Chillaxation in Santa Catalina

As I sit in Miami International Airport at 3:00 am, waiting for the US Airways counter to open so my Central American trip can officially come to an end, it seems like a good time to continue writing about the final week of my trip.  If I remember correctly, I’m up to Santa Catalina, so let’s talk about that.

We left Bastimentos via water taxi at around 9:00 am to the mainland.  I got a little wet and my ass was sore in the hour it took us to get there, but that was just the beginning of the trip.  We took a couple of buses and a private van and ended up in Santa Catalina early in the afternoon.

Santa Catalina is the smallest town we visited throughout the trip.  In fact, it’s kind of hard to call it a town.  It’s a series of surf huts along a beautiful beach on the Pacific coast of Panama.  We stayed at one or the other Surf Oasis(es) and checked into our hut.  For the first time on the trip, I was roomed with somebody different – a Canadian man in (I think) his seventies.  I fell asleep almost immediately and was awakened by my new Canadian roommate at 4:20 pm because he said it was time to start drinking.  Obedient to my elders to the end, I relented and he ended up buying drinks and cigarettes over the course of the next eight hours.  He was toasted, but at least he was a nice, happy drunk.  Around midnight, I took him back to the room and he ended up getting up around 6:00 pm the next day/evening.  This was the most interesting part of the trip to Santa Catalina, but this isn’t his blog, it’s my blog, so I’m going to go back to writing about me.

Actually, there’s not that much to write about with respect to me.  I drank with my new Canadian roommate that night, had some dinner, and went to bed.  The next morning, I went to breakfast and then I walked into “town” for some provisions with a few other people from the group.  The walk was up a gravel road and took about forty minutes.  Once we got to “town,” we could see that there really wasn’t much to it.  There was one main strip with empty stores and a few surf shops.  The people I went with stopped by a restaurant for some juice while I just grabbed my provisions at the little minimart in town and then I went back to the shack by myself.

View from my hammock

I’d like to tell you that I went swimming, but the waves were too strong for me to be interested.  I’d like to tell you that I went surfing, but that would just be a boldface lie.  For the most part, I spent the rest of the day sitting on the hammock outside of my hut and watching people, crabs, and listening to the almonds from the tree directly in front of our house fall on top of our tin roof and then roll onto the beach in front of us.  It turned out to be pretty much nothing but a day of pure chillaxation.  Not the most exciting way to end a trip, but not the worst way, either.

There’s absolutely nothing exciting to report about Santa Catalina but it was very beautiful.  Perhaps I’ve been jaded by all of the beautiful beaches I’ve seen since visiting Hoi An in Vietnam in November, but I felt like I was taking it for granted and that bothered me.

The night was short because we were meeting at 6:00 am the next morning in order to head to Panama City, the final stop on the Central American tour.  I’ll start on Panama’s capital in the next entry.