San Blas Paradise | Take Me Anywhere!
Finally, our once in a lifetime experience is coming closer. We were planning this trip for a longer time already or were at least dreaming of it when we were still in Germany, we are excited and looking forward to spend 5 days sailing from Panama through San Blas Islands to Colombia. But lets start from the very beginning.
Waiting, eating, drinking and waiting…hmm the captain is already gone like 3 hours and we are still waiting, getting to know each other – without passports.
The co – passengers (what an amazing group – you guys made these 5 days as special as they were :)) we immediately found very sympathic and slowly the nervousness stopped. We actually had a good feeling about the upcoming 5 days together – no more nightmares of annoying passengers getting on our nerves and killing the trip for 5 days on the same boat!
Our crew consisted of 3 persons in total, from which was one Captain Borja, cool, experienced but little bit short in giving information, then Dani, sailor and cook, always smiling and preparing such delicious food all the time and Dani’s brother Dario, who was actually on vacation but helped on the boat.
Ok, Ok before behaving appropriately in such a situation, which would mean waking everyone else up and running around the boat, screaming “we all gonna die!”, I’m going upstairs on the deck to check the situation up there.
The captain is covered in sweat and running around, Dani as well but they don’t look like we’re about to evacuate the boat. Turned out that not the water comes in the boat, there’s, but no water is leaving the engine’s cooling system, which means no cooling of engine and because of that no running engine.
The next morning, we finally reached the calm waters of San Blas Islands and eventually realized what everyone who did this trip was talking about – it is Paradise. Around us only islands full of palm trees, cristal clear water and sailing boats and catamarans. The water so refreshing that after the first jump in, you don’t want to come out ever again – for next 3 days we can do exactly this.
We sailed from Island to Island, snorcheling, swimming, eating delicious food prepared by our Cook Dani in an unbelievably small kitchen on the boat and just enjoyed paradise. On almost every visited Island there are ‚Kuna‘ families of local habitants living and selling fish, lobsters and hand made souvenirs to all visitors.
Snorcheling in this waters was a great experience, discovering the wonderful coral reefs, watching mantas, colorful fishes, ship wrecks and that beautiful clear water.
“Time to leave guys!” – that sounded like the captain violently wants to pull us from the paradise. Everyone knew what is going to follow and we knew that we need to continue to direction Columbia. 2 days on the open water on our Amande boat – what terrible stories we heard of sick passengers, feeling ill for 2 days and vomiting without end! Challenge, here we come. Most of us were well prepared and bought seasickness pills, some of us tried alternative ways eating ginger and pressing the P3 point on both hand wrists according to acupuncture studies (James, what a luck that you found that book on the boat!). After dinner we headed to the open waters and expected that our boat will be turning into a zombie boat – pale people making weird noises, no talking, walking dead, eeewww.
To shorten this story a little bit – we survived, and in the end it wasnt that bad at all! For most of us the pills helped a lot, making us sleepy and calming us down. The biggest effort was probably to get over the immense heat in the small rooms, but being surrounded by great people who all felt the same, the coast line of Cartagena appeared earlier than we thought. On the last evening on the boat, we were even joined by dolphins jumping at the front of our boat and made a wonderful end to this amazing trip.