Merry X Mas

Merry Christmas to all. My Christmas wish is for none of you to ever drink the tap water in a costal town in Costa Rica. After travelling for over a month in Panama where the tap water is ok to drink I arrived to the beach town of Dominical in Costa Rica on the 22nd and kept drinking the tap water until on the 24th I took the time to look at the water I was drinking and it was full of black floating particles and some other UFO´s (unidentifed floating objects). For Christmas eve and all night I practiced running between my bed and the toilet. Christmas Day was spent in a hammock eating yogurt. Boxing day I woke up feeling much better so I headed for the waves only to come back 2 hours later beat up and probably feeling worse then the previous 2 days as I learned 12 ft waves are lot funner to look at then to play around in. Paddling out through these waves is a task on its own and when you end up on top of one of them, looking down at the sea below you before being pile drived into the bottom I gurantee your heart will skip a beat. After a few surf outings this trip I am starting to think it might be the ultimate cross training for mountain bike racing as it is great excercise for your upper body and it works on your balance and core strength. The layed back relaxed atomosphere is also pretty chill. More then anything though I figure its the perfect way to practice crashing uncontrollably. I think that after getting tossed around in the ocean with a surfboard tide to your leg that crashing on a bike is pretty tame as once you crash thats it, you dont have wave after wave pounding on top of you reminding you that your hurt and a surf board bouncing off your head. Crashing also makes you more flexible and bend in ways you never though possible. After a few days of this I had enough and road up to Quepos and world famous Manual Antonio National Park to meet my good tico friend Ronald who rode from his home in Sant Ana. Arriving in late afternoon was pretty scenic to see the cars lined up along the rode for over a mile and the beach jam packed full of tourists and vactioning Ticos. The national park has 5km of hiking trails through virgin jungle clinging to the cliffs overhanging the ocean and is full of monkeys and other crazy animals. We were up at 5:30am today to beat the rush into the park and we sccidently walked in the exit and had the park to ourselves for over an hour before the tourists hoards arrived at the park opening time of 7. We met a ranger at around 6:55 am who was a little moody and wanted to deport us out of the park but after some negotiations I think we confused him as I spoke in english and Ronald joked around with him in spanish and he decided to let us continue on our journey through the park. After a quick bite to eat it was on the bikes were we are now headed north towards his parents beach home near Orotina.

Sunday Funday

• Disc golf
• Waterfall adventure
• Shoot papa`s
• Tubing
• Strawberry splits
• Ping pong tourney
  
• Fire
• Cheap fireworks
  

Good bye Map

The trip up to visit Kat, a young peace corps volunteer from North Carolina got delayed a day as the ride over from Santa Catalina proved to much for a gringo biker and his map. Getting late in the day and not super stoked about biking on the Pan American highway again at night I pulled over to check my map. To my suprise there was a shortcut just 2 km ahead, a nice 23 km paved highway to my destination of Cerro Iglesia. Heading straight up hill I biked for 40 minutes into the night before coming to the small town of Nancito and the end of the road. I looked everywhere only to find deadends, exhausted I finally asked a local and he varified that the highway on my map didnt exist. Almost 2 hrs after dark now, my local friend invited me in for the night and the next day fed me a large breakfast and sent me the right way to Cerro Iglesia. ¡
Spending some time with Kat and seeing the life of a Peace Corps volunteer in Panama was pretty cool. I have met lots of these volunteers but I never imagined they were living in Bamboo huts in the middle of the junlge. The Panamians love there volunteers as they are constantly being helped in various ways whether it be developing new agriculture methods or building a shelter for the rainy season. Yesterday with directions from my friend I headed up into the mountains to a small indeginous village at 6 000 feet where my map showed the road ended, but behind town I noticed one kept going so I rode up it for 4 hrs, over a mtn and then started decending down to the caribean but the day was getting short and I could see the road didnt end anytime soon so I reluctanly turned around. After exploring these mtn roads in the highlands of Panama for the last couple weeks I have come to the conclusion that camping supplies, a GPS and a weeks worth of food would be necessary to explore this frontier properly. As for my map it is now in the hands of a young boy on the side of the highway as it is apparent it will make a better fire starter then the directions in was giving.

Heat

Panama is somewhat like Costa Rica was before the tourists bombarded the country a few yrs back. Life is laid back here and the tourist scene is just starting to develope in some areas and for now things are the way I imagine they have been for decades. A few days ago I took my bike down a small jeep path over the continental divide and decended into a wild caribean valley. Things were peacful and untouched, the jungle was in once piece, the jeep path was the only contact with the outside world and after 24 kms it turned into a knee deep pile of mud. After hiking with my bike for a 1km I left it and trudged on deeper into the heart of Panama. The locals I saw all stared, most the kids were scared of me and the adults I tried to talk didnt speak a word I knew back to me. At first I figured my spanish had gone to hell and I was getting pretty frustrated but once I made it back to civilization I found out the people I was talking to spoke an indigenous language and only the young kids were taught spanish in school. Returning to the spanish speaking world late in the evening I devoured 6 000 calories of food to get ready for the 150 km ride the next day to the fisherman town of Santa Catalina on the pacific coast. Having seen Santa Catalina on the Panama version of Monopoly I figured I was going to someplace devloped but what I found was a one store town which used a payphone to communicate to the outside world. Throughout the day people would call the payphone form around Panama and whoever was closest would answer the phone and then run around town calling out the persons name for who the call was for. Hardly a Monopoly worthy town, but soon I found out the real reason for the towns popularity was its enormous surf which is famous for being some of the best in Central America. While I was there the swell was small though and the surfers were going snorkeling not surfing. Today I am in the middle of a ride back into the interior to a small mountain town with nothing more than a few thatched houses where I will meet up with an American Peace corps volunteer to tour the area for a day and see more into the primitive lifestyle of the Panamanians. For now its plus 34 and Im off for a little siesta in the shade until the weather is a little better so Im not found melted into the pavement somewhere down the road.

Directions

After some beach time and working on a nice sunburn for a couple hours yesterday morning I set off riding to the city of Santiago around 1 pm. One thing about rides down in central america is that you can never be sure how long they will take and were they may take you. One of these reasons is there are next to no distance signs on the highways, and the other problem is that people will tell you what they think you want to here instead of the truth, especially when it comes to distances. When its really 30 km to some place, they will tell you 15 km because they want to see you smile. This causes problems for a gringo biker. Around 6 pm last night it was starting to get dark and Santiago city was nowhere in sight. I began asking locals and they suggested it was just 1 hr away. Doable, after another hr of riding it was now completely dark and still no city so I asked again. This time the city was just 30 min away. Alright I though I might as well put my headlamp on and keep going as there was a pretty well known and cheap hostal just outside of Santiago. After another hr of biking, still no city so I asked again. Now it was 45 mins to Santiago. Confused, running out of food and getting tired I started looking for an alternate accomodation for the night but there was nothing but jungle and swamplands so I kept riding. Finally at 10 pm, bonking and half in a coma I rolled into the hostal and passed out in a bed swearing to never listen to local directions again. Today its back into the mountains around Sante Fe to get out of the sweltering heat and more Canadian temps. First off I will buy a map and then start biking with my headphones on so I can no longer listen to local directions.

Mud & Rain

The ride over the mudslides started a little late as 95% of the boats stopped running between Bocas and the mainland as they were running out of gas. One last boat company still had a bit of fuel so they were running 4 or 5 times a day, whenever they had a full boatload os passengers. Hitting the mainland at 10 am I started the journey and it was smooth for the first 65 km with only 4 or 5 mudslides but after that the road was a disaster. For 15 km acending up to the divide there were streams running across the road, 40-50 mudslides, no road in 3 places and only half a road haning on over the steep mountainside in 2 other places. Lucky for me there were probably over 50 large machinery working on the mudslides and all but the last 2 mudslides had been cleared just wide enough so small 4x4 supply pickups could get through to the desperate civilians on the caribean coast. Three times during the ride, convoys of 20-30 pickups full of supplys would pass by with a polica car escorting them on either end. Being the only other person on the road I received some odd looks. At the end of the day I pulled into the Lost and Found Jungle hostal, a small treehouse type structure in the middle of a cloud forest with feeding stations all over to attract wild animals.

The next 6 days it has rained and I made my way to Boquete a small village of 4000 residents up in the Panamanian mtns. Here is a great place to xc ride through the jungles but I´m starting to morph into an amphibian after being wet for days on end. Usually in central american countries the rural folks hike around with machetes in there hands, but now everyone is packing an umbrella. Another traveller at the hostal I´m staying at has bought 3 of them, but they are a hot commodity and keep vanishing. As a result from the rains, most trails and side roads have been closed due to slides and being washed out. I tried one 12 km trail called the quetzal which passes over a small pass into another village but after the first 4 km I travelled about 350 meters over a jungle mess in the next 1 hr, saw a snake, got scared and peeled back to Boquete. On the way back to town I was chased by a few dogs which is nothing new in central america but these dogs were pretty aggresive. Overtime I have started to notice a trend that the wealthier a country is, the more vicious the dogs get as they are fed regular meals to stay strong. In countries like Nicaragua and Guatemala there are stray dogs everywhere but they´re undernourished and seldom a problem. Not here in Panama or Costa Rica. After many trials and errors I have found the best way to deal with these suckers is to stop, turn around and chase them with my water bottle back into there yard. Works 90% of the time. The other 10% of the dogs are a bit braver and pose more of a problem. Tommorow its off towards a small surf town on the pacific coast for a little warmer weather.