“Paradise. We all want to go to paradise, right? Paradise means different paradises to different people – we all have our own personal view of paradise because paradise most often resides inside our head. Panama’s San Blas islands might be described as paradise – the sort of tropical island paradise we see in pages of glossy print so it’s fixed in our minds that a tropical island is where we want to be. To ourselves, Green Island was just a convenient place to shelter from howling thirty-knot winds, until we could launch ourselves from behind paradise into the towering sea that everyone warned us would kick our backsides. When we left, we got hammered – crawling into Cartagena with shredded sails and a broken shackle, our exhaustion a testament to what real paradise is.”

When we left Shelter Bay in mid-January we were glad to be gone. Gone from Panama, nearly two years in the country we first planned to get through in less than two months. We had covid to thank for this, we did not suspect what lay ahead when we crossed the border from Costa Rica having never heard of this virus that was festering inside a bat cave in China.

Now we wanted to move on, we wanted to get out of Panama, we wanted to get away from all the bad memories of covid. We thought we might head south, through the San Blas, to South America…

Continue reading “Panama to Colombia” →