We'll Call It Luck

So, shortly after finishing my post last night, I went down and had a few 50 cent beers in the bar below my hostel and made chit chat with some folks about my new set of travel plans. As it happened these two girls were also looking to head over to the Caribbean side in the morning, and to travel on to Colombia by sailboat. The difference is that they'd booked tickets on the old relic steam-engine that runs between Panama City and Colon, and would be sailing out on a foreign yacht, with one of the pre-paid package deals I mentioned before. I mentioned that I thought they were a touch expensive, and they agreed, but claimed that they were willing to pay for the peace of mind of not having to worry about safety, food, etc.

I also mentioned that I was hoping to sail on a foreign yacht as well, but as crew rather than as a passenger. They said that sounded interesting, and how is that going? Well, not so good, I said, and explained how I'd made the rounds a few days ago to ask around at yacht clubs and put up signs, and how I'd met the Swedes who'd been looking for weeks with no luck, and how I'd read in all the guidebooks how this kind of thing could be dangerous, and that your better off just taking a damn seat on a tourist yacht or flying over. They smiled at all that, and shook their heads and wished me good luck. I was beginning to realize I might need it more than I thought.

Anyway, it was the birthday of one of the owners of the hostel and things were getting pretty rowdy in the bar as the night wore on, and eventually I went back upstairs to sit and read a book of short stories by Hemingway I've been chewing on recently. It's excellent reading but maybe not the best stuff for someone planning a makeshift trip through an area of the world as dangerous as this. Anyone who's read him, especially any of his work influenced by his own adventurous life, will likely know what I mean. He gives you the hard facts, the robberies, attacks, injuries, deaths, and all the rest without candy-coating. And so, as I sat there, leafing through The Snows Of Kilimanjaro, a vivid account of one man's last thoughts, as he lay dying of gangrene on a cot in the African savanah, my own mind set to wandering a little.

Was I some kind of fool to be marching into this nasty part of the world in search of ocean passage? As the potential dangers awaiting me flitted about through my imagination, I walked into the book exchange area across from the kitchen and again picked up the recent edition of Lonely Planet Central America:

Colón has some upscale residential areas, but most of the city is a sad slum widely known for street crime. If you walk around, even in the middle of the day, well-meaning residents will inform you that you are in danger. Parts of the Darién Province, which borders Colombia, are extremely dangerous. Not only is it easy to get hopelessly lost, but parts of the province are used by guerillas from Colombia, the paramilitary chasing the guerillas, and narcotraffickers. Particularly treacherous is the area between Boca de Cupe and Colombia, which is the traditional path through the Darién Gap. Plying the waters of the Archipiélago de San Blás are numerous Colombian boats that run back and forth between the Zona Libre in Colón and Cartagena, Colombia. It has been well documented that some of these boats carry cocaine on their northbound voyages. If you decide to ride on one of these slow cargo boats, be forewarned that your crew may be trafficking drugs.

I put the book down and wandered out to the balcony to sit in the hopefully cool, but actually balmy night air. OK, so there are risks. I knew there would be. But but I still didn't want to give in and settle for some swanky tourist pleasure cruise with pit-stops to gawk at tribal islanders and fillet mignon every night (actually). I'll have my look around Colon in the morning, I thought, and if things are really as bad as they say, I guess I'll smarten up and fly. No sense tempting fate. I grabbed a glass of water and went to bed.

This morning I woke early, packed up my hammock, raincoat, and freshly-laundered clothes, and headed downstairs. There was no one around. I halved a grapefruit, poured a cup of coffee and made myself a peanut butter and jam sandwich. When I'd finished, I gave in my key at the front desk, and was on my way out the door when I realized I'd better make use of the free internet to check my email one last time. To my great surprise, I had one new message which read as follows:

joseph, looking for crew from balboa yacht club to salinas ecuador. anticipate leaving sunday 23 may. i am on yacht (TLC) tom corogin. if i am not in the yacht club restaurant take the panga to tlc.

I was dumbstruck. Here the Swedes had been moving through the yacht community for weeks actively looking for rides down South, and I walk into town and throw up a sign and get a hit two days later. I left my already packed luggage at reception and headed for the bus station. No more than twenty minutes later I was aboard the little yacht club panga headed over to a beautiful 30-foot sailboat emblazoned with the letters T.L.C.

I called out to Tom from the panga but no answer. Boat people are usually up early - it was only 8 o'clock or so by this time, but maybe he was napping, I thought. I decided to board and see. As I made my way on, a little grey-haired noggin emerged from the cabin and looked over at me through cool blue eyes and said, You must be Joseph. I told him I was, and apologized for boarding uninvited. It's alright, he said, I was just on the toilet. He smiled, extending a wiry sun-browned hand in my direction which I shook with a laugh.

We sat and talked for a time, and I came to learn a bit more about Tom, an older fellow from Ohio, and quite pleasant, presently in the midst of a lenghty sail trip round the world. It's been four years so far, but he's nearly through now, just making his way down to Cape Horn, the very last point of land as you round the southern tip of Chile. He's been mostly soloing so far, but had a bit of a fall recently and injured his knee. The doctor told him not to strain it for a week, but as he's got a friend to meet in Ecuador, he can't afford to wait until he fully heals up to set out. How soon could I leave, he asked. By this time I had pretty well sized up Tom and his boat well enough to know that I would be comfortable sailing with them - clean, orderly, good vibes all around - and I told him my bags were packed and ready to go as soon as need be.

I'd be a little diasppointed to sail right past Colombia, I said, but I couldn't exactly pass on a ride down to Ecuador. I'll provide everything, he said, referring to food, towels, bedding, and the like, but I can only pay you a little. I told him that sounded just fine to me, and we made plans to rendezvous later today.

So just like that, everything has changed. One moment you're on your way to scraggle along the Caribbean coast, next moment you're gearing up for a 5-day sail through the Pacific. Crazy place, Panama.

Anyway, as I won't be able to write again for a while, I thought I'd better make use of the remainder of this morning to write this post explaining things, and hopefully soothing any worried minds out there. I, for one, feel much better about this course of events than my prior "plan" of skirting the coast on the Carribean.

With any luck, I'll be able to drop a line later this month when I set foot on solid ground again.

Talk to you soon!

In Search Of Sail

So, after a rather long busride out of Uvita, I made a quick and painless border crossing into Panama, and rolled into in the bustling but relatively uninteresting city of David (pronounced Daveed), just before dusk. I spent a couple slow nights in a funny little hostel called The Purple House, where I was informed that I was lucky enough to have come into Panama right on time to take part in a country-wide census - something which occurs only once every 10 years, apparently. The following morning I would be strictly forbidden to leave the premises until having been officially counted by the Panamanian government, on penalty of fine and/or detainment.

This was OK with me, I didn't have much to do anyway, except work on salvaging bits of my journal which unfortunately got soaked-through the day before in a freak rainstorm on the beaches of southern Costa Rica. (I'm still working on salvaging it incidentally, but it's coming along). As it happened however, the crack one-woman team showed up to count us first thing in the morning, and the whole process was over in no more than maybe five minutes.

Anyway, once I was free to go, I grabbed a direct bus into Panama City, arriving late, and after crisscrossing a bit on some local buses, managed to find and take a bed in a big old youth hostel in a beautiful if disheveled part of town called called San Felipe, or Casco Viejo - Old Town - where I've been ever since. It's a bit expensive, but quite lovely, with high ceilings, free internet, a big communal kitchen, pancake breakfast and all the rest. It's also full of travelers from all over, making for a good atmosphere and facilitating the swapping of stories and information. A fine spot to flop while I saw about boats to Colombia.

As it happens, there are plenty - if you're willing to pay, that is. Full-service 4-6 day packages on foreign-yachts running through the various islands along Panama's Caribbean coast, complete with stops to snorkel, all you can eat, etc. sound very nice, but you're looking at something like $100 a day, not to mention putting up with a boat-load of other tourists. Good to know there's a Plan B if it comes down to it, but I thought I might like to see about crewing on a private yacht first, like I did back in Mexico. I had heard that kind of thing was also possible around here, if perhaps a bit more difficult to arrange, but I was confident there would be loads of boats heading down looking for crew, and was excited for the challenge. In the meantime, I thought I might as well take a moment to enjoy the sights and sounds of Panama City.

Day One I just wandered around the Casco Viejo, soaking up the crazy scene and familiarizing myself with the crumbling colonial neighborhood. The streets were lined with innumerable and beautifully ornamented old buildings, but virtually every third one was, behind its lovely facade, little more than a rotten old shell overtaken inside either by vegetation or full up with garbage and other human waste. Despite an abundance of street people and obvious poverty, however, Old Town remains quite lovely by day, if you can handle the heat (I could not, and around noon I had to dash into a cheapish bistro for lunch and a cold beer). But you get the feeling it's a kind of artificial loveliness. I took a few wrong turns on one of my short wanders, for example, and quickly found myself in nastier territory. It wasn't long however, before I was spotted by one of the many over-polite and shockingly well-armed young policemen patrolling the place and pointed back toward the safer part of town. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.

Day Two I made for the famed Panama Canal. Two quick bus rides saw me over to the entrance way to the Miraflores Locks, from whence I wandered into the compound, and up to the gates, to pay my $8 entrance fee. Happily, there was a sizable boat passing through just then, and I was able to observe the workings of the canal in action. Before my visit, I had absolutely no idea how the canal operated - I suppose I had thought, naively, that it was just a straight-up trench that had been dug across the country of Panama to link the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and that boats just sailed clean through. In reality, however, it's much more complicated, and much more impressive than that.

The kind of trench I was imagining, in which boats could just sail straight through ocean to ocean, would have to be dug to a depth far below sea-level, obviously. This would be conceivable perhaps, if the land separating the two oceans had been very minimal, but the country of Panama, however small it may appear on the map, is actually a sizable tract of land, consisting largely of mountains of solid rock, and rising high above sea level. Removing enough material to allow for the straight passage of ocean vessels at sea-level would have been virtually impossible.

In fact, the canal - or canals; there are three of them - functions more like a kind of huge staircase for boats, transporting them up through a series of independent chambers called locks, into a freshwater lake through which they pass - high above sea-level - and then down again, on the other side, to the ocean. Very cool.

And very huge. I had a good time wandering through the museum-type exhibit on site at the Miraflores Locks, and learning about all the huge gears and cogs, and valves and things that make the whole sucker work, and absorbing all the dazzling statistics from poundage of concrete, and lives lost in its construction, to the many thousands of litres of freshwater used each day when the last set of locks are opened releasing vessels back into the salty seas. Fortunately, Panama gets a whack of rain every year, so freshwater resources like Lake Gatun which runs between the locks, are continually replenished. Indeed, Panama is apparently famous for having some of the best drinking water in the world, and it's been a pleasure to be able to drink straight from the tap this past week or so.

Another stat that stood out in my mind was the cost of passage: many of the bigger cargo ships apparently pay well over US$200,000 for a single pass! And of course many thousands of such ships pass through each year. No wonder then, that the canal has long been one of the Panama's largest sources of income - and plans are actually underway to expand it. At this very moment, two new sets of locks are being constructed, one on either side, which will greatly expand the Canal's capacity, and hopefully re-invigorate the country's economy, which has reportedly been in decline the past few years. You'd never know that looking out at the city's impressive downtown skyline, however.

My first night in town, after I'd stowed my things, I wandered out to the second story balcony and was struck by the hundreds of huge sky-scrapers running all along the waterfront. They made for quite a sight all lit up against the swollen black of the Pacific and the dark clouds overhead. Surely Panama was a wealthy country in some ways? I'd have to make a point of going down there to explore that part of town eventually.

Day Three - yesterday - was my chance to do so. I was beginning to think I ought to start looking for boats, especially if I was going to make it to Colombia by the end of the month, and so I set out early to make the rounds of the various yacht clubs here in town, and see what was up. I had heard that there was a little yacht club down there somewhere along the scenic walkway that winds along the water between my hostel and the downtown core, so that's where I started, setting out on foot.

It was a gray morning, and hot, and the smell of the fish market was thick and inescapable as I walked by. The pescadors and salespeople hustled about in the filthy streets shouting all kinds of important sounding things to no one in particular, and skinny cats slinked along in the sidelanes looking for little bits of anything fishy. I asked a cabbie for directions, and he pointed me onward to the club, but when I finally found the place, the chap at the gates told me it was a private facility, and that they didn't allow folks to just come in off the street and petition for rides and the like. For that kind of thing I might try these two other places, further up the coast, the names of which he wrote down for me on a scrap of paper.

I was already more than half-way into town, however, so I kept wandering toward the looming sky-scrapers. I was sure I could catch a bus back up the coast from there. As I drew closer, I realized that what had appeared to be so many impressive buildings from across the way, were actually no more than skeletons of buildings, either abandoned in the midst of construction or ruined remnants of a more luxurious age.

Probably 60% of the big buildings, I'd say (OK, maybe more like 40% - anyway, lots of them) were hollow - just empty concrete forms, only the bottoms of which were home to a few restaurants, shops or offices. Even those buildings that were complete looked pretty dead - no lights, no people bustling about inside, at least as far as I could tell. There were lots of folks about in the streets, mind you, and plenty of traffic and what not, but the empty shells of the big buildings cast a strange ghostly shadow over the place - perhaps Panama was in worse shape than I thought.

Anyway, after I'd wandered around gawking for some time, I did manage to find a bus up toward the other yacht clubs, and grabbed it. On the way I met a young Swedish couple making the trip down from Alaska who had also been looking for boats recently, and we chatted a bit about their search. They informed me that they'd in fact spent the past three weeks or so making their way back and forth across the canal, working as line-handlers on various boats in search of folks headed down to South America, and had only just now found a fellow willing to take them along on his way to Ecuador.

It's not the season, they told me, for sailing South; far more people, it seems, are heading West across the Pacific at the moment. But they were a pleasant pair, and wished me the best of luck as they pointed me toward the first yacht club. I walked in and surveyed the place, which regrettably, looked about as dead as downtown, and dutifully posted my sign on the modest little noticeboard. Maybe more would be happening at the fancier club up the road? This, I found, was untrue, but again, I posted my little sign on the noticeboard and sat for a beer in the little restaurant and tried to suss things out a bit with the few locals hanging around. No leads though, and so I returned home, by now a bit discouraged.

When I got back I took to reading a bit about things on the Caribbean side of the country - perhaps the going would be better over there? - and found a mixture of good and bad news. First off, Colon, the city I'd hoped to make my home base on that side while I searched for boats, turned out to be something of an infamously nasty place. Indeed every guidebook I picked up seemed to say more about how to avoid it than anything else. Poverty and crime, apparently, are among the more serious of Colon's problems and muggings are quite common, even in broad daylight. Anyway, that's the bad news.

The good news is, there are a few other places to stay close-by that sound much nicer and far safer. I need to be close though, because the fact of the matter is that Colon and the surrounding ares are home to several big and important ports. I was also encouraged by the fact that despite their strong warnings, all of the guidebooks admit that it is possible to find boats headed to Colombia from this area. Foreign yachts, merchant ships, tribal canoes and all the rest do routinely pass this way, and indeed, all along the Caribbean coast of Panama and into South America. So long as you're careful and keep your wits about you, they say, you should be able to find passage somehow. (Just for the record, however sketchy all this may sound, boat travel on the Caribbean side is actually far safer than on the Pacific - one sees way fewer foreign yachts cruising along that side, for example.)

So the plan at the moment, is as follows: tomorrow I will rise early and break fast before making the short two hour bus journey over to the Caribbean coast. I intend to use the better part of the morning to make a few visits to some of the bigger ports in and around Colon and hopefully shake a few hands, and leave a few signs. Then, I'll skip town and head up to Portobelo, or some other sleepy little fishing town, to spend the night. That way, if things don't pan out at the bigger ports, I'll still be able to poke around some kind of wharf and ask some questions, and maybe find something else up there.

If pickings are looking better further East on smaller boats, there is also the possibility of dividing my journey into several smaller trips between these little fishing cities all along the Caribbean coast. If I make it far enough that way, I'll eventually come to an old US military base situated just this side of the border, and I can walk into Colombia from there. Once you're across the going gets easier I hear, and there are plenty of boats and buses that run deeper into the country. And of course, if the crew thing looks like a bad call, I can always jump on one of those luxury tourist cruises, or even fly, I guess, which would actually be cheaper and faster, but we'll see.

Either way, unless something crazy happens, tonight will be my fifth and final night in Panama City, and with a little luck, I'll be able to hold to my plan of making it to Colombia before the end of the month.

Hopefully I'll be posting again soon with some good news! Wish me luck! Miss you all.

Of Snails & Men

Jeez, I turn my back for one second, and here we are already mid-May. I don't know what to say. Over the course of the past few weeks, I have felt myself slowly growing big with feeling at the realization that I am now officially past the half-way point in my trip. From here on, I'm running out of the forest, as the saying goes. Happily, I am pleased to report that I am only a little behind schedule. With luck, I will be setting foot on South American soil before the end of the present month.

Due to time constraints, however, I've had to make a few regrettable edits to my trajectory: plans at present have me skipping both Venezuela and Brazil. I have convinced myeslf that this is necessary if I want to make it to the bottom of Argentina within my remaining timeframe and at a pace I find reasonable. It could still be a bit of a push to make it, but I remain optimistic, as ever. For the moment, however, it will serve me to try and catch you all up on a few details from the past few weeks.

So, after a warm goodbye with my surrogate-family up on the farm, I set out down from the mountains of Nicaragua, and into the sweaty arms of the country's capital city of Managua, where I spent one realtively uninteresting night in a seedy ant-ridden hostel uptown. My room had a TV at least; I don't watch much boob tube on the road, but I was excited for a bit of world news as I settled in this night.

Unfortunately, all the world had to tell me was how oil from the then-new leak in the Gulf of Mexico had reached the shores of New Orleans, and that said leak would likely take months to seal up, and probably represented one of the worst natural disasters in American history. Well, there's always reading, anyway.

The next morning, I woke early and after quickly swallowing a greasy too-expensive made-for-tourist breakfast, I cabbed it down to the bus station, and caught the next one out to the famed volcanic island of Ometepe. I gather that this unique and beautiful location has recently been added to one of the many new lists of world wonders that seem to be emerging all over the place. World wonder or not, it was certainly a nice place to stay for a few nights.

As it happens, I was, at that time, preparing to put a number of things in the mail to friends and family, and my few days on Ometepe afforded me the time to prepare those parcels for their long journey. It was quite a beautiful place, complete with lovely beaches, and incredible jungle crawling with unique long-tailed birds, feisty monkeys, and all manner of distinctive insects. And as if that weren't enough, each night the skies would be filled with the incredible strobe of the vast lightening storms atop the two volcanoes that made up the island's bulk. There was one drawback however, namely, the peculiar character of the lake-water surrounding the small island.

Come afternoontime it would usually be getting oppressively hot out, and all around the waves would be there, jingerly rolling up to shore and looking inviting. I gave in a number of times, and was mildly refreshed, but I was always sorry. My brief dips always left me covered in what felt like a thin coating of wax which persisted despite ample scrubbing - I'm quite sure the shower-water came from the lake also - throughout the whole of my stay. In fact, to be perfectly honest, it was chiefly to find a decent shower, and take a dip in the salty Pacific that I eventually left Ometepe for the nearby sleepy surfer town of San Juan del Sur. But also, to pop my recently packaged items in the mail, and chill out for a few days.

As it happens, however, this quick pause wound up stretching into five days and six nights, due chiefly to a few complications regarding my mail, the details of which needn't be included here. It will suffice to say simply that over the course of my stay in little San Juan, there occured, among other things, aptly timed government holidays, missed emails, and power-outages, not to mention a few good rounds of phone-tag discussing various potential fees, required permits, personal favors, liability issues, and all manner of other imaginable delays. It looked like popping a few things in the mail would be a little tougher than I imagined.

The good news however, was that the business of trying to get all this mail off also involved a lot of hurry-up-and-wait, and so when I wasn't dashing about trying to make it happen, I had little else to do but relax and enjoy the numerous pleasures of beautiful San Juan. I was able to find a lovely little bookstore/coffeeshop/bistro type place where I convinced myself I had earned the right to enjoy some of the more expensive - and delicious - fare they offered there. And so I sat, and dug into a few of the books I'd been working on, and savored delicious gourmet coffee and plump breakfast bagels.

Additionally, the cool waters of the Pacific were a refreshing treat after a few days of sloshing about in the tepid brown volcanic soup of Ometepe, and I partook thereof at least once a day for the duration of my time in San Juan. (Perhaps my beef with the crummy water surrounding Ometepe was enhanced somehow by my having recently heard the news of the big spill in the Gulf?) It was on one such leisurely afternoon on the beach - stretching in the sun, poking around in the sand, and generally lolling about - when suddenlyI happened to notice some interesting little pock-mark disturbances in the sand, which seemed to reveal themselves just as the very tail-end of a wave ebbed back out to the ocean, and then to promptly disappear.



Now, anyone who has ever flopped around on an ocean beach for any length of time will tell you that the salty shallows are often a haven to all kinds of wee little lifeforms. I will not try to conceal the fact that I have always taken great joy in observing the workaday dramas of various tiny scraggling creatures, and I was reminded just then of how back in India, I had spent many a casual hour observing and playing with the little hermit crabs that populated the beautiful flat beaches of the Andaman islands. I knelt down and waited for the ebb of the next wave.

When it came, I leaned my head in close to see if I could get a good glimpse of what I expected would be some other species of tiny crab. What I saw when the water cleared up some however, was actually nothing crablike, but looked rather more like numerous little translucent bubbles resting atop the sand, which, just after the wave had receded, shrunk down until all that was left was a nondescript lump. That's odd, I thought. Why would the crabs be spitting out bubbles as the waves receded? Then it occurred to me that I had not actually seen a crab just yet, and so I decided to dig up one of the little rascals.



What I pulled out and washed off was actually a smallish snail with a rather long nose - if you could call it a nose - more like a kind of a longish set of wavy tendrils hanging out the front way, although he or she quickly retracted them. I dug up a few others just to make sure, and confirmed that this was in fact a whole community of such tiny snails. After surveying them for another moment or two, I realized that what I had initially mistaken for bubbles were in fact their tiny translucent "noses" which they were using as minuscule fishing nets.

So far as I can tell the strategy is this: after having burrowed themselves down such that their little faces lie just beneath the surface of the fine sand, they then sit concealed and wait for the waves to wash overhead, and ebb back out to sea, at which point they blow out their little tendrils which balloon open like a sail in high winds and presumably catch all manner of other yet tinier critters or some other brand of vegetable snail munchable. As the wave disappears completely, they pull in their catch, cover up, and wait for the next one. And so on all day long.

Sounds like a pretty sweet gig, but as I observed, there's actually quite a bit involved. For one thing, you've got to make sure you find that particular stretch of beach where the waves are just shallow enough for this particular kind of fishing. If you set up shop too far inland, the waves may be too small and infrequent to catch much, but if you're too far out, the current may be too strong, and you're liable to get pulled out and washed away the moment you throw out your nets - I observed many an unfortunate overzealous snail succumb to this fate.

But even if you find that sweet spot with plenty of shallow waves of workable depth, there's still the issue of tides. Depths change, and if you want to stay in the good fishing, you've got to shift along with them. This can mean a lot of commuting over the course of a day, but none of them seemed to mind all that much. And as I looked down at them fishing away, I confess to having been struck by the simplicity and the cleanliness of their little lives; no fretting about trying to get mail sent off, that's for sure. No huge oil spills to sop up either. It's a slow life being a snail, but it's a relatively harmless one too, and that's more than can be said of us lately.

I don't mean to harp on the foibles of human beings. It goes without saying that we goof up hugely from time to time, but I think overall we're a pretty terrific addition to the universe, however unpopular that opinion may be these days. Far more fashionable, it seems, is the view that human beings are some kind of planetary disease, a unique species of world-cancer whose sole prerogative is to produce food and preserve our selfish selves indefinitely and at at all costs - future generations be damned.

The world, it is sometimes said, would be better off without us. Shades of this view can be heard both explicitly and implicitly in the words of numerous scholars, pundits and various other doomsday announcers all over the place. All you've got to do is turn on the news:

... fossil-fuel addiction, oilspill in the Gulf, economic-crisis ...

... global warming, ocean-acidification, deforestation ...
... consumer-culture, obesity, moral devolution...
... greedy corporations, bloodthirsty CEOs ...
... crime, drugs, mental illness...
... poverty, disease, war...
... etc. etc. etc. ...

To anyone paying half attention, it would appear that human beings overall are just a nasty bunch of ignorant creatures involved in a nasty bunch of ignorant doings. But however compelling this view may be to so many, is it really true that the world would be better off without us? Are the snails more valuable citizens of this planet than we are?

To their great credit, snails do not often cause global environmental disasters, nor are they commonly referred to by seriously thinking people as some nasty type of cancer on our planet, at least to my knowledge. They seem to have got the sustainability thing down, as far as we can tell. Well done guys, we might take a lesson from you. Snails: 1. Humans: 0.

But apart from their admirable environmental practices, as a species, snails don't exactly contribute anything particularly valuable to the universe itself, do they? Relatively speaking. I mean, they're undoubtedly an important link in various food-chains, and an integral part of balancing whatever ecosystem, and all the rest, but that much can be said of just about any living creature.

However much pleasure we may take from their casual observation (and by "we" of course I mean "I") snails are just not all that interesting in the great scheme of things, and I suspect most people - excepting perhaps a few zealous biologists - would not find much tragedy in imagining a world in which no snail ever existed. For whatever reason, their exemption from the universe does not strike us as much of a loss. But why? Perhaps it is because we know of all kinds of other little semi-aquatic scragglers who seem to "count for" just as much as snails do? But if we try the same thought experiment with human beings, I think we actually get a much different result.

A world without human beings might very well be a "healthier" one in a lot of ways. It seems to go without saying that the the world would have been a touch better off without all our oilspills, nuclear leaks, burnt/burried garbage, and all the rest, but I think it's also pretty clear that it would be a far less valuable world. Obviously our house-keeping needs work, a lot of work, but whatever else I want to say about human imperfections, I still think we are quite obviously incredible creatures worth celebrating in a lot of ways, and that our omission from the cosmic roster would represent a monstrous loss in the overall value of the universe. In short, I think we "count for" a lot, and I think that for a few reasons, which I'll try to summarize here.

Part of it is that we possess a number of unique capacities and abilities. I know, I know, birds can talk and solve simple puzzles, and dolphins have sex for fun, and primates can do sign language and all the rest, but the best of them are still way behind even human children when it comes to things like linguistic ability, and the capacity for reason, logic and abstract thought. Not to mention the capacity for complex emotion, empathy, compassion, and love. And that's valuable stuff! That, I take it, is the kind of stuff that actually makes talk of value meaningful at all!

(How, afterall, could value even exist in a universe void of any and all creatures complex enough to formulate some idea or sense thereof, however vague? The extent to which the universe is more or less valuable, ebbs and flows, or so it seems to me, in proportion to the extent to which existing creatures are capable of having thoughts or feelings (or whatever you want to call them) of value, that is, insofar as they are capable of valuing things. I recognize of course that this is a deep issue upon which opinions vary greatly, but that's mine for the moment.)

I'm not trying to suggest that animals don't think or love or have value. I think it's quite obvious that they do, and that a world without human beings would still be a hugely valuable world. Non-human animals of all kinds bring immense value into the universe, and I for one would not want to live in a world in which they did not - indeed such a world is scarcely imaginable to me.

The point I'm trying to make here is simply that there is a whole lot of things we humans can do that no other animals can. For starters, we're the only ones who write and enjoy poetry and music, tell jokes and celebrate beauty, and think about what it means to be good. We're also the only ones who strive to understand the nature of the universe in all its aspects, consider at length the consequences of our actions and habits, and share bits of culture, happiness, inspiration and all the rest. Snails may not make much of a mess, but neither are they much concerned about the existence or nonexistence of any messes - that's also a uniquely human trait.

We muck things up, but we're also the only ones capable of truly understanding, regretting and (hopefully) rectifying our various muck-ups. Plenty of other animals surely care about the immediate well-being of themselves and their offspring, but how many of them could legitimately be described as caring about the well-being of the world itself? Of understanding that its very existence is a magnificent and invaluable miracle?

Anyway, part of the reason I've allowed myself to fall into this little diatribe on human value - apart from 1) trying to make myself feel better about that damn oilspill, and 2) the opportunity it gave me to nerdily post photos of super-cool snails - is simply to preface something I had wanted to bring to your attention a few posts ago.

A couple weeks back, while Couchsurfing in Antigua, Guatemala I had the good fortune of meeting an intriguing fellow by the name of Christopher Howe. The short video below does a fine job of explaining things, so I'll refer you thereto for the details of his project, but I think it goes without saying that the kind of thing we see in Chris' trip is a big part of what makes people valuable. You don't see snails doing this kind of thing, do you?

iAMwalking.org movie from Christopher Howe on Vimeo.

Pretty sweet, right? And I thought I had a long voyage. This guy's straight-up walking through the desert, collecting rainwater, eating cactus - and why? If we take him at his word, it's at least partly out of a desire to help other people "realize the potential of their lives" - to think about all they're able to do, and what they want, and to empower them to move toward actually creating the life - and world - they think best, or at least better. I love that one fellow's comment toward the end: "If he can do this... I can do something." Anyway, last I heard from Chris he was making his way through Nicaragua, but lord knows where he is now. His site was down for a while recently, but I'll drop him a line and post a link to his blog when it comes back up. Good luck Chris!

Anyway, to conclude my own little narrative, after five days in San Juan I was starting to get fed up with the run-around I was getting with my mail, and decided on a whim to take a late-afternoon journey into the nearby town of Rivas and see if things were any different there. Wouldn't you know it, I had all my parcels off in a matter of minutes, and for a remarkably reasonable rate at that. Free at last, I nipped back to San Juan, packed my goods and left the following morning on the first bus headed for the Costa Rican border. It was a rather poorly organized place, full of confusingly parked semi-trucks, dirt roads and dodgy characters, but I managed to get through relatively quickly, and grabbed the next bus clear across the Northern part of the country down into the capital of San Jose.

Again, I spent a single night in a relatively uninteresting uptown backpacker place, and left the next morning on an afternoon bus into San Isidro de el General, a smallish city in the Southern portion of the country where I had another Couchsurf lined up with some friends of the folks I'd stayed with in Antigua. Bubba, Dixie, and Liz - lovely folks all - welcomed me warmly, and I wound up spending three very enjoyable days in their pleasant company, and that of the four delightfully tiny dogs who command the lush bit of land surrounding their beautiful two story home set just outside of town.

I'll tell you, it took some doing to pry myself away from delicious home cooked meals and good conversation, but I managed to do so this morning and grabbed a bus over to the Pacific coast, and then made my way down to another quiet little surfing town by the name of Uvita. I think I'll put no more than a night or two in here before heading on into Panama sometime in the coming days. My chief concern at that time will be trying to find another boat-ride not unlike the two I had in Mexico back in December - I hear it's not uncommon for foreign yachts to take the odd traveler along into the Northeastern part of Colombia. More on that front however, as the month progresses. South America here I come.

I hope this letter finds you all well and happy.

Lots of love from sweaty Costa Rica!