Shipboard, again

My travels are increasingly being defined by abrupt left turns - you´ll forgive me if I even go so far as to call this one a jibe - but that suits me just fine. It feels good to be on a boat again, especially a boat such as this. Indeed, having spent so much of my time of late in water, it is nice for once simply to be on it. The boat, Astor, is itself incredible. 86ft (26m) long, but only 13 across (4m), she is a woodened-hulled schooner from 1923 that just cuts through the water. She was designed for racing and, according to Richard and Lani, even though her displacement is 63 tons she can go over 30 knots - and when she does, watch out: it can take her up to two miles to come to a full stop. It is, needless to say, the biggest boat I´ve ever sailed on and damned intimidating. Fortunately for me, her owners, the aforementioned Richard and Lani, are anything but. California retirees in their 60s who have been slowly sailing Astor around select parts of the world for the last eight years - they are warm, friendly and inviting. They, like the boat itself, are better than I could have ever hoped for.

As if all of this were not enough, however, get this: the first night´s menu was the absolute freshest lobster you have ever seen.

I could get used to this!

Into the drink, dear friends!

So, having now reached the Panama Canal - and let me tell you, seriously, wow - by way of the longest bus ride in recent memory (15 hours, San Jose to Panama City), my journey south has come to an end. Fortunately, however, my journey back north is just beginning! Through a strange serious of coincidences - the best kind, I always say - I have lucked into passage, as crew, aboard the very sailboat pictured above. The timing is not exactly perfect (thus my marathon travel session), but the set-up is, so this time tomorrow I will be working my way north from the San Blas Islands of Panama.*
I could not, I assure you, be more excited.
Next stop: the high seas!

* This also means that communication of all kind will have to be kept to a minimum. Phone calls, IMs, e-mails, and even this blog with pretty much dry up for the duration. On the bright side, the boat has an e-mail address, so you can sporadically check its progress here: http://www.astor.org/

Much by accident, I assure you!

Over the last few days I´ve been climbing Cerro Chirripo, Costa Rica´s highest mountain and the tallest point between Guatemala and Peru. To put it simply, the hike has been incredibly intense and took some three days in all. Not quite the vacation from work I was hoping for, but really, how many times can you stand in one place and see the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the same time? Incredible. More impressive pictures to follow [eventually].

At the same time, it suddenly occured to me after reaching the summit that I´ve come a long way from both the Smokeys and Mexico, hiking-wise. I have this habit, it appears, of over-estimating my previous climbing experiences* so when I thought my latest attempt - Cerro Chirripo, 3820m or 12532ft - was about on par with my earlier exploits, I guess I thought wrong. By, oh, about half. I mean, I´ve already made it to the top (getting back is a different matter entirely, actually), but it truly is an order magnitude greater than anything I have tried before: the next tallest thing I´ve climbed might actually have been Cerro de la Silla (1820m or 5971ft) all the way back in the early days of Monterrey. Even Maderas, which brought me such endorphin-induced joy a few weeks ago was smaller than that. I mean, that makes sense, in a way (both were one-day climbs, whereas Chirripo has become a three-day affair) but you try telling that to my aching feet...

Still, tired though I may be, the same old feelings are there: equal measures exhaustion and exaltation.

* Maybe this has something to do with the metric system or maybe it´s just a way for me to feel better the next day when my knees don´t work, but who knows?

Coming to terms with Costa Rica

If I have remained conspicuously silent about my life as it is now in Costa Rica, there is a reason: compared to what has recently transpired both my life and the country itself are exceptionally dull.

The former is obviously the easier of the two to explain: having moved the travel bag into storage for the duration and being somewhat gainfully employed, I now have what approaches a routine. As much as I like the consistency after so much that was decidedly not consistent, even I (in retrospect) am bored to tears by the minutiae of my day-to-day.

The country itself is a harder nut to crack. It is wonderfully beautiful and its residents are possibly even kinder than their Central American brethren, but still it leaves me wanting. Let me put it this way: after so many weeks on the road, in so many alarmingly different cultures whose various eccentricies prompted no small number of ¨only in Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, etc.,¨ I find it all but impossible to say the same thing about Costa Rica. Wonderful it is, but different it is not. I mean, perhaps it is exceptional for its normalcy - the banal has historically been in short supply in this neck of the woods - but as beautiful, orderly, and safe as it is, at times I think I am no longer in Central America but rather Middle America.*

I like it here a lot, don´t get me wrong - I even like my job, such as it is - but I do miss the sense of adventure.

* This may mean nothing to the rest of you, but when I saw, in the central market of San Isidro, market stalls not only with electricity but refrigeration you could have knocked me over with a feather. I mean, imagine it - fish that stays cold from the catching all the way to the cooking... This is certainly a land more akin to Grand Rapids than Guatemala.