BTW, please forgive any wierd spellings etc. in my posts for the next few weeks--even though this about my 8th trip to Central America, I´ve yet to get the hang of Spanish keyboards. We´re getting up at 4:30 in the morning tomorrow to catch a small plance to the San Blas Islands in the Comarca de Kuna Yala. Shar is now wishing she had written out our will, since it´s been thundering & lightning-ing today & she says she´s keeping my leatherman handy for when she gets fed up with me laughing about just how close the lightning got to our little plane. Little does she know my plan is to be pouring rum for the pilot. I´ll tell him to do a roll, or nose dive when she comes after me with the knife.
We spent a day in Santa Clara. I am sorry to say that place seemed to combine some of the worst of Latino & American culture. The beach had weekend ATV types using people on foot as markers for an obstacle course. There were also jetskis which I´ve never seen in C.A. The funky hotel we stayed at blared music till late hours, the people in the next room to us (which was open to us above the sheet of 1/16 in. plywood separating the two rooms) blared cartoons on the TV all night. On the neighboring beach, guys with those rigs with 150,000 watt sound systems and 36 in. bass speakers in the trunks had a competition of booming reggae-tone. Some sort of cultural experience. We left and found digs a few miles to the east at Playa Palmar Surf Camp. Cheaper and infinitely nicer. Beautiful place, nice folks. The locals (or whoever they were--I never figured it out) sat around with us last night singing and passing guitars around. They wanted blues & 70s American & English rock & roll! I come here to do latin music! One more casualty of US imperialism. The oldest of the guys there explained to me that he learned all this music from "Zonians," US guys he used to surf with when the canal was the US.