After over four years of wandering through the Caribbean and exploring dozens of islands and hundreds of anchorages, you would think we are used to the excitement of arriving at a new locale. The thrill, however, never wears off. Each place can be so dramatically different in culture, landscape, language, food, customs and immigration procedures, […]
Posts with the Sailing tag
The Pura Vida Life
After two months living in the mountains of Cartago, Costa Rica, at an elevation of 1,200 meters (4,000 feet), we changed scenery for the hills west of San Jose with a magnificent view of two volcanos from our backyard. We chose the new rental house for its location offering us a relatively short drive into […]
Bungle in the Jungle
Before we knew it, we were hauling ¡Pura Vida! out of the water and it was time to leave Panama. Hauling out is never an easy or relaxing process, as you see your home and all its contents unceremoniously lifted from the sea and set to rest, unnaturally, on dirt. They call it “being on […]
Fleeing Zeus’ Wrath
We had spent five months of absolute bliss exploring the islands of the Guna Yala (San Blas), but it was time to move on. We were ready to leave for a couple of reasons. The main one was that we had exactly one month before our scheduled haulout of ¡Pura Vida! in early July and […]
Guna Yala – The Cruising Life
There is no way to write a single blog about the Guna Yala land and waters, and the Guna people, and do them justice. So we will break this up into three parts. This is the third part: the sea and the cruising life. The remoteness and simple lifestyle in the Guna Yala make it […]
Guna Yala – Remote and Isolated
There is no way to write a single blog about the Guna Yala land and waters, and the Guna (aka Kuna) people, and do them justice. So we will break this up into three parts. This is the second part: the land. Along the Caribbean coast of Panama lies an area called the Guna Yala, […]
The Guna: A Fascinating Culture
There is no way to write a single blog about the Guna Yala land and waters (also known as the San Blas), and the Guna people, and do them justice. So we will break this up into three parts starting with the most important: the people. A large portion of the Caribbean coastline of Panama […]
Roller Coaster to Panamá
The infamous Santa Marta winds were starting to kick up with nightly gales. If we did not leave soon, we would be stuck for a month or more at the marina with no chance of a safe departure. The seas were big, over 20 feet (7 meters), but they always are around the northeastern tip […]
Game Changer
Two doctors, a firefighter, three tanks of pure oxygen, a defibrillator, and a team of fellow cruisers doing non-stop CPR couldn’t save him. What happened in our anchorage recently, in the San Blas islands off the Panamanian coast, only a few boat lengths away from ¡Pura Vida!, was a sadly enlightening experience for us. One […]
Mountain High
We love our aquatic lifestyle, but when you’re in a country as diverse as Colombia, you have to explore inland. We knew we wanted to travel by air from Santa Marta to Bogota to meet up with local friends, but we wanted to explore more than just the big city. One night, while planning our […]