Around The World In 80 Waves

With the sort of timing I am not normally known for I am going to be escaping Panama just as the rainy season begins.

For the next five or six months it is going to tip it down every day. Not your British drizzle but full on bucketing down for about an hour.

I can’t say I am too disappointed to be missing that!

Yesterday seems to have been the first day of the rainy season, which is actually late this year.

There was thunder, lightning and rain like I have not seen in a long time. You might not be able to make out the rain in the picture but you can certainly see the splashes. I almost got my surfboard out! 

The rain did make the trip to the airport today a bit miserable, but I have arrived intact.

Now I am just waiting for my flight and will shortly be on my way.

Two continents down, three to go! Wooo-hooo!

Wooo-hooo!

It is time for me to move on into another continent and for a few reasons I am flying down to Rio, where I hope to see 200 beauties! I am not sure my dancing is up to the standard of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but I may well have a go at a few Samba tunes whilst there.

The painful customs process in Panama City as cost me a lot of my exploring time in South America so I am only going to get the chance to spend a few days in Brazil before returning once more to the Pacific coast, where I will meet up with some old friends and do some surfing in Peru.

As luck would have it my visit is coinciding with the ASP tour event being in the city so I will get to catch up once more with all the pros who I last saw surfing the Banzai Pipeline on the North Shore of Oahu in Hawaii. Anybody would think I had planned it. Oh hang on I did!

Hopefully I will get to catch a few Atlantic waves whilst there, as well as conjuring up some mischief for myself to get involved in when out of the water too.

I’m not usually superstitious but my sale may have had something to do with moving from room 13 to help the owners of the hostel do some decorating. I’m not sure how likely that is but I sold the Little Green Surf Machine late yesterday.

I had broadcast my very real threat of donating he car to the local charity to all the people who had been interested and that combined with a significantly reduced price meant that it is now off my hands. 

In a pleasant turn of events I have sold it to the Robert who helped me to replace the battery when I arrived in Panama City several weeks back.

The California registration plates are no longer required so I get to keep them as a souvenir. (I was always fond of them because 1984 was the year I first went surfing and the plates indicated that.) It is a bittersweet moment because I really have loved that car, and we have been through so much together but I couldn’t put it in my suitcase.

I didn’t do as well as I would have liked with the sale but still know that the cost of the leg from San Francisco to Panama City when compared with all the flights, transfers, taxis, buses, etc I would have needed to get to all the beaches (not to mention all the hassle of trying to do that with a 7’10” surfboard in tow) has been a bargain. Myself and the other Robert have also made sizable donations to the charity too so nobody is out of pocket.

To celebrate in the spirit of the Welsh pirate Henri Morgan I bought a bottle of Captain Morgan rum and some Coca Cola with my plunder. All of which was then drank with pirate like speed with my friends at the hostel. You can see the state of me off the back of that here.

However that was just the start of the celebratory night. I went out with a few of the people I have got to know whilst living here and went on a big night out in the city.

Thankfully my time in Panama is now drawing to a close. It has been emotional!

Many happy returns to my brother Richard.

Hope you have a great day.

Thinking of you from South America.

Much love

Robert

The Darien Gap is the informal title given to the break in the highway which would otherwise run from Alaska to Chile. It gets its name from Darien, which is the largest and eastern most province in Panama, but also includes the northern extremes of neighbouring Colombia. It is what stopped me driving on towards South America

It is a vast area of rugged, sparsely populated, jungle covered terrain, which is second only to the Amazon in scale and within it’s confines are the huge Darien National Park and a self governing indigenous area.

Europeans first visited The Darien in the early 1500s. However people from my own shores arrived in 1696 when 2500 Scots tried to establish a trading colony. Many of the settlers died from disease, and those that didn’t had everything destroyed by Spanish soliers a few years later.  So much of Scotland’s wealth was invested in the colony, and subsequently lost, that Scotland was nearly bankrupted and effectively lost its status as an indepent nation as a result of the fiasco.

I know how they must of felt because all my own best laid plans are starting to look more than a little shaky because I can’t off-load the car. I have now significantly dropped the price to get rid of it, because it will be impacting on my later plans in a big way if I allow things to drag on much longer. A cheap selling price is not ideal but the financial implications of the potential delays, the time itself and the administrative overhead of any changes needed, will be far more costly for me in terms of this trip.

Drastic times call for drastic measures and I spotted this place a few doors down from my hostel yesterday. (www.darien.org.pa) I have decided that if I do not sell by lunchtime on Monday I will walk into their offices and hand over the keys. That would be outrageously generous of me but I really have had enough of feeding the local mosquito population and just sitting around for days on end. We did something similar on the Sahara Surf trip, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world and a lot of good would come from it, not least me leaving!

Massive congratulations to Wigan Athletic for winning the FA Cup. I have been following the text update on the BBC website for hours. It is great to see a team come up through the ranks and win the oldest knockout football competition in the world. King Street will be rocking tonight!

It is brilliant that the chairman (who admittedly is not without a few bob) is above everything a football fan, and not just using the club as a Billionaire’s plaything. That he actually broke his own leg playing in the 1960 Cup Final, just adds to the romance of the tournament.

I can’t believe it Swansea and Wigan, which are my two favourite nights out in the UK, bagging both the cup competitions and I am unable to join the party for either of their biggest nights ever. Gutted! With all the above and all the Welsh success it may be better for my sporting teams if I do not return to the UK. I have turned into something of a Jonah!

Apologies for the radio silence but nothing much has happened to update you about. I am still trying to sell the car and am getting a great deal of interest in it, but nobody has bitten yet.

I have also been doing my own share of self publicity driving it around the city with the ‘for sale’ signs on display, as well as trying to find interested buyers.

On one such journey I was following a motorcycle down the road. The rider went into a pot hole right in front of me and never came out!

I swerved to one side to avoid following him in and peered over the precipice to my right to see if he was ok. Alhough somewhat dazed and a bit confused by what ha just happened he seemed to be ok so I helped him get his bike back upright and out of the hole. In true biker style however he was back on his way in seconds.

Yo Bro. Hope you have a great day you old git.

I couldn’t put all the required candles on your cake in fear of starting a fire at the server farm where the website is hosted.

Will try and catch a few left hand waves in honour of your lefty ways as soon as another beach is in sight.

Catch up soon.

Robert

x

I did a final trip to the customs office yesterday to get ‘Autorizada la salida de este viajero sin su vehiculo autoridad. Nacional de Aduanas’ stamped in my passport. So far each of these 13 words has cost me $150, a day from my time exploring and surfing in South America, and a considerable amount of my sanity. Even yesterday’s efforts were a joke with nobody even acknowledging my presence at the relevant desk for nearly half an hour despite half a dozen people sitting around doing nothing. The paper mountain is now complete though and I am free to leave once I sell the car.

Since putting the for sale signs in the window I have already had three people try to ask me about it whilst I am driving down the road, one of which pulled alongside on the motorway, wound down the passenger window and was actually trying to haggle whilst swerving along the road at 60mph! I could barely here a word he said and just kept pointing at the telephone number eventually jamming on the brakes so the maniac would go past me.

I have to say I am now desperate to sell the car and if it goes on much longer I will practically give it away. As ever time is far more precious than money to me, and every minute I am spending pacing around the garden at Panama House waiting for a buyer is a minute where I could be doing something new. I am trying to keep myself both busy and positive, but there is only so much of that I can do. On the plus side I am getting many calls about the car, but as with selling a motor back home you get a number of time wasters, false promises, no shows, etc which adds to the frustration. I am going to rock up at a number of used car dealers tomorrow to see if anybody will take it off my hands. Please can you keep you fingers crossed for me?

There was nowhere at the surf beach to even get a drink so after my bodysurf session and an hours scorching in the sun we drove to the nearest town which is called Nueva Gorgona for a couple of beers. We found an amazing little beach there where my loud shirt was the only evidence of western tourism. Whilst there I fell in love with the latest in a very long line of mellow surf mutts that I have befriended on my journey south. Got to get myself a hound when I get back. It is long overdue!

The beers were lovely but the little shack did not serve any food so we pushed on once more stumbling across this fantastic place which had been built from the wreck of an old US army station. www.laruinatavern.com It’s owner Frank, himself a former GI told me the history of the place and the town. The original Gorgona is now a very long way down under the waters of Lake Gatun, which is the reservoir in the midle of the Panama Canal. It was flooded during the construction process and the residents were reimbursed with land on the Pacific coast, hence Neuva Gorgona.

The station was set up by the USA who finished the construction of the canal (it was started by the French) to help people relocate, establish schools, infrastructure, etc, but was abandoned around the time of the second world war because the people had been resettled.

We had some great food in the brilliant venue that Frank has built up like a phoenix from the ashes, but I got a call from an interested party about my car so had to dash back to the city sadly a long time before I even got to enjoy a game of darts with Jenny. 

Frank did tell me how to find the local surf shop where I was hoping to sell my board in order to avoid the ridiculous surcharges that airlines now make surfers pay when I move on (despite golf bags, skis, etc. weighing far more), and we called in there on the way back to the city.

The foxy female surfer working there could tell I was offering a great deal but her boss wasn’t interested without seeing the board and he was out of town, so it looks like the board will be visiting South America with me.

The only other thing to report there was the animal you see here who I will call Cat Dracula. I thought he was cute at first but the eyes tell the story. He was evil. All my best efforts at chatting up the Shred Betty were in tatters as he kept sneaking up behind me and sinking his sharp little fangs into the back of my unprotected ankles. This would be followed by me doing a flip-flopped version of the can-can. I definitely prefer dogs to cats!