Dispatch Number 54 -Errant Thoughts VII

Coconuts
In the jungles of Costa Rica coconuts fall at night with heavy thuds, like rocks falling off a cliff landing in damp soil. Getting hit by one could kill you. The snakes and frogs can kill you. The jaguars can kill you. Things in the ocean can kill you.

It is a natural paradise and there are no signs saying "No..." or restrictive handrails prohibiting entry. The absence of controls and laws in Central America is liberating to the American who comes from the most legislated place on earth; America also has more people in prison than all other counties in the world, naturally this includes Central America. I don't think the handrails and abundance of laws are working in America.

Cigars
How come men who smoke cigars act as if they own or command everything around them?
-Note on a man smoking a cigar loading his car on a ferry in Nicaragua

Neal
Neal Diamond is gay, I didn't know that. I thought he was singing about women in all those songs.

Second Times
Most of the time people aren't that happy to see you again, it is like the moment has passed.

Unused
Policeman's pistol looks like an unused museum piece.

Notes from a Notebook
I am a country boy. I am much more at ease in the country. A rural tourist if you demand a label. Cities are a drag and require a lot of energy to be in, they are snake pits. When in them I feel like a bad swimmer in big city waters. It requires energy. The energy of survival.

Solar Flare
Sunsets. You can watch a mind blower with all the orange layers upon more layers until the sky turns cobalt blue and finally sparkling black. We tend to recall them like special events as if they were rare things that hardly happen.

Sunsets happen every single day. We live a mechanical life in cars, houses and places like cities where the horizon is blocked out by something man has made. Mechanical places we choose to be, while missing most every sunset. Sunsets are not only for retired people.

Milk
Throughout Central America milk is raised and collected the old way. Local farmers have a small herd of say ten dairy cows he collects milk from each morning, as the sun is coming up he sets one or two tin canisters out on the edge of the dirt road that a pick-up truck collects. Later that warm milk is transferred to a larger truck with tanks. When I camp with a farmer I am often treated to fresh milk, often still warm -it tastes incredible. There are no industrial cow farms in Central America with millions of cows cramped up, instead they are free to roam the pasture.

Dateline
Crossed the Panama Canal by going over the Bridge of the Americas on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 12:50pm. The canal represents a major wayward point for this traveller on his way to the bottom of the world. Family probably thinks it is a bridge too far. This traveller now breaks a land tether by going to South America by sea, for no road connects Panama to Columbia.

The Dirty Look
In a hostel one has little privacy, so it becomes a chance to learn how others live. Those hippie Rastafarian types spend a remarkable amount of time maintaining and creating the soiled unkempt look. It came as a surprise since they often look so disheveled and barely keeping themselves up.

Is anything real anymore or is it just a bunch of fashion cliques and designer cults?

The Marina
While there are a lot of beautiful boats here in the well-to-do Panama City marina, there are a sizable share of "project" boats and others abandoned to dreams gone by. The common ending for boats is decay. The passion fades fast making a boat like a tattoo, a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling.

Books
Books I have read in last couple months:

The Path Between the Seas (Panama Canal History), Blade Runner, Guns, Germs and Steel (a pull it all together history of the evolution of civilizations), The River of Doubt (an explorer story that almost killed President Theodore Roosevelt on an unexplored river in Brazil in 1913), Saint Jack (a Paul Theroux novel), The Godfather, The Last Don, Songlines (travels in Australia by Bruce Chatwin).

David
Cartagena, Columbia