The San Blas
I stand on the bow of Blackwattle, bare feet planted each side of the anchor on the varnished gunwale, back against the fabric furler of the forestay. It’s a cotton-wool-cloud day in a happy blue sky, and there’s a sweet-smelling fifteen-knot breeze tickling the sea into a small chop. I laugh. More like a chopette!
Eyes shaded, loving the sun on my skin, I’m staring over the deep blue waters ahead, my Polaroids helping me look for telltale signs of coral reefs or shoals. When I lift my eyes for a moment I count thirteen palm-tree-sprouting islands dotted around me, looking like ragged broom tops, but I know that somewhere out there are more than 300 of these broom-topped islands. I am in the San Blas.
‘A little to the left,’ I call into my small two-way bow-to-cockpit mike. The boat changes direction slightly, missing a coral outcrop. We’ve been here a few days, chilling out after a stimulating journey from Cartagena. Now life is reduced to utter simplicity.
As I watch for shoals, I remember our last few days.
We have been anchored with less than a metre under the keel, the anchor visible from the bow in the clear water. We have swum, snorkelled and slept. We’ve met another Australian boat which arrived here a year ago meaning to stay a couple of weeks, and simply couldn’t find a strong enough reason to move on.
‘That’s the way the San Blas gets you,’ the skipper explains. ‘Why go home? Parking meters, parking fines, traffic . . . spending money on clothes and restaurants, cars, houses. Here we are in paradise, yet we spend nothing.’ Yachties must merely renew their documentation every now and then, and there are dozens of ‘local’ yachts that stay for years. They have made their own community. We tune in to their morning ‘Cruisers Net’ on the HF radio, and listen to their chatter about yoga lessons and Scrabble days, birthday parties and beach barbecues.
But this is a community of strangers. The ‘real’ community is of the Kuna Indians, one of the smallest races on earth, and one of the most determined to retain their own culture. As we stay a while, and learn, it’s inspiring to see these tiny indigenous people controlling their own future in a peaceful and organised way.
The ‘Congreso General Kuna’ have come by in a longboat to explain to us through a translator the Kuna rules: no spear fishing, no lobster catching, keep your garbage, dress properly if you visit an island. We are also told that every coconut tree is owned by ‘someone’ so please don’t steal the coconuts. We’ve paid US $10 for the privilege of anchoring here for three months, and we are told that local villages may ask for an extra $5. We set off to anchor near Mormake Tupu village on the island of Maquina, where one of the famous ‘master mola makers’ of the San Blas lives, and we are hoping to be invited to visit the village.
On the way, though, there is a disturbing incident. As usual, we watch our electronic chart carefully, our paper charts and also our cruising guide to the area. For once they all agree, and I count three islands that we must pass to reach the island of Maquina.
I am steering, but Ted must be giving me the wrong information. ‘I can only see two islands,’ I call.
‘Are you on the right course?’ he replies.
‘My course hasn’t changed.’
He checks the charts, and then checks again. Three islands. I turn the boat around. We cannot proceed if we don’t know where we are. We check our GPS position again and again, check against the other coastal indicators. It’s easy to make a mistake here, because all the islands look alike, each not more than a metre of sand high, covered by palm trees.
Then I see it.
‘Look, Ted, there!’
‘Where?’
As I point, and he sees it too, we stare in horror.
‘Yes,’ he breathes. It is in the right position, just as we expected. But there’s one difference. It is now merely a swirl of water. The island, which must have been there when the charts were made (and our cruising guide is the latest edition), has disappeared beneath the rising water level.
It is one thing to understand intellectually that the world’s water levels are rising. Respected scientists of the world agree that it is so. But to be faced with it a few metres from our bow is so shocking that I begin to feel physically ill. To realise that the people of the Maldives, of many islands in the Pacific and of these gentle San Blas Islands are to lose their homes, where they have lived for thousands of years, because of what our society has done is disquieting in the extreme. How can the peoples of the world blindly continue to lead their comfortable lifestyles? More to the point, how can I?
———
As we approach the island of Maquina, we see nothing but matted and thatched roofs, jammed together and covering all of the island, a jumble of different shades of brown. Along the shore, washing hangs on lines, and the occasional fisherman sets out or returns. Drawing closer, there are wharves abutting almost every house, rickety things lining the shore, with dugout canoes attached. The master mola maker’s brother, Idelfonso Restrepo (whom we had met before in another anchorage), has watched us arrive and is waving from his wharf, made mostly of bamboo. Idelfonso is extremely unusual in the San Blas, in that he speaks English.
Idelfonso takes us first to pay our respects to the Sahilas of the village – the chiefs, who are elected every four years. We are led through bamboo and coconut alleyways between thatched huts, followed by a train of giggling kids, the younger ones naked. After much shaking of hands with the Sahilas’ secretary, and in return for our US $5 fee, we are given permission to anchor in Maquina waters for one month, renewable. It is all explained very carefully, and we are given a handwritten scrap of paper torn with care from an exercise book, slightly crushed, but duly signed, and sealed with the ink-stamp of the village.
Formalities over, Idelfonso walks us through his house. We are led from his wharf on the water, where the washing hangs, past a ‘kitchen’ with an open fire. His house is a long, narrow, bamboo-walled thatched hut, dark inside, slats of light spearing the darkness from the cracks between the bamboo. He shows the ‘public’ rooms, the ‘bed’ rooms, and then his ‘shop’ where he sells T-shirts and lollies, on the ‘street’. One narrow corridor joins the rooms, all off to one side. Underfoot is fine-packed dirt.
We walk through the village on narrow pathways. People stand at their doors, staring and smiling. Tiny coloured beads, fitting as snugly as stockings, and creating intricate patterns, are wound around the legs and arms of all the women. They also have intricately multi-layered and multicoloured bodices, which are the focal points of their otherwise plainly wrapped bodies. These bodices are the molas, for which the San Blas are famous. Traditionally, girls make molas for their trousseaux, ready for marriage; these days, the villages earn extra income by selling them to tourists.
We stop to buy some molas from Idelfonso’s brother, Venancio, who is a master mola maker renowned for his craftsmanship. Tradition decrees that only women make molas. However, if a family has no daughters, one of the boys is brought up as a girl-child, and this is how one gets to be a ‘master’ mola maker. Venancio runs a bamboo-walled factory of women who make the fine molas. Almost the only people who ever visit this island are cruising sailors like ourselves. They offer to bead my wrist, and I willingly sit as one young woman, with a gaggle of children straining to see, makes me a Kuna wristband reaching halfway to my elbow. How sad that we cannot stay in the San Blas longer, and how many times have we said this in our circumnavigation?
As we leave I experience a hollow feeling of bad faith. I am still thinking about how we are part of the reason that island has disappeared. But it’s hard to stay morose when we’re about to sail for Panama. I am excited, but there is also a curious feeling of trepidation in my solar plexus when I think on this – like when an examination is around the corner, or the headmaster has just summoned you to the office and you don’t know why. The Panama Canal has a fascination, but Panama also means a crossing to the Pacific, and the Pacific means we’re getting close to home. What then? What then? I ask myself. But there is no answer.