft hand, put on a silk blouse given to her by sister Mary, black pants and pointy shoes. We walked up through the casino, strategically located on the way to the Rotterdam dining room (the other path takes you past a long jewelry store), heading in next to many men wearing tuxedo’s and ladies in formal evening wear. Not my favorite scene, but there you are.

Afterward, we came back to the cabin, changed out of the dress clothes and sat down to read, Kate on the bed and me out on the deck watching Cuba.

One more day at sea then we hit Santa Marta. I’m looking forward to getting off the ship since we’ve been on board since October 16^th and will be again tomorrow. It’s fun, but I want to see something different now.

Fall Waning Autumn Moon

The day has slipped by, Cuba still lies off to starboard, now very visible as we come close to Puerto Perde. We had lunch on the Lido deck, an elaborate cafeteria with many choices ranging from starters to Asian, Italian and meat eater entrees. The Lido is on the famous lounging beach in Venice, but I don’t know the connection between the cafeteria style food and the Lido since I’ve not been there. In Venice we looked at Cathedrals, bridges, the Piazza San Marco, but never made it to the beaches.

I spoke with Benjamin, the travel consultant, who says for $5 we can get a ride into downtown Santa Marta’s colonial district and, of course, its renaissance style cathedral.

Anyone who has toured Europe has probably seen more cathedrals than necessary, but, who knows? Maybe this is the one with the can’t miss interior. Could happen, right?

Having the only walk around deck right outside our room has made staying on my exercise regimen easy, though I’ve yet to start doing my tai chi. Maybe later today.

We have come 400 nautical miles from Port Everglades now, traveling around 18 knots on a course of 115 degrees, ese.

Our next three stops Santa Marta, Colombia, San Blas Islands and Fuerte Amador, Panama, on the Pacific side of the Panama Canal, now show up on the map projected on our flat screen TV. It gives us our current position, shows maps at various close ups, our course, our speed, distance to the next port and current winds complete with the Beaufort scale. I love this because I like knowing where I am and how fast we’re going.

On each journey I take maps. This time I have a continental map of South America and a map of Patagonia as a whole plus a map of the Chilean fjords. On these maps I’ll mark the day and time we visited the place, perhaps with a note. I have these maps for several places we’ve been and when we go back I find them very helpful. They are also a cartographic diary of our travels.

Fall Waning Autumn Moon

A warm morning, sitting on the deck chair, watching Cuba roll by to the south/ Clumps of trees, sandy beaches and a few antenna installations mark this place, a testimony ot the overhang of the cold war. If it were not communist, this ship would stop in Havanna. Odd and more alluring as a result, the island seems a forbidden oasis of, what? Egalitarian socialism? Since we’re passing along its length, it will be in view a good while.

We have come approximately 300 nautical miles from Ft. Lauderdale’s Port Everglade. The night, a calm one, unlike the night before, lent itself to a gentle rocking and good sleeping. I checked the national hurricane center and there are no storms of consequence in the western Caribbean Sea.

Kate and I have fallen into a relaxed mode, much like independent living with meals as anchor points for the day, punctuated with naps, reading and the occasional onboard activity. This afternoon is the first high tea, for example, at 3:00 pm. It is also the first formal night, so I’ll don my navy blazer and put on a tie for the first time in years. It’s like being pretend grown-ups.

As an Inca Discovery cruise, you’d expect my attention to be on antiquities in South America, yet I’ve narrowed my main interest to the ocean itself, the constant and most occult portion of the trip. We sail over sea mounts, deep valleys, even canyons. Whales, sharks, crustacean, jelly fish and barracuda swim below us in oceans of kelp. But we cannot see them. The visible ocean extends a blue ripply vastnness to the north, the south, the east and the west, a wavy surface that hides the depths and the ocean life.

Fall Waning Autumn Moon

58 nautical miles south of Ft. Lauderdale, headed for Cuba and the strait between Cuba and Hispanola. Today was a quiet, uneventful day thanks to the high winds, including tornadoes, that struck the Everglades.

Uneventful until 800 more folks joined us at Port Everglades. 400 of us boarded in NYC, but the bulk of the folks came through Florida. A lot of new folks, in particular Marsha and Jerry, retired New Yorkers, who joined Maurine, Kate and me at table 31. Marsha taught school in NYC for thirty years and Jerry had a legal practice on Long Island then got involved in real estate in southern California.

Interesting, literate people. That fills our dinner table, 5 of us at a table for 6. Tonight we watched Port Everglades and the southern Florida coast slide away as we ate and talked. Jerry recommended another naval history series by Alexander Kent. I’m going to check it out.

The promenade deck, our deck, has had few people on it, so I did some exercise tonight. Tomorrow and the next day are at sea as we make our way 1200 miles south to Santa Marta, Colombia. Santa Marta made Wired magazine last month as the site of an international coffee tasting competition. It is where Simon Bolivar died and was buried. We’ll find out more about in a couple of days.

With Santa Marta the South American portion of our journey gets underway, not to end until we leave the Rio Airport the day before Thanksgiving.

Fall Waning Autumn Moon  October 20th  10 am

A warm morning, sitting on the deck chair, watching Cuba roll by to the south/ Clumps of trees, sandy beaches and a few antenna installations mark this place, a testimony ot the overhang of the cold war. If it were not communist, this ship would stop in Havanna. Odd and more alluring as a result, the island seems a forbidden oasis of, what? Egalitarian socialism? Since we’re passing along its length, it will be in view a good while.

We have come approximately 300 nautical miles from Ft. Lauderdale’s Port Everglade. The night, a calm one, unlike the night before, lent itself to a gentle rocking and good sleeping. I checked the national hurricane center and there are no storms of consequence in the western Caribbean Sea.

Kate and I have fallen into a relaxed mode, much like independent living with meals as anchor points for the day, punctuated with naps, reading and the occasional onboard activity. This afternoon is the first high tea, for example, at 3:00 pm. It is also the first formal night, so I’ll don my navy blazer and put on a tie for the first time in years. It’s like being pretend grown-ups.

As an Inca Discovery cruise, you’d expect my attention to be on antiquities in South America, yet I’ve narrowed my main interest to the ocean itself, the constant and most occult portion of the trip. We sail over sea mounts, deep valleys, even canyons. Whales, sharks, crustacean, jelly fish and barracuda swim below us in oceans of kelp. But we cannot see them. The visible ocean extends a blue ripply vastnness to the north, the south, the east and the west, a wavy surface that hides the depths and the ocean life.