Around The World In 80 Waves

After living out of the Little Green Surf Machine for four months I have acquired quite a lot of stuff. Cooking equipment, maps, guide books, souvenirs, T shirts, beach towels and other bits and pieces.

The hoarder in me does not allow me to discard all of the above so I have to send what I want to keep home, because I cannot carry it all without my wheels, let alone need it or wish to pay for the excess weight it would represent on the rest of my flights. That sounds easy in prinipal but the practise was somewhat more complicated. 

First I had to lay out every single item I have with me in the hotel room and then sift through the lot deciding whether or not it was ‘backpacking necessary’ because that will be the mode I return to after leaving Panama. Then using the boxes which I have been segmenting the car boot with I prepared beautiful parcels all sealed perfectly with tape, to the extent that it would have taken an entire Welsh mining village to hack into them.

All good up to this point however at this stage my limited Spanish let me down. Carrying half a tonne of boxes around the centre of the city I kept getting sent to postboxes, when I thought I was asking for the post office. It is about 35C throughout all of this, draining me of all my energy and I am sweating cobs until my arms simply couldn’t lift the weight anymore so I practically threw the boxes down. At this point the rainy season appeared to have arrived and I got soaked for 15 minutes until I eventually hailed a cab.

It took me to the post office (la officina de correos – in case you ever need to send home far too much stuff from Panama) but the first thing they made me do was completely unwrap the lot so they could inspect the contents. I was then offered a roll of masking tape to reseal everything, which wouldn’t have been strong enough for my bulging parcels so I had to abandon everything with the staff and then run a couple of miles through the heat until I could find some duct tape because I was running out of time before the post office closed.

Even though it had stopped raining it was still so hot and humid that I returned looking like the proverbial drowned rat. Thirty minutes of speed wrapping later I am at the till filling out forms like they were lines I had been given at school and ready to pay the huge fee for sending everything home. That is until I discover that the duct tape purchase has left me $1.17 short to pay for postage and there was by now only 12 minutes until the post office closed for the weekend.

Nothing I can do because they dont accept cards so I have to give it toes to a cash point, in the kind of run on a bank that Northern Rock Investors would be proud of! The third cashpoint I found actually worked and I sprinted back to the post office to hand over the $1.17, be handed the receipt and then be shown the door as they are locking up.

I am more than a bit traumatised by this whole experience and I walk back to the hotel to try and cool down, but in all honesty it took three Cuba Libres and half an hour of ice cold air con before I was at all human again. However I have lightened the load and the stuff is on its way. In many ways it is a weight off my mind.