You cant cross the Panama - colombia border very easily over land, and rather than fly we decided to glam it up and take a yacht from Panama to Cartagena in Colombia, rossing through the Carribean sea and stopping off at the San Blas Islands on the way.

The San Blas Islands are an autonomous archipeligo of islands populated by the indigenous Kuna people. No-one else can buy land or live here, so they are completely protected and undeveloped. there are about 300 islands and only some of them are inhabited.

Our yacht sailed from the caribean pirate port of portobello in panama and stopped at several of the islands before we sailed the 2 days to Colombia. The sky was blue, the water was turquioise, absolute paradise.

We hung a hook off the back of the boat and Damian caught a tuna which we ate straight away with garlic butter and parsley (the boat captain was french!!). then we went and visited some of the islands which are basically desert islands with nothing but coconut trees and coral reefs. We snorkeled the reefs and looked at all the multicoloured fish (mmm garlic butter) and then wandered around the islands where I collected some amazing conch shells the size of my head. some had hermit crabs in so you had to watch out.

we sailed around the islands for a couple of days (I even spotted one that had just one tree on it, ship wreck survivor style...) and visited some of the Kuna villages. Kuna people are tiny, they wear gold piercings through the midle of their nose, black lines drawn from their forehead down their noses, and masses of beads all the way up from their ankles to their knees and up their forearms. They dont get a lot of visitors so they were very keen to sell us their ethnic woven tat and refused to have any pictures taken unless we bought some, so we now have some rather strange multicoloured traditional masks!

The rest of the journey was rather different. we sailed to Cartagena in the wring season - the seas are quite rough, with massive waves. We didnt realise that wed have to man the boat ourselves and Damo and I got a crash course in sailing the boat at an angle of 40º to the horizontal, smashing up and down on the huge waves. we sailed like this for 55 hours in shifts, during which time it was impossible to go below deck because of the sea sickness, and the movement of the ship made it really dangerous!! it was incredibly difficult to use the pumping toilet I´ll tell you, and leave it at that. Our captain, Davide, was an excellent cook and managed to cook some fantastic elaborate meals on a stove that swang about to remain horizontal, while all around him the knives and plates were falling off the shelves and people were vomitting (not us mind!) Sleeping was not an option, nether was washing (its hard to do anything at all apart from hanging on for dear life) and by the time we reached Cartagena, playgound of Colombia´s rich and famous, we felt and looked such a mess. (but with excellent tans).

such a fantastic thing to do though, we´re so glad we did it, its really different.