After a few more days in the Holandés, during which I speared my first two fish (a cero mackerel and a tiger grouper) with my new-to-me pole spear, we sailed over to the Lemon Cays. With the wind howling and at least occasional sunshine, we have been keeping our batteries entirely topped off from alternate energy. And since we have a diesel water heater, we have absolutely no excuse to run the engine. It's nice to be able to sail even the short distances between anchorages.
As usual, shortly after we dropped anchor we were visited by several canoes of mola-selling Kuna, even though there is no village nearby, just individual huts on some of the islands. I think that if we had bought just one mola from each canoe (not each woman!) that visited us, we would have spent $500 or more over the past 6 weeks! As it is, we have a small collection, ranging from a few small $1 patches to a large $20 panel.
Molas are part of the traditional dress of Kuna women, and just about every Kuna woman makes and sells molas. However, in the Lemons we were visited by a transvestite male "master mola maker" named Lisa. He (or maybe she -- I'm not sure of the etiquette here) was by no means the first Kuna transvestite we have seen. In nearly every village there are men who affect an effeminate manner, who make and sell molas rather than farm and fish. We assume they are homosexual, and we did see one obvious couple in Caledonia, an extremely traditional village. None (that we saw) dress in traditional Kuna women's clothes, but most wear jeans and women's style tank tops or t-shirts, and earrings and occasionally rouge (although we have seen a few "traditional" men also wearing rouge). Many are locally famous mola craftsmen. From all indications, they are fully accepted within the culture.
Another unusual type of Kuna we have seen frequently is the albino. Again, nearly every village seems to have at least one, and among a dark-skinned and dark-haired people they are very obvious. It must be awfully tough to live in the tropics with skin that sunburns instantly. At least the San Blas isn't a particularly sunny place. It's the dry season now, and although we only get 37 drops of rain each night (well after midnight, waking us up, of course) it's cloudy much of the day. Our deck has been salty ever since we left Cartagena, six weeks ago.
Yes, we've been in Panama for nearly six weeks. That makes us a bit overdue in checking in, but yesterday we legally and officially entered the country. We checked in at Porvenir, which is also the administrative capital of the Kuna Yala (the Kuna autonomous region of the country -- basically, the San Blas Islands and nearby coastal areas), and which has just this year been made an official port of entry for Panama. The Kuna extract an extra $30 or so in fees, compared to checking in at Colon, but it's one-stop shopping rather than a trek to various offices, and we were told that the Kuna official who handles yacht check-ins is easy-going and not overly bureaucratic. This appealed to us, since we were a little worried that the officials might be concerned that we checked out of Colombia with three people on board, and were checking in to Panama with only two. (Our friend Kevin, who flew to Cartagena to join us for two weeks, took a small plane out from one of the Kuna villages in the San Blas.) But the official gave only a cursory glance to our Colombian exit papers, and even though we actually arrived in Panama six weeks ago, he started the clock on our regulation three-month visa on the day we checked in.
Despite being the administrative center of the San Blas, Porvenir
doesn't have much on it. No village, just a string of handicrafts
booths (probably occupied when cruise ships visit, but empty when we
were there), a few hotels, a government building, and a paved
airstrip. The small control tower next to the airstrip, at the time
we visited, had a four-seater Cessna picturesquely wrecked into its
side. The government building flies not the Panama flag, but the red
and yellow Kuna flag, which always grates on us a little because its
main design element is a big red swastika. (We have seen a few molas
and beaded bracelets for sale with swastika designs. I imagine the
Kuna just think of it as their symbol, and have no idea why they
don't sell well to yachties.)
The anchorage at Porvenir was rolly, so after we checked in we sailed over to Chichime, a group of islands at the very edge of the archipelago. It's a good place to leave from early in the morning for the 50+ mile trip to Portobelo, and we planned to leave today. Well, plans change. The wind howled all night, and we didn't get much sleep (not because of the wind -- maybe it was because we hadn't gotten our usual snorkeling exercise), and when I woke up at 6:45 and saw a steady 22 on the anemometer, I decided we'd wait and see if tomorrow was any better. I crawled back in, told Britt (who was fuzzily waking up) to go back to sleep, which he happily did, and we both slept until after 9.
It turned out to be a good thing that we didn't go, because after breakfast, when I opened the "coffin" -- the big storage area under our bed -- to move some beer to the fridge, I found a wet and slimy mess. In the six weeks since we left Cartagena, the last time we opened the coffin, our beer and soda cans had shifted and rubbed against each other enough to rupture more than a dozen cans. The liquid had gotten on some towels we were using as padding, and other things stored nearby, and a truly disgusting green slimy mold had spread and flourished. The resulting clean-up job took us all day, and it used a good deal of the water we'd been "banking" for the dirty harbor of Colon. The moral of the story, I guess, is that we should have been drinking more of our beer.
Tomorrow, if the wind cooperates, and we don't have any other small domestic crises, we will sail to Portobelo.
