Tuesday 30 July - Saturday 3 August

Sailing San Blas and beyond

Silvia, our host at Hostel Wunderbar, dropped us off at Turtle Cay where the SS Wildcard was moored. The boat had been overbooked, due to a miscommunication between Silvia and Captain John who thought that we were a no-show...this was most annoying considering we'd booked and paid a $200 deposit three weeks earlier which Silvia was pocketing and we'd arrived a day earlier in Puerto Lindo to ensure our spots on the boat. So this left us in separate bunkbeds with the two Irish chaps who'd begged to get on our boat at the last minute, having to sleep on the floor for the 5-day trip. Luckily the boat was chock-a-block full of really cool people who all got on really well with each other, which made for a fun and drunken trip. The first three days were pure bliss island hopping around San Blas with its white sandy beaches and crystal blue waters. The rum was flowing and we enjoyed hours of snorkelling (saw eagle rays, lion fish, morays and cuttle fish), raiding coconut palms for our rum mixers, suntanning, bonfires, sing-a-longs while Mike played his guitar, gorging on delicious food our captain whipped up in the tiny kitchen for 20 people at a time including fresh lobster and king crab caught that day and visiting the Kuna people on one of the many islands dotted around San Blas. The last two days were spent extremely seasick, rocking to and fro in my bunkbed whilst we made the choppy ocean crossing to Colombia. I've never been so glad to see dry land as the skyscrapers of Cartagena loomed in the distance. It took just as long, five days, for me to get my land legs back...I concluded that this was the first and last boat trip across any body of water I was going to take ever again. It was both heaven and hell for me, and once in my lifetime is more than enough. The captain said that, that was a fairly calm crossing with 1-2m swells, as compared with previous crossings with 3-4m swells. Say no more.