We have been back to Isla Espiritu Santo for about a week and a half now. We left Pedro Gonzalez after a wonderful couple of weeks there - it is a great little town, with friendly people and a couple of pretty good places to get vegetables. And once the people figure out that vegetables are what you are looking for, they seem to get them. I asked the store owner if he had eggs, and he said yes. Then he disappeared for about twenty minutes, appearing again with a dozen eggs. I have a feeling he went door to door collecting whatever anyone was willing to spare. All the eggs down here are brown eggs, which I like best anyway. (No real reason, I think they are more fun. My mom agreed with that, and after all, she is the one who taught me about brown eggs and other eggs as well. The color of the eggs depends on what kind of chickens laid them. Brown eggs are laid by Rhode island Reds.) This town also participates in one of the big sports in small town Panama - chicken fighting. All of the fighting chickens have leashes on their legs, giving them the run of the yard, but no more. Other chickens just roam everywhere. "Free range" has a really different meaning here - it means the chicken gets to fend for itself. The fighting chickens are big, beautiful roosters. I have not seen a chicken fight and likely won't. I feel bad that I would even consider a thing like that just out of curiosity. After all, I would never see a dog fight - so what's the difference? I guess because I have never petted or otherwise interacted with a chicken. Not an excuse!
Everything here is fine, except for the fact the shipping of our water maker replacement parts went south. We had two packages coming - one with the important parts and one with some extra gear oil and pickling solution (which is for when you are not using the water maker. You "pickle" it with some chemicals so there is no bacterial growth in the membrane). Of course the oil and pickling solution arrived just fine, and for some unknown UPS- related reason, the parts were returned to sender rather than being sent to out shipping agent in Miami. Great. They were re-sent yesterday(thank you Cruise RO!)and hopefully we should have them within two weeks. When we are notified by our agent, we will head back to Panama City, then on to Costa Rica. Hopefully!
It remains just awesome here. We finally got a big enough rain to fill the water tanks, so we got to take real showers and do laundry, which was starting to pile up. That was a really good feeling. We have been catching fish pretty much every time we go out, so our meat supply from our last trip to Panama City is holding out nicely. The nice part is that we catch enough to give fish to the other boat in the anchorage - their dinghy, until yesterday, was out of service so they couldn't fish. (It had holes and needed patching. It is fixed now.) It was a great rain, by the way - lots of water but the lightning was at least six miles off. That is the kind we like - close enough to be entertaining, but not close enough to hit us.
Yesterday, after the monumental laundry doing (which really isn't much by regular standards - about a machine load. But since we use a five gallon bucket and a plunger as an agitator, that one machine load is about five bucket loads. It doesn't sound like much, but I have a new respect for anyone who has to do all their laundry by hand, including sheets and towels.) we went on a dinghy ride up a river that empties out here. You can only go up it at high tide, and because it rained and because there is a full moon, we have larger than normal tides. Therefore, we got to go further up than usual. It was amazing, mangroves everywhere and more birds than you can imagine - parrots, herons, egrets, kingfishers greater and lesser and the list goes on. Once we got into the river, we turned off the outboard and paddled. If we were super quiet, we were able to get within ten to twenty feet of the birds before they flew off.
Our anchorage is between an island and the mainland, but there is a smaller island between us and the mainland. The small island is heavily jungled, so all we have done is to poke around a bit on the shoreline. When I say heavily jungled (which I am not sure is really a word) I mean so dense there is no way to get through it, even with a machete. It is an impenetrable wall of vines, trees, and green growth of all sorts. Even with a machete, you would be out there for hours and only clear a few feet of ingress. So anyway, it was on this small island that we saw, sliding into the water looking right at us, a seven foot alligator. We had heard they were around, but hadn't seen one. It did not seem shy, either - it looked right at us and I swear it made eye contact. But before I could get the camera ready, it slid into the water and only its eyes were visible. Then it submerged and we got the hell out of Dodge. After all, although our dinghy has a hard bottom, its sides are inflatable and that thing looked like it could take a leg if it was so inclined. Plus it did not look as though it was missing any meals. This is the first time we have seen them on our own. We saw them in Guatemala and Belize, when we were on guided river trips to the otherwise inaccessible Maya ruins there. They really are pretty sinister looking.
Except for the pesky water maker issue, things are good and the boat is in good shape. We are getting low on coffee and beer, so it is possible our trip to Panama City may be sooner than we think. I (we) can certainly live without beer, but coffee is a whole different matter. I have taken to drinking tea in the morning so as to save the coffee until Mike gets up. I think that is only fair, and I like tea a lot. In fact, I was a tea drinker rather than a coffee drinker until I moved to Seattle. My first coffee drinking experience was this: I was working at an emergency shelter program, and we had a really small office. It was an unusually hot day, and my co-worker offered to get us a couple of iced lattes. I didn't know what a latte was, but I was interested in anything that was iced. So when she asked me if I wanted a regular or a double, I said a double. I figured it would be bigger, and I was really hot and thirsty. Plus I didn't want to admit I had no idea what a latte was. When she arrived, I was delighted to discover how delicious coffee could be! But then the caffeine hit, and I was almost crawling up the walls. I told my friend "People pay a lot of money for chemicals that do not work as well as this does!" And from then on I was a coffee drinker. I went from having to have it with real half and half, then worked down to whole milk, 2%, and finally skim. Now I drink it black, because I did not like the milk they served in Yucatan and Guatemala.
The coffee in this part of the world is wonderful - IF you can find it for sale. Guatemala, no problem. But in El Salvador, they export all the really good stuff (I was told Starbuck's buys the lion's share of Salvadoran coffee). They do sell their good stuff locally here at the fancier grocery stores. I would really like to buy the beans and try roasting them myself. I saw some for sale in El Salvador at the big market, but MIke wouldn't let me buy it because the beans were broken and looked old. I think he was right, although I was disappointed at the time and accused him of being a buzz kill, a label he wears with equanimity.
Speaking of grocery stores, the one we shop at is called Riba Smith. It is more expensive, but has a great selection of stuff, including things like dry salami and proscuitto. We discovered they have two more outlets and tried a different one the last time we were here, but saw no real difference. Then our cab driver, Roosevelt, told us there was another one, but said we would not like it because it was more expensive. As he put it, "It is where the Arab people and the Chinese people and the Jewish people shop. It is for the rich people." I am going to make him take us to that one. He is always trying to save money for us, directing us to places with lower prices, which is usually a really good thing. But this time I want to go all out. Besides, I like the food Arabs and Chinese eat, and I am hoping to find tahini and hoisin sauce and stuff like that.
In my earlier post about culinary week, I forgot to mention that I am now a pizza cook. I take the bread dough and after the first rising, use it for pizza. I can take the dough and flop it around my fists just like they do in the restaurants, albeit more slowly and awkwardly. I can't throw it up and catch it (and we have a VERY low ceiling for that sort of thing anyway). But our pizza is almost as good as restaurant pizza, and better than most of the frozen kinds. I can make my own with no cheese, which is also a good thing. Mike wants to have pizza about three times per month, and I have gotten myself on a bread making schedule of making two loaves about once a week, with the second loaf put in the freezer until it is time to eat it. I discovered the hard way that homemade bread gets stale way faster than store bought. Plus this environment, while great for making bread, is not good for keeping it due to the humidity that caused mold to grow on everything.
Anyway, I must get going as it is time for me to turn on the SSB radio and handle the Panama Pacific Net. As usual, life is good her in Panama.
"The eyes of others are our prisons, their thoughts our cages." (Virginia Woolf)
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