panama!

i haven't been able to get the song out of my head since i got here.

panama is so beautiful.  i haven't seen much of the country yet but i could sit all day and watch the boats.  i'm at mandy and joe's place on isla perico, just across the water from panama city.  its on the amador causeway, which was made to connect a few of the nearby islands with the dug up materials from the panama canal.

joe is working in panama for a month, drydocking a boat that he built a couple years ago.  he and mandy and the kids have wandered around the world building and working on boats, i met them when they briefly lived on kauai.  the apartment that they live in here has showers with disco lights and music.  and i met a columbian hooker (but not in their apartment).

mandy, makaio, koa and i went to isla contadora for the day today, another beautiful small island.  it was a 2 hour ferry ride on one of the boats that joe built.  the island used to be pretty busy as a stop on the drug routes.  alot of money was invested because of this but now there's really only one hotel that is open and most everything else is slowly rotting away.  the water was a beautiful blue and we spent the day drinking bloody marys and building sand castles with the kids.

contadora means 'accountant' in spanish, i know this because instead of writing 'unemployed' on all of my immigration forms i write 'contadora' so they won't be afraid to let me in.  i thought that isla contadora was a strange name for an island in the middle of nowhere, panama.  at first it made me think of one of the hitchhikers books where they take all of the middle management and pack them onto spaceships, telling them that they are going to a new planet, but really they just wanted to get them off earth.  when the ship lands the planet becomes populated by accountants and hairdressers and telephone operators, etc.

but really the island (and all the others in las perlas) were big in the pearl trade and everyone used to bring their pearls to contadora to trade with the spanish, hence, accountant island.

tomorrow i'm off to see the panama canal.  i can see the end of it from here but i want to go to the miraflores lock and watch the boats go through.  for some reason this is the only thing i've truly wanted to do on this entire trip.  and i'm unreasonably excited.  i was going to find a boat to cross on but it might take a few days to find one and i don't want to sit around waiting and not seeing anything else.  so a day at the observation deck should be good and maybe in the future i can cross.

i also bought a ticket to cuba today.  i'm going for 12 days.  health insurance is mandatory but at $3/day i'm not going to complain, it allows me 24/7 access to any medical service i need.  maybe i'll get my teeth cleaned while i'm there.

boats moored near the bridge of the americas