TravellingStrom

Saturday – Miriadiadup, San Blas Islands, Panama

Another one bites the dust, no, not a song from Queen, another freakin camera !!!!!!

Another damp day of sailing this morning, we seem to be getting the worst weather but once again we did not have a long journey today, only a few hours across the passage and in mostly sheltered waters to another Island where we were to meet a local artist called Prado, we left 1 and arrived at 2. Some of the other passengers seemed to be feeling a lot better and partook of a few beers 🙂

About 2 hours later we arrived at an Island I have no name for(Miriadiadup thanks Bruce), but will find out and once again greeted by some locals. This Island only has about 2 families on it and they stay here for 6 months at a time before changing Islands.

So, the whole day was once again to be spent snorkelling, kayaking and being ashore, but Bruce said we would eat lunch here but have dinner on board, which suited everyone as yesterday was a long day. Once again I spent a long time in the water, but this time I wore a t-shirt to block the sun, it did not help much and I was soon as red as a beetroot. 😦 It was also once again nice coral but a lot of it was chopped up and the fish were scarce, definitely not a conservation park anyway. It was fun in the sun and shade, lounging around doing whatever.

We were shown inside a typical cooking hut, when they catch fish here it is smoked dry straight away and can sometimes be hard as a rock, but it will last a year or so this way and when added to a soup, it will rehydrate and is supposed to be good eating. Bruce told us we were having that day’s catch which was still fresh and not hard, this was going to be with coconut rice. Some of the fish under the leaves were so small they would be a waste of time eating and should have been thrown back for a year or so.

Val was busy chatting up one of the local women, meanwhile they had a cute parrot type bird which was quite happy to get fed coconut and hop on your finger 🙂

We had two lunches, the first was the normal ‘unidentified’ meat substitute, supposedly ham and chook, but I have my doubts and the second lunch was the rice and fish, both were very welcome and the fish tasted fine, the rice excellent. Once again with fish I have been spoilt, once you have eaten coral trout and red emperor etc anything else is bait 😉

We had already met this “chap” called Prado and I use the quotes on purpose. Apparently, the Kuna people have no bias when it comes to what you want to do, some blokes grow up and be fishers while the women stay and do the artist work, but quite often at an early age, a boy may be more interested in the artistry side of things and are respected. Prado is one of these and after looking at all the work he does he certainly has talent. Apparently he dreams what he is going to produce, these panels are called Molas and looked like he has colourful dreams 🙂

It was after this we found out that what we had been thinking was correct, he is gay and went and dressed up with makeup and stuffed bra to prove it. No wonder Bruce was having a cackle the other day when he said I was going to love meeting his m8 Prado!

Now was time for the 2nd lunch, this is where some people were grossed out especially the princess Tami, what was worse was Val taking the heads and eating the eyeballs, then breaking the skulls open and eating the brain!! It even gave me a shudder to see that, brrrr!

One final shot of Prado before some of us who were a tad bored went back to the boat. During this trip in the zodiac, my camera, in a plastic bag ended up in the water in the zodiac, the bag had a hole in it and the camera was soaked 😦 I dried it out the best I could and put the battery on charge, the spare battery was lost either on the beach or in the zodiac bilge somewhere. I will try and see whether it starts later on when it is dry. I hung it in the airing closet,(the engine room) overnight.

So, from now on, no more pictures from yours truly, I am hoping to get some from other people, but who knows when! The rest of the arvo was spent beering up and trying to stay out of the sun, I had been burnt again and was now lobster colour and it hurt as well. Obviously my Ponty shirt is not SPF30, so that is a lesson learnt! A few rums after dinner and this evening I claimed a bench on the back deck with sheets, that way I could stay cool and get some sleep, even if I did snore a tad loud.

Tomorrow was going to be the end of our sojourn here amongst the Islands(yay) now we were going to run for 36 hours straight across the gulf to Cartegena which meant we had an early start at 5am and would stand watches tomorrow night while the skipper grabbed some shut eye, that should be fun 🙂

Day 0 miles and 0 km
Trip – 43,486 miles and 69,984 km

Salud
TravellingStrom

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