Inversely Proportional Tenacity

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Luckily Jeremy and I have both spent time in Central America before; our expedited pace is still painful, but somehow tolerable. Even going fast, we were in Panama long enough for both a good thing and a bad thing to happen. We visited the canal, this was good. I flipped my flop in a poop pile –bad. In the spirit of optimism i´ll elaborate only on the former event.
I didn´t know before, but the canal isn´t flat. A series of locks raise the boats up to a fresh water lake, and then lower them on the other side -so the boats actually go over a hill. The average freighter pays $250,000 for passing through, although Richard Halliburton paid only 36 cents. He swam.

To build the canal they moved enough dirt to build a wall, the size of the Great one our Oriental friends have, from San Fransisco to New York City. Woodrow Wilson is credited with removing the last bit of dirt that finally united water from both ends. He did so from Washington with the click of a telegraph that had
been wired to a dynamite charge.
We were delivered in Panama by ¨Fritz the Cat.¨ Fritz is a former restaurant owner from Vienna, the cat is his 59ft catamaran. We sailed five days with Fritz, from Columbia to Panama, exploring the San Blas Islands en route. The San Blas are home to the indiginous Kuna people who, to this day, maintain they´re own
sovereignty, culture, and language. I got a kick out of meeting people who, though they live a few miles from the mainland, don´t speak Spanish.

Fritz recently bought two new solar panels for the cat. He decided to give his older panels to Edwino, a Kuna man who lives with his wife and daughter on an island about the size of your backyard. We went with Fritz in the dingy to meet Edwino´s family and to help wire up the solar panels. I failed to impress Edwino with my spear fishing skills, but I did impress him with my Polaroid camera. I´ve been lugging the camera all the way from the end of the earth, but the Kuna made it worth it. The Edwino´s now have two things they´ve never had before, a family picture and light by night.

Nicaraguan beaches are spectacular, but don’t take my Word for it, watch the next Survivor. They were filming just around the point from where we were surfing. When it comes to surfing my tenacity is inversely proportional to the amount of skin that friction has robbed from my nipples. When I ran out of skin, I snuck through the jungle to spy on the Survivors. I´ve always wondered if survivor sets are as desolate as they appear on TV. In this case it was possible to buy a sandwich and a soda ten minutes away from the set. I reckon the winner will be the guy who sets up a sandwich/soda cartel through which he controls the other players.

Jeremy and I have argued heatedly twice so far on this trip. We decided to separate for a while. The fact that we argued has nothing to do with the fact that we´ve separated,I don´t even know how they got in the same paragraph, but I may as well elaborate. We argued once about whether or not children should be spanked, and once about when to apply Newton´s second law of motion. I don´t recall any of our discussions about where to go or what to do ever becoming heated. I rather like traveling with Jeremy and look forward to meeting up with him in California in a couple of weeks. In the mean time we´ve got different priorities, and no doubt it will be interesting to fly –figuratively of course- solo for a while.