A Month in Hawai'i

"We just spent a month in Hawai'i," said Alisa. "I think we'll look back at that and be blown away."

And so it is with this nautical existence of ours.

I tend to cast a gimlet eye on sailors' easy talk about "freedom".

But having discretionary time in such quantities that we can spend a month in a place like Kona, meeting the locals and getting a taste of the life, while we're also working on making little contributions to our understanding of the North Pacific (me), or making very big contributions to the education of the next generation (Alisa)...well. That's the thing right there, isn't it?

But this time in Hawai'i has come to an end. Elias has raised the Blue Peter (below), that age-old signal of a ship about to put to sea.

And...I'm feeling the moment. Tomorrow when we wake, we will set sail for Alaska.

This picture and and the one at the top - our good friend Jamie, a long-time Kona connoisseur, turned us onto this great walk south from Honokohau Harbor. It was good fun to discover something like this just off the boat at the very end of our stay.

What I Like

That's what I like. Galactic is just to the right of the guard tower

Panama, rather than being the between-the-oceans transit lounge that I was expecting, has turned out to be a fantastic destination on its own terms, regardless of our business with the Canal.

A highlight for our crew of wandering biologists has been the biodiversity. More bird species have been recorded in this little country than have been recorded in all of the US and Canada combined.

As for the people part of travel...I find that I am getting to be more and more like our friend Richard, on the indefatigable yacht Thélème, whom we met all these years ago. Richard, who has been sailing much longer than we have, once explained to me that he has reached the point where, if given the choice between two anchorages, one in front of a village and another off by itself, he inevitably finds himself gravitating towards the lonely anchorage.

Portobelo and the lay of the land

And so it has become with me. As a case in point, I offer up the delightful Caribbean port of Portobelo.

The place is filthy with history. Sir Francis Drake was reportedly buried at sea just off the harbor, and the history only ramps up from there.

Portobelo today is a fairly quiet roadside town, come down quite a long ways from the years, centuries ago, when it was a terminus for the transshipment of the fruits of genocide.

The town is something of a backpacker destination, and has a very lively Carnival scene infused by the local Afro-Caribbean culture. There are two Spanish forts, long since abandoned, right in the town, and all sorts of little eateries for bored looking tourists.

And, from day one when we made our immigration formalities there, I would have happily not set foot in Portobelo the town ever again.

The other side

But the other side of the harbor, away from the town, was my very image of travel idyll.

Here it was possible to anchor just off of another derelict fort, this one a three-level affair with a large waterfront fort, a smaller one a hundred meters or so up the hill, and a third at the top of a short track through the jungle.

Ba-boom

 The area around the two lower forts has been cleared of trees, producing a wonderful forest-grassland ecotone that was a birder's dream. It was always possible at the end of a day of science work to nip over with a boy or two and spot a handful of new species.

And when there were other kids about for the junior Galactics to play with we would send the whole mob ashore to go nuts in the forts without the inconvenience of adults sticking up the works.

Just look at the top picture in this post - can you imagine a better setting for the 6 to 10 set to be left to their own devices?

Our great friend Diana gently, and rightly, pointed out to me that my recent anti-rally screed sounded suspiciously like the ravings of a grumpy old fart.

(But, Diana, they're doing it right now! The "Puddle Jump" rally is having a meeting today in Panama City. When did anyone ever dream of going to sea so that they could attend meetings? And now they'll go to this meeting, and then they'll hurry through the Tuamotus so they can make it to the staged cultural event in Moorea, all the while ensuring that they travel half the world round without leaving the bubble of people very much like themselves.)

So yes, you're right, Diana. Grumpy old fart status attained.

And so it is, perhaps, with the people side of travel.

I still love meeting people, and various yachties remain some of the most remarkable people I have ever met. And at times in the past we have gone to great lengths to achieve friendship across cultural and linguistic barriers, with extraordinarily wonderful results.

But our affairs with town life in a place like Panama can be fairly transactional, and the trouble of getting past my awful Spanish to make a meaningful connection with a local can seem like more trouble than it is worth.

In contrast, a place like that abandoned fort on the other side of the harbor from Portobelo, redolent with history, offering reasonable solitude, and the delight of learning a new place through its avifauna...put me in a place like for a couple of hours with my family, and I am completely content with life.

The Kuna and the Snail

Yet another moment to remember when we're back in Alaska

The San Blas are an autonomous island group, nominally a part of Panama, that are the home of the Kuna Indians.

Isla Tiadup, San Blas

The San Blas are one of the marquee destinations in the world "cruising" scene. We have met very experienced yachties who compare the place favorably to the South Pacific, we know people who have spent months and months there on their boats, over multiple seasons.

El Caracol

We arrived in the San Blas  after our rollicking sail from Cuba. And the first thing we did was to reconnect with our friends on El Caracol, a Portuguese family whom the other Galactics had gotten to know in Curaçao last year while I was away in the US for my science work.

Galactic and El Caracol in the background, and the ships' people taking the waters

My immediate impression of the San Blas themselves was a little...blah. The anchorages were packed with yachts, many of them in the charter business, carrying cargoes of backpackers from island to island. Not so tranquilo.

Jorge and the Galactic dudes, post-spearfishing mission

Los Caracoles, though, proved to be a ton of fun. (El Caracol is "the snail" in English, of course. They have a blog, with out-of-this-world photography, at entretantoabordo.com.)

Here and below - Kuna garb

The progress of global cultural homogenization, written in the dress of three generations of Kuna

So we naturally fell into hanging out with El Caracol, and didn't engage with the San Blas, or the Kuna, much at all.

We bought a few of requisite molas, the traditional appliqué that adorns pillows in many a yacht we have been aboard.

The second anchorage that we visited with El Caracol was an informal Kuna resort of sorts, with accomodation provided for the backpackers who were sunning themselves on the beach.

People took selfies, and uploaded them to Facebook.

El Caracol was off to Colon to be measured for the Canal. They had heard rumors that in either February or March, they forgot which, the number of yachts seeking to transit would make it impossible to book the canal without an agent.

(There is a pronounced negativity trap in the western Caribbbean. More about that in a future post.)

Our minds were already on the blessed Pacific, our home ocean, and at this point, as much our home as any place on shore. More so.

After only five days, we decided to leave the San Blas and go look into our own arrangements for the Canal.

The San Blas clearly has enough admirers already, and we were happy enough not to add ourselves to the list.

Regret

Does anyone else see regret as an essential part of travel?

Our visit to Rapa, for me, will always be marked by a splendid chance that I had to be open-hearted and big-spirited, which in the one moment that I had to take it, I missed.

Alisa and I were looking through Cuba pictures yesterday, and we came across the ad for live music that she had photographed in Cienfuegosso that we could follow up. Somehow in our rush to get out of Cienfuegos before Christmas, we neglected to go check it out. Other things seemed more pressing at the time, but of course now I can't even remember what they were.

So, no music for us in Cuba, if you can believe it. I guess I'll have that to regret.

But I'll note that it's a very different regret, having gone somewhere and then thinking of something that you left undone while visiting, than the regret of never going at all.

In haste, with a good wind and our outward clearance about to arrive...

In Praise of the Off Season

Elias, steering a local boat on a daysail

Another traveling crew, who had left their boat at the False Bay Yacht Club while they were out of the country, returned last week. They're Australian, with kids, and inevitably in this small world of traveling boats we share mutual friends with them. Together we had a braai at the club and fell into the easy chatting of strangers who have a lot in common.

Alisa and I have been missing the company of other traveling boats - since we returned from our safari we've been the only traveling crew here. At this point in our sailing lives, we start to miss the company of the also-saltstained if we're away from it too long.

But! It has also struck us that there has been a tremendous upside to being in South Africa during the off season. If we were here during the peak season, when as many as 16 foreign boats might pull into Simon's Town on the same day, it would be very hard to break out of the yachtie bubble. All those fellow-travelers on the other foreign yachts would have so much in common with us, and if experience is any guide would be a generally excellent sample of humanity, that it would be tremendously easy to just hang out with them. And it would have been correspondingly difficult to break out of the bubble and get to know some locals.

And so, it has been our great good luck to be starved of the company of fellow travelers this season, and thereby to get the chance to find friendship among the locals.

It's true - there really are good people everywhere. And meeting some of them in a place where we've never been before, and getting a bit of the unique perspective on the human experiment that they each provide, is one of the things that keeps us traveling after all these years...

So now we'll leave South Africa (soon!) having added to my thumbnail description of what we've earned for ourselves over these nine years of travel. 

We know fantastic people around the world, I sometimes say to Alisa. And almost all of them we'll never see again.

Finally, after nine years of sailing, we were invited to tour a candy factory. 
Now we can safely retire from travel, knowing that the crew's fondest wish has been granted.

Here, and below - getting down with the locals

More soon...

Namibia Red

Our time in Kruger and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier parks were oddly private. The campgrounds aren't very interactive places, though of course we did meet some simpático souls.

But the actual event of each day in those parks, the driving around and looking at the wildlife, gives you a one-off experience. No one sees quite the same park as anyone else on any given day. Your own particular experience is driven by your own luck and patience.  In the case of the Galactics, our days tended to be heavy on the bird side of things, and our bouts of watching any particular group of animals, no matter how close or how spectacular, tended to be limited by Eric's six-year-old patience.

But then, after a few days of travel and sidestories here and there along the road, we arrived at our next marquee spot - Sossusvlei in the Namib-Naukluft National Park and Namib Desert.

Here, the experience is much more standardized. It's all about seeing the dunes, especially at sunrise or sunset. The place is a bucketlist kind of place that features on most foreigners' visits to Namibia.

We almost didn't go. We were trying not to do too many things in Namibia, and skipping Sossuvlei would save us a bushel of driving. (See six-year-old patience, above.)

But one of those simpático souls and an old Namibia hand besides told us that we would be absolutely mad to skip Sossusvlei. 

So we went. And we were very glad we did.

This next set of pics is from the morning when we drove out to the dunes at sunrise.  We parked the rig halfway along the four wheel drive track and walked up the nearest dune to that point, thereby missing the bucketlist crowd on the dune ridge at the end of the track.

A dune of our own. What bliss for the Galactics.

Of course, as these pictures were being taken, Alisa was warming up to the most spectacular bout of travel sickness visited on any of us during the whole month. She won't soon forget Sossusvlei.

Yes, we did bog the rig in the deep sand. My fault for losing speed while trying to shift up to second in four wheel low. That might have been the boys' very very viscerally favorite moment of the whole trip. "Dad bogged! Get out and help! It's like playing in the sand, except we have to do it!" A number of other rental rigs were bogged and left in place, their renters nowhere to be seen. We got great amusement out of that.

And I don't have the bird book handy to jog my memory on the identity of that passerine. But it is attempting to drink from the water tap on the truck. Life in the desert. The boys let a puddle run out on the sand and soon had a whole flock at their feet, drinking deep.

More soon.

Just Fun

The Galactics, watching wildlife

Well, courtesy of the patchy cell coverage that we have enjoyed in the out of the way places that we've been visiting, we're now nearly three weeks into our car camping trip through South Africa and Namibia and the chronicle of our doings in this space is hopelessly out of date.

I want to post this brief note to say that in spite of the inevitable hassles of putting in long days in the car with a six year old, and the occasional moments of travel uncertainty, we have been having almost nothing but fun, day after blessed day.

Now, having fun is about the only goal that some yachties need in their approach to sailing and life. (Thinking of you, Fatty Goodlander.)  But fun, to be perfectly honest, usually bores me to tears.  I outgrew fun, as a pursuit, right around the time that I flunked out of college for having too much of it. The idea of traveling the world in a small boat just to have fun seems completely ridiculous to me.  Why not stay home and watch You Tube? That would be more "fun".

I am not at all fit to keep their company, but the travelers who I look up to are the Ryszard Kapuścińskis of the world, the Bruce Chatwins and the Bill Tilmans.  I admire people who travel far  afield out of an overabundance of human spirit, who travel out of an incurable romance with the idea that whatever there is to figure out about life, it won't be figured out sitting at home.

What did any of those three men know about "fun"?

The land yacht

The braai

Nonetheless, that's what we've been doing on this trip - having fun. We've been hitting the national parks in a supremely comfortable camper and seeing the iconic wildlife of southern Africa. Every night we braai (barbecue) under the stars. The beer is cheap, the wine is cheap and good, and we can afford t-bone steaks. Both boys are mad for birding, and nothing makes them happier than spotting a species that is new to the family - in our lexicon, a "lifer". I have a good book to read, and just before this trip I finished up a huge push of science work.

So who wouldn't be having fun?

And, well. There might be something to be said for this fun stuff, after all. It's not like the gloomy and serious among us have all of the answers. So, for this month at least, I'll be satisfied with the company of my dear wife, and the hundred smiles that my boys grace each day with, and the supreme good fortune that sees us able to undertake this trip together.

But we take our fun seriously! Up at 0500, making sandwiches to see us through the day...

Eric and lion

All funned out

So, cross us off your things to worry about in the world.  We're having fun.

I'll post some specifics soon...