En el muelle de San Blas

To me small islands are kind of same same. I tend to believe they are essentially uninspiring and boring, and I am hardly excited at the idea of exploring any of them. Except that they are often an easy way to tick a box without risking my neck. So in the end I give them a try.
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Then I think twice. And I realise I did risk my neck a few times. In the Solomons' open waters, when we were lost at sea, caught in a storm and running out of petrol while I was at the same time dizzy, sunburnt and throwing up. Or when in the Comoros I was physically assaulted ina dodgy market by a couple of angry women. According to locals' beliefs, (my) photos would have potenzially been edited using the women's faces and a porn star body and then shared onthe web. Even educated people believed in the theory. It wasn't easy to explain them that none would have never posted nor enjoyed a picure featuring a porn star naked body with an old Comorean lady's face.

I obviously tried to explain it without sounding too offensive. Just to prevent from being assaulted again.

Besides, I had the fortune to live rich cultural experiences in Vanuatu and at the Galapagos, and I had a blast hitchhiking in Tahiti, ending up in a local's bed in Tonga or walking up and down Palau and the Seychelles. Always, mercilessly, sunburnt.

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But the most rewarding island experience to me was probably in Panama's San Blas archipelago, a group of 365 riddles-like drop of sands scattered on the Atlantic Ocean, a natural bridge for drug traffickers to avoid the military packed land border between South and Central America.
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The name sounded so evocative to me, I mostly picked the place because of it. But what I found was heaps better.

Panama’s history, anthropology and geography have been shaped by its strategic location between the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean. The capital, Panama City, was founded by Pedro de Avila in 1519, 17 years after Columbus' fourth and last voyage, as the starting point for expeditions that conquered the Inca Empire in Peru. The native Cuevas and Cocos tribes quickly disappeared after the Spanish arrived in the early 16th century with their guns, germs and steel.
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On the other hand, as caravans full of gold traveled overland across the isthmus to be loaded on galleons bound for Spain, this wealth attracted so many pirates stronghold that, in the early 1700s, shippers chose instead to sail around Cape Horn to Peru to avoid them.The region's importance rapidly declined, and Madrid did not contest its inclusion as a province of Colombia when the then New Grenada won its independence from Spain. Panama was free to join the self-determination bandwagon and technically born as an independent State on November 28, 1821.
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The history of the nation is actually more complex, as United States recognized Panama only 80 years later, in 1903. Roosevelt's advocacy for Panama's full sovereignty had likely to do with a more direct access to the administration of the Canal - built in 1881 and originally controlled jointly by US, France and Colombia. 

The country has such and odd curved shape that the canal connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific ocean doesn't go from west to east (as anyone would think), but from NORTH-EAST to SOUTH-WEST. And there's also a significant gap in the two Oceans' level that the completition required a fait bit of engeneering triccks.

As for the indigenous people, nowadays there are approximately 400,000 left - just over 1/8 of the country's population. Some of them live a simple life in this paradisiacal archipelago in the Caribbean, where there's no power, sewage or running water. 

And where there are still many pirates, as none ever completed the highway through the jungle connecting North and South America and the trades, all sorts of, still happen at sea.

A wonderful, unspoilt place - marginally turned into a tourist spot - adopted me. A Guna Yala's Jantupu village became home: I slept on a hammock, drank rainwater, ate the only available food, which happened to be lobster (nothing but lobster for breakfast, lunch and dinner - except they didn't have any condiments, either salt or mayo) and killed all the time in the world in two possible ways: reading a 1,774 unfinished novel of an Austrian XX century writer or swimming between islands like the one in the photo. 

Holding my compact camera in the process.

Senza acqua, luce, gas, lenzuola da cambiare, pavimenti da spazzare, fogne da spurgare e toilettes da pulire, nei villaggi Kuna dell'arcipelago di San Blas il condominio si paga con una stretta di mano.

p.s. cara ET (Einaudi Tascabili, se ce l'avevo con l'Extraterrestre scrivevo "Caro", sebbene il sesso fosse perlomeno ambiguo), non avendo lo scontrino dubito che ricevero' la sostituzione del secondo volume de "L'uomo senza qualita'". Ma visto che sul tomo in mio possesso mancano le pagine dalla 1233 alla 1264, me ne spedirebbe gentilmente almeno una sintesi? (data l'andatura della storia non dovrebbe essere molto corposa)

Aggiunta gallery: Polinesia in RTWO2007-08

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