Panama Canal Zone - English

for more pictures of Panama click here --- hier klicken fuer Bilder von Panama

We got off the Tica Bus in Panama City at about 5am, tired and half frozen - the bus had the air conditioner on high the whole way - and excited for the new adventures to come. It was unfortunate that we had to skip all of Costa Rica (spent about 18 hours in San Jose but didn't get to explore much while waiting for our next bus) - we'll leave that part of Central America for the next trip! We spent about an hour getting our bike and gear off the bus and ready, it was still dark and we were trying to decide if we should sit and wait until daybreak to ride the 30 km to Alex's house or take a bus. The decision was made for us: there were no buses to Gamboa that could take our bikes, so we rode.

It was a nice ride, quick and scenic along the east side of the canal to Gamboa - a small town populated mainly by researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and their families. It was a special gift to be able to stay here as very few tourists are allowed to come, and then at a high price. We moved into Alex's house, glad to be able to unpack and relax, enjoy a nice house with a bed, a shower, a full equipped kitchen, and most of all the company of Swen's old university and outdoor-action friend Alex, with whom we spent many nights in long animated talks about science, politics, ecology, the world and our future till long past midnight, accompanied by our old friends rum and coke who we haven't enjoyed for a long time.

Alex took us on some beautiful hikes through the tropical jungle and we saw some great wildlife: howler monkeys, cappuchin monkeys, spider monkeys, poisonous dart frogs, toucans, rodent type animals called agoutis, crocodiles, lots of cool birds, a deer, cool lizards and iguanas.... and not to mention ticks. Kat found out the hard way what a "tick bomb" is: an invasion-explosion of clusters of ticks crawling and hiding all over you, biting and itching. We found them on us several days afterwards too! We also got a very special opportunity to go to the research island Barro Colorado - from Gamboa we rode about 5 minutes on the bikes to a dock and took a boat 45 minutes to the island which is full of about 70 phd students, researchers, and a few staff doing studies on soil and rainfall, water flows, bats, ants, and other things regarding tropical rainforests. A fascinating talk and slide show was given by one of the researchers - a photographer doing photo expositions on exotic, ecologically fragile and endangered communities of monkeys, bats, orchids. He has won many awards and had his photos published in magazines such as National Geographic, Geo, and many others.

We walked all around Panama City - easily the most developed city we have been to since we began this trip. The downtown has a huge financial district with dozens of huge skyscrapers and super super fancy malls with Armani stores, etc. It isn't a very pretty place but everyone here has been really very nice and the Spanish spoken here is the most clear and easily understood we have heard in a while. However, it is about 90 degrees F (30 C) and 70% humidity - the rainy season is just about to start - so we have mostly been a couple of sweating, melted, sticky heaps of soggy clothes zig-zagging across the city from one shady spot to the next, occasionaly finding an air conditioned patch to refresh in for a few minutes before darting out again to the next spot.

Panama has so much to explore, but we can't stay long because we only have a 1 month visa and extending it requires way too much work (including a letter from a Panamanian who will sponsor us and afterward you must make a special request to leave the country) so when we return someday to Costa Rica we also include the west of Panama that we were unable to visit.

But we did visit the Miraflores Locks of the Panama Canal, and its museum that was a really nice exhibition on the planning, history, construction and future of the canal. They are currently expanding the canal a lot, building a second set of locks all along it, which will allow bigger ships and thus increase the income (the Canal is the major income source of the country), as they pay per weight. The fascinating museum with its view point over Miraflores locks kept us there for a whole morning.

It was a close call being able to leave "on time": it turned out that the brake problem on Kat's bike wasn't really a brake problem but a rim problem. We ran all over Panama City for almost a whole day to find a replacement, had to fit the spokes and do all the adjustments ourselves, but in the end it worked fine, Kat learned more about bike repairs, and now we don't have to delay the adventure any longer. So, having filled up on stimulating, intellectual conversation and the comforts of a home, tomorrow we cycle to the Caribbean coast where we will look for boats to take us through the many islands in the San Blas Archipelago and work our way over to Columbia.

It may take us 2 weeks to get to Cartagena in Colombia and until then most likely there will be no electricity or anything besides small villages of indigenous people - essentially a huge reservation where the indigenous people are in complete control and have total authority and autonomy for what goes on in their territory - a huge difference in the rights of indigenous peoples in Latin America as well as much of the world! They even have refused the US military as well as the Panamanian coast guard and military from coming into their waters - making the area a bit of a heaven for the drug traffickers. We have heard of the wonders of these islands and hopefully will fill the days drinking coconut milk, snorkeling (dolphins and manatees are some wildlife we may see if we are lucky!) and relaxing on these beautiful Caribbean beaches - while trying to avoid the above-mentioned drug lords. Read about it in our next blog!

Best wishes to you all and happy springtime (or fall as the case may be for our friends in the southern hemisphere). Thanks for your comments and emails! Keep them coming!
Until next time, kat and swen

Nicaragua - English

to see more photos click here --- hier klicken fuer mehr Fotos

As we crossed the border from Honduras to Nicaragua we were hit with the mouthwatering smells of roasting coffee beans - a delicious scent present all throughout the mountain range we rode through those first few days. While riding in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras it was mostly the harvesting season when the coffee beans were picked, the fruits were peeled and the beans were left out to dry all over the roadsides and rooftops before being roasted - the smell of the piles of rotting fruit peels was not so appetizing. The change in coffee season was a nice welcome into this pleasant country that would become one of our favorites so far.

We biked through rolling hills of coffee plantations, through the moutains to a small town where we were greeted with friendly faces and had a wonderful lunch - fried plantains, boiled yucca, beans and rice with delicious fried yucca balls dipped in liquid sugar for desert! Camping was beautiful in the mountains of Miraflor National Park with lots of plants - flowers, big trees, grass pastures. It was nice to get on the bikes again for more serious riding after our long breaks in Honduras. There were a few days going through tough climbs that we hadn't experienced since Guatemala, but the pay-off was the 45 km/30 mile descent going at speeds up to 68 kph (~40mph)!

We managed to get farther than we were expecting that day and made it to an interesting thermal bath outside of Managua to soak our tired muscles. As we got there late, we asked and were allowed to camp there for the night. This way we had plenty of time to relax our bodies in a sweating hut built right on top of a very hot-steaming thermal spring. Loads of Nicaraguans, mostly overweight, seemed to come here every day as part of their dietery program, exercising in the hot steams and massaging each other with essential oils and honey - it was very nice to experience this tradition with all the locals, being the only foreigners there (even though in non-traditional surrounding, as the baths were rather modern).

We had a very early leave in the morning to get to the city of Masaya, 20 km east of the capital Managua (which we skipped as we didnt hear much positive about it from tourists and locals). Masaya is famous for it's big artesania market, located in an old fortress that looked like an old castle. It wasn't the nicest city, but an interesting one, as we walked and biked around town. We spent 2 days there in a nice hostel with a nice courtyard garden and were able to take a few hours to ride out (without our luggage!) to active volcano Masaya 6km outside of town. It has a road built up to its rim, offering beautiful views all around and - most impressive - a look deep into its steep crater, with sulfurous smoke billowing out of it constantly, stinging our eyes and hurting our throats whenever the wind blew our way. There was a museum in the park as well, offering some of the best natural history displays we have seen in Central America so far, including plate tectonics, volcanology, botany and zoology, 3D-models of the area, as well as helpful and friendly rangers showing us around!

Nicaragua has the biggest lake in all of Central America, Lago Nicaragua, 58km in length and 177km long (35 x 110 miles). We planned to ride to Granada, a colonial town on the edge of the lake, and take a ferry from there to Ometepe island. The island, formed by twin volcanoes raising over a thousand meters out of the lake, was part an old Mayan prophecy of two volcanoes that will be found within a freshwater ocean. And indeed, crossing the lake by ferry you could easily feel being in the middle of the open sea, as the far shore is mostly not visible. As we arrived in Granada there was unfortunately no ferry until 3 days later: we had been misinformed by the Masaya tourist office and our guide book! So we rode around a little to see the colonial town center, and then raced about 60 km and hitchhiked 35 km more to get to a town that definetely had a ferry leaving that day. We made it and were on the island by early afternoon, camping on a lonesome beach.

The island was great - we spent almost a week there, the first few days on one side, and the last 2 on another. In the middle of the huge lake, and 18km (12 miles) away from mainland by the shortest route, we felt like we were on an island in the ocean - except we swam in freshwater! We got in some nice relaxing time of doing nothing but reading, swimming, cooking, and chatting with some other travellers and natives we befriended. Swen went for a hike up the lower of the two volcanos, Volcan Madera, with organic coffee fincas, beautiful cloudforests, lots of monkeys, great views and a crater lake on top on the way, while Kat preferred relaxing a little more. Especially nice - and rather good timing - was meeting up the last 2 days with Kat's friend and former colleague Maura, who was in Nicaragua on her vacation - Kat got updated on all that has been going on with mutual friends and the midwifery world!

We decided to skip through Costa Rica and get to Panama City by bus to meet up with Swen's friend Alex from university who is living and working there, so the day we left the island we made it to the border, crossed, and took a bus all the way to San Jose, capital of Costa Rica. We spent the evening wandering around a bit - and surprisingly met a cyclist we met two weeks before in northern Nicaragua. Late the next morning we took our connecting bus to Panama City and the rainforest research community of Gamboa where Alex lives - our adventures there will be described in the next blog entry!