Colón, Saturday 22 July
Guidebooks claim that Panama City is dangerous. I have ridden through the city over the past week. A barrio has a look of danger; I find a different route. I have been careful and have never felt threatened and have been assisted with courtesy when asking for directions. I have had a great time.
Colón is different.
Colón is dangerous.
Development has passed it by.
No skyscrapers, no flash banks.
Not even a decent downtown hotel. No sensible visitor would want to stay downtown.
I stop by a couple of cops patrolling the pavement on the central avenue. They direct me to a bank and call a motorbike team to escort me. The two cops who escort me ride a trail bike and wear dark-glass space helmets and flak jackets over combat camouflage. They carry machine pistols and automatics and clubs. I follow them to the bank. The bank has three guards. It is a small bank – no bigger than a branch bank in a small English market town.
I carry a debit card in preference to a credit card, because I reason that debit cards are of less use to a thief. Debit cards are also of little use to the Colón bank. A kind teller presumes I have misused the ATM. She tries the card and gets the same message: Call my bank. Saturday afternoon in England and my bank is closed for the weekend.
We are plastic-dependent. Even more so when travelling. I am stuck. I am in jail. Plastic is my jailer. Will plastic release me on Monday? Meanwhile what to do?
Maybe the Germans from the Stahlratte will be at Mirimar. I can explain my predicament. Mirimar is eighty-five kilometres east along the coast from the Panama–Colón highway. This is a weekender coast. Schools are out on summer vacation and the wealthy are down from Panama City. Flash family 4x4s come loaded with surfboards and ice chests.
The road is good for the first thirty-five kilometres to Portobelo. Beyond Portobelo I weave between potholes. The road is hard dirt for the final stretch. Rain falls as I walk the bike across one of those plank-on-plank bridges. To me, this is a different country. It is not Latin America. It is Caribbean. The sea is ever present, palm trees, almonds, sea-grape trees. Most faces are black. Men favour sleeveless undershirts. Small girls wear their hair braided. Big girls and women have the curls ironed out. Each village carries the scent of fried fish and the music volume is on high.
No Germans are in Mirimar. How do I know? Mirimar is too small to hide a chicken. The dirt street is wet; the trees drip. Small thatched and tin-roof houses sit miserably among the puddles. A Yamaha low-rider loaded with packs is parked outside a shack. The Japanese biker and his girlfriend eat fried fish on the small terrace. His hair is cut shoulder length; he wears string and leather bracelets and amulets round his neck. She has studs in her tongue. They both speak some English. She has been living in Mexico and speaks better Spanish. I relate my plastic jailer. We share biker experiences. They find 300 kilometres a full day’s ride. Further and their hips hurt. I guess the pain is caused by the angle at which they sit on the low-rider. The low-rider looks cooler than my Honda pizza-delivery bike. However, I sit upright on the Honda. All I suffer is a numb butt.
We walk to the dock. A big dugout canoe lies alongside. I would guess it is thirty feet in length. It is narrow of beam and powered by an outboard. The bulwarks have been heightened with planks and it carries a cargo that is mostly Coca-Cola. The captain, a Coona, has his crew shift the Coca-Cola aft to make room for the Yamaha. The canoe is five feet below the dock. They tie a strip of canvas to the bike and lower away. I would be scared for the bike. So are the Japanese. Up there in the bows, the bike is going to get wet in anything other than a glass-flat sea. Islands of mangrove protect the shore and we can’t see the height of the waves. We say our goodbyes and our good lucks. I watch the canoe slide out from the dock and head out between the mangrove. Maybe the plastic jailer did me a favour. I return to the terrace where we met and eat fried snapper.
Portobelo, Sunday 23 July
I have found a room in Portobelo, base for the annual Spanish treasure fleets for 150 years. In truth, the town is no more than a village. It guards a lovely bay. It boasts three small ruined Spanish forts, a Spanish customs house that now houses a museum, a small walled Spanish cemetery and three churches. One of the churches displays a famous statue: a black Jesus.
Columbus visited in 1502. The road to the Pacific, the Camino Real, started here. What more could a tourist town desire?
Portobelo should be beautiful. It should have charm. It has litter. It is strewn with the detritus of the fast-food era. It is polystyrene paradise, a visual symphony to cellophane, a sepulchre for discarded Styrofoam cups.
The restaurants serve genuine Caribbean food, fried, fried, fried.
Drake’s is the gringo yachtie haven. The owners are a Canadian and his Fijian-born wife. Presumably neither of them is a historian: Drake torched Portobelo. I leave a message for any yacht sailing for Cartagena.
I ride thirty-five kilometres from Portobelo to Sabanitas, junction of the coast road and the Panama City–Colón highway. I work at an internet outlet for a couple of hours. Then, for the hell of it, I cross the highway to the town’s only bank. I stick the plastic in the slot and ask for 200 dollars. The ATM spits out the cash. Too late to catch the Germans.
Portobelo, Monday 24 July
Dawn and Portobelo lies under a tablecloth of charcoal cloud. The cloth has a paler fringe at the horizon. The one window in my room at the Hospedaje d’Aduana overlooks the bay. Rain falls steadily. The yachts lying to anchor are almost hidden. Closer to shore a line of pelicans rises to a barely noticeable swell.
This coast may be a holiday paradise for the wealthy young of Panama City. Perhaps they don’t notice the trash. The trash and the attitude. The attitude is unavoidable. This is the first area in 6500 kilometres of journey in which people have tried to scare me as I ride by, shouting suddenly or pretending to throw a stone. Not often, but it happens. Kids, mostly, teenagers.
The cops stop me at a checkpoint. They tell me to check out the Coco Solo wharf in Colón for a trading vessel sailing for Cartagena. Coco Solo lies to the east of the highway. I don’t have to ride into the city. A Latino mestizo at a bus stop gives me directions. I ask whether it is safe.
‘Be careful,’ he answers.
Great.
I ride a kilometre and enquire again of a guard at the entrance to a container wharf.
‘Keep going,’ he tells me. And be careful.’
I pass the flooded entrance to a row of tenements waiting to be cast in a horror movie. Beyond the tenements lies an opencast litter mine. Rain falls. The road narrows between walls of sugarcane. I ask directions of a black woman walking with a cute daughter beneath a pink umbrella. The woman tells me I should have taken the flooded entrance. I turn back. I want to keep going right on back to the highway.
I have already chickened out of sailing to Jaque.
I take the turn at the tenement buildings and ride gingerly through the flood. The docks and ships lie ahead behind a twelve-foot security fence. The road is flooded to the fence. Half a dozen men in semi-rags are picking through the litter dumped to the right of the flooded road. I imagine myself through their eyes: a fat juicy pigeon. Hitting a pot-hole hidden beneath the floodwater will put me in serious trouble.
A medium-dark middle-aged man in cap and dungarees picks his way along the edge of the road from the dock. He tells me that there are no boats in for Cartagena. I should try the wharf on Fifth Street, Colón.
I ask whether Fifth Street is dangerous.
‘Dangerous, yes. But not as dangerous as where you are now.’
I turn the bike very, very carefully and ride back through the flood and out of Coco Solo.
The main avenue in Colón is a dual carriageway. Trees shade the avenue. If it were safe, it would be a pleasant place for a stroll and a little window-shopping. I stop on the avenue to ask a woman directing traffic for directions to Fifth Street. She advises me to enquire of a proper cop. I follow her directions to a cop shop and find myself at the entrance to a slum street of crumbling tenements. This is a street that I wouldn’t enter in an army tank. I do a quick U-turn back to the avenue. A fellow biker, a clerk type with a briefcase, pulls alongside. I ask for directions. He tells me to follow. We cross the avenue and he halts at a couple of cops (checking out the war zone?).
The cops signal us on and we make it to the Fifth Street dock.
Guards direct me to the captain of a small trading vessel. The captain tells me of a vessel due on Thursday and expected to sail Saturday for Cartagena. The captain tells me of another biker seeking passage, a Chino. ‘Chino’ encompasses anyone with almond eyes.
Enough for one day. Enough of Colón. I am in need of a cold beer.
Portobelo, Tuesday 25 July
I am stuck in Portobelo. I have a room with a bathroom. The bed has two foam mattresses and tissue-thin nylon fitted sheets that slip off the mattress corners if I sneeze. The bathroom has cold water, bearable after the first strike. The cotton towel wouldn’t dry a damp mouse. I could do with a shelf above the sink. Instead, I balance the tubes and cups and soaps of old age along the back of the sink from where they fall whenever I move. I breakfast on scrambled eggs and great coffee at a thatch-roofed restaurant across the road. A bright, pretty girl of seven has adopted me as an auxiliary grandfather. She is very dark with naturally straight hair and an unnaturally wicked smile. I believe that she is the cook’s daughter. I could be wrong – Caribbean relationships are complicated. She has shown me how to use the washing machines at the launderette and walked me to the health clinic to have a stitch removed from my finger – a stitch the nurse in Bocas had overlooked.
A black man I believe to be my temporary granddaughter’s true grandfather has a habit of discussing politics and social issues while I drink my second cup of coffee of a morning. He tells me there is no work to be had in Portobelo. He tells me that none of the black people own farms. The Latinos own all the land. The Latinos bought the land from the black people for next to nothing. He tells me that modern youth is utterly corrupted. Thirty years ago you could walk through Colón counting hundred-dollar bills and be as safe as in a bank safe. Now kids kill you for a five-dollar watch.
Portobelo, Wednesday 26 July
I ride down the coast and take a side road through palm trees that leads to a small village. A boy-man tells me of a foreigner who owns a bar the other side of a hill. I ride a dirt road over the hill and down to a collection of huts and a couple of houses on the shore. The foreigner caretakes yachts that lie at anchor inshore from clumps of mangrove protected by a reef.
I ride down a path between trees and over two narrow concrete foot-bridges. The foreigner’s house is whitewashed concrete block with a tin roof. A big covered deck leads to a concrete dock supported on concrete-filled oil drums. A small black dog on a chain snarls and lunges at my ankles. A toucan watches me from a large cage. A shy immature mulatto girl, fourteen or fifteen at most, appears in a loose cotton dress. The foreigner is away in Colón. The girl brings me a tin mug of iced water.
I ride back down the path and across the footbridges. The littoral is rolling hills and valleys. I ride a kilometre down a farm track. The farmhouse stands on the tip of a promontory. The farmer and his wife are Latinos. They run a small dairy herd on 300 hectares. Their two sons don’t care for the land and work in Panama City.
Portobelo, Thursday 27 July
Portobelo awakes to a second day of incessant rain. The Spanish treasure fleet gathered annually in Portobelo Bay. Now the few yachts anchored offshore look miserable and unromantic. None is sailing to Cartagena. I sprint across the road to breakfast. The Spanish bridge is diagonally across the street. The bridge once carried the treasure of the Americas to the customs house in Portobelo – the town was sacked repeatedly by the Brits. Drake was first – he died here and is buried offshore. The list contains all the great names of pillage: Parker, Morgan, Vernon, Kinghills – all put Portobelo to the torch. Presumably they attacked in the dry season. Today you would require a loaded petroleum tanker.
Portobelo has been declared a World Heritage Site. The Spanish bridge is being strengthened and the cobbles are being replaced. This cobbling is the only work in town. Six men are unoccupied with the cobbling. They have rigged awnings against sun and rain and sit on the balustrade and chat among themselves.
A black woman wearing a pinstripe business suit sips black coffee at the next table. I watch her watching a couple of black men at the far end of the restaurant veranda. The men’s speech is loud and comes in brief rapid bursts. They are wired. The one man is unable to keep still. His movements are as jerky as his speech. The cook has brought his breakfast. He forks a mouthful of sausage, only to be distracted. Up he jumps and crosses the street to the Chinese supermarket for a quick talk with a man in a pale grey hoody. He returns and actually eats the first forkful of sausage. Then he is back to the Chinese, then down the street. He returns with a cardboard container of orange juice. He picks at his food a moment and then is off to speak with the six men sitting under awnings at the Spanish bridge.
I continue watching the pinstripe woman. Read her face and you know that she is thinking: ‘Lord, am I really part of this?’
She finishes her coffee, checks that all four doors of her dark-grey Nissan car are securely locked and boards a white Health Department 4x4. Four vultures sit on the roof of the Chinese supermarket. I eat my eggs.
In Colón workmen have closed fifth Street midway between Central Avenue and the wharf. I backtrack down Central Avenue. How can I tell which street is safe? I take a right, ride to the end, take a second right and am at the gates to the wharf. The boat for Cartagena has not arrived. It should be in tomorrow. My informant is the skipper of a boat heading through the San Blas Islands to Cartagena. I am tempted. However, the voyage will take three weeks. Waiting in Panama has already put me behind schedule. I don’t have three weeks.
The guard at the gate warns me to take a left outside the gates to return to Central Avenue. Turning right would take me into dangerous territory. Right is the way I came. Ouch.
The guard also tells me of a second biker seeking passage: the biker is a Chino.
The relationship between men and women in Portobelo confuses me. The sexes seem separate species, and communication between the two is clearly difficult. Mostly it consists of women shouting at men. Whatever the message, it seldom gets through. I remark on this to the cook while eating breakfast this morning. She replies that the men here are cold. She asks where we live and in what type of house. I describe our cottage and the garden and that Bernadette told me yesterday on the telephone that she had saved a failing rose bush. For medicine she had used horse manure from the dung heap behind my brother’s stables.
The cook complains that no man has ever given her a rose.
Riding back from Colón, I stop at the big supermarket. I buy fruit salad and a packet of cured pork loin for my dinner and a bunch of pink roses for the cook. The cook says that I am a good man and gives me a hug and a kiss. My temporary granddaughter giggles. I drink coffee and watch the traffic pass through town. Public transport is old school buses imported from the US. The buses have names: Doña Lola, Conquistador, Niña Jenny. The sides are painted in stripes and often bear cartoon characters. The back is the real canvas. Some subjects are religious: the Resurrection, the Angel Gabriel. Others have pictures of the jungle, rivers, a puma. I spotted a Swiss mountain scene. On others, scenes are drawn from fantasy movies.
Cherished buses have their exhausts extended with chrome pipes rising vertically up the back and all buses have messages painted across the windscreen. IN GOD WE TRUST is a favourite. Bikers are vulnerable. I would prefer the driver to trust less in God and have better visibility.
Colón, Saturday 29 July
I ride to the Fifth Street wharf at noon. The boat for Cartagena is in. The skipper will take me. The bike is a problem. Why? I don’t know. The skipper will tell me midday on Monday whether he can take us both. He will give me the fare at midday on Monday. I shall spend the weekend chewing my nails.
As insurance, I ride out to the Shelter Bay yacht marina. The road crosses the canal. The bridge is a steel grid on top of the lower lock gates. Water boils out of the sluices on one side while the bows of a massive ship tower above on the other.
Beyond the canal, the road leads to the marina through the rich forest of a national park. I speak with the director, a grey-haired, grey-bearded, big-bellied American eating lunch in the clubhouse with his decorative female Panamanian assistant, probably thirty years his junior. The assistant shows interest in my journey. The director sends me outside to talk with the janitor, a Coona Indian.
The Coona is fishing off a dock with a weighted line and crab for bait. He pulls in a couple of fish while lecturing me on what is good food and what is bad food. Bad food is what people eat at Chinese restaurants. The Chinese cook rats and cats and dogs – again, I quote. Meat in fried rice is rat.
The Coona is fifty-nine years old. He was out of work for a year. He visited all the factories in the Free Zone. He was told either that he was too old or that they would be in touch. They never were in touch. He has four children and three grandchildren to feed. He went hungry often. His mother-in-law does sewing and embroidery work to sell to tourists. The mother-in-law was hard on him, nagging and demanding why he didn’t work and why he was reading all the time. The Coona was reading the Bible. He reads the Bible every day. God answered his prayers with the janitor’s job. Solving difficulties is all a matter of praying and waiting. God will answer prayers in his own good time.
The Coona is close to tears while relating his trials. Although a sweet man, he is of little help to an aged Englishman with a bike in need of a boat. The marina director and his assistant are in the warehouses. The assistant asks how I progressed with the Coona. I tell her of his mother-in-law and she giggles. The director is irritated so I leave and ride to the shopping mall outside Colón on the Panama City highway.
I have lost the knife I bought in Mexico. I try a big hardware store. The security guard is an off-duty cop – a sergeant, no less, and a fanatic biker. What sex (the cop not the bikes)? Female, mother of four, and a widow. Her left leg twists through 200 degrees – that was the Harley wreck. The weird elbow was a BMW. A Yamaha 750 did for her right knee. She is impressed by my leather leg gauntlet; her right leg has burn scars up to mid-thigh. She is wearing uniform biker’s breeches; we can’t compare scars.
Her sergeant’s pay is 600 dollars a month. She has two kids at school and two in further education and supports her mum. Do the sums and you understand the need for extra income. We chat for half an hour out on the pavement. A lovely woman.
Colón, Monday 31 July
I have met with three Americans over the past few days. The first is ex-military on a disability pension. A staff-sergeant, he lost his left forearm in a parachute accident while serving a second tour of duty in the Canal Zone. He has bought a house in the Canal Zone from the Panamanian government and lives here with his second wife, Panamanian, and their baby girl. He is a Puerto Rican, Spanish-speaking, a small, thin man, grey-haired. He talks indignantly of America’s surrender of the canal. In the old days Panamanians working in the Zone were paid American wages, as were the many employees of the American Zoners. The Panamanian government boasted of taking over the canal for the benefit of the Panamanian people.
So now who lives in the Zone?
Foreigners employed in the Free Trade Zone. Their Panamanian employees are paid the minimum wage: approximately 280 dollars a month.
Ernesto finds this ironic and is bitter at the treatment of the working class. As to the Iraq war, he believes that the US had to do something after the attack on the twin towers.
He is a keen angler, fishing from a dugout canoe. He holds the line in his right hand and loops the slack round his left stump. He catches good-sized fish and red friction burns from the line ring his stump. He suggests that I am courageous in riding a bike through Latin America. He asks how I feel on the bad days. I am ashamed to have bad days. This man is an expert on bad. He is an everyday hero.
The second of the three Americans is a teacher of history at the American school in Honduras. He is from New England. He is in his early thirties, a tall, quiet, thoughtful man. We discuss history and Central America and the war in Iraq. His father, a middle-of-the-road Republican, is against the war and believes that the US should withdraw immediately; the teacher votes Democrat and is also against. However, he believes that he would have enjoyed the army, the comradeship and being part of a team. He sent me an email yesterday. I thank him.
I met the third American in Portobelo – a yachtsman. He is one of a threesome at the restaurant where I eat dinner. His companions are a couple. The man is a Polish software engineer, also with a yacht. His girlfriend is English.
The American is a small man, pugnacious and opinionated – not much of a listener. He has read Tad Szulc’s biography of Fidel Castro and spent a week in the Havana marina with his son and his son’s friend. The son speaks Spanish. The yachtie doesn’t. Yet he is an expert on Cuba. He suffered a painful (to him) divorce, which he blames on the confrontational system of justice the US inherited from the Brits. He blames the same confrontational system for most of the world’s woes. He is obsessive on the subject. He harbours a hatred for authority of any kind. He warns me of Colombia, that the immigration and customs officers will let me in only for the cops to shake me down.
Were I Colombian cop, I would shake him to death. Half an hour of his company and I want to scream. I have sympathy for the engineer, an intelligent man, and for his bright, funny, English girlfriend. The freedom of the seas imprisons yachtsmen in odd company.
Colón, Wednesday 2 August
My passage is confirmed. The boat, Don Sebas, is a small trading vessel, twenty metres long. It sails from the Fifth Street Wharf for Cartagena. When? Today, tomorrow, the day after …
How much? Two hundred dollars. There will be another biker: ‘the Chino’. I ask the Chino’s nationality. The captain shrugs. How should he know? A Chino is a Chino.
The captain buys copra in the San Blas Islands and the voyage takes around five days. Food is included – fried fish. Maybe a lobster.
Flying me and the bike to Medellín would cost 800 dollars.
Shipping the bike to Cartagena by container is 350 dollars. Add my airfare.
The German yacht was 500 dollars plus fifty for a dugout canoe out to Porto Vinir in the San Blas Islands.
Two hundred dollars is a bargain.
I move base from Portobelo to Colón. I have discovered a hotel out in what was the US Canal Zone. The Harbor Inn is close by the luxurious Melia. I pay for a big room with bath, a great bed, hot water, air-con. Staff are friendly, I have internet connection and the area is safe.
I ride to the canal and watch pilot vessels whiz across the lake to huge ships and watch the ships ease through the lake to the locks. Locals are used to the sight. I never tire of watching. Construction of the canal was the US at its best. Now Panamanians run the canal. They run it equally well.
I have a few beers with a retired governor of Colón province – he drinks Margaritas for the first hour. He believes that termination of the criminals is the only solution to crime in Colón. He gives The Black Hand in Brazil as an example. I am a liberal. I am against popping people without trial. I might feel differently if forced to live in Colón. Riding through on my bike is sufficiently scary.
Colón, Thursday 3 August
I have coffee at Ernesto’s house. Ernesto is the one-armed Puerto Rican ex-military. Ernesto is ambivalent as to the governor’s belief. Shooting the mini-gangsters wouldn’t solve the problem in the long term. Neither would employment or better education. Essential is personal responsibility.
‘About every man I know here has a wife and three women on the side, all with kids. The men sit around in new shirts and pants and trainers. The kids go hungry.’
And not only the men are to blame: the women get pregnant in the hope of getting something out of the man. Three kids by three different men is common.
The kids have inadequate and irresponsible fathers as role models and worse role models in the music industry. Panamanian rap shocks and offends Ernesto. Rap has become less brutal in the US while, in Panama, it has become more vicious. Role models rap vile sexual obscenities and glorify violence.
Ernesto drops me off at the Zona Libre, the Free Zone. Free is freedom from import tax. The Zona Libre is as big as Colón. A wall surrounds it, guards at every gate. Within the walls is street after street of back-to-back shops and warehouses. What do you need? Five dozen pairs of trousers in assorted sizes and colours? Two dozen Dior sports shirts? A 5000-dollar Longines watch? Cooking pots, table china, tools, outboard motors – what ever is manufactured can be found right here in the Zona Libre ready for onward shipping to wherever.
Much of it is manufactured in China by workers on near-slave wages.
China’s low wages guarantee unemployment for workforces in other developing economies (socialist togetherness). Forget multinationals as the big-beast criminals of the liberal establishment. Chinese wages are the monster. We must forbid imports from any nation without a reasonable minimum wage and we must insist that health inspectors check factories.
Why was I in the Zona Libre?
To buy a fishing rod for the voyage through the San Blas Islands on the good ship Don Sebas.
I have met the Chino. His name is Ming. He is forty years old, born in Indonesia of Chinese parents and a US citizen. He is an electronics engineer with a doctorate and has been granted a year’s sabbatical by Hewlett-Packard in the hope that he will free himself of the travel bug. He rides a 650 Suzuki Endurance trail bike with a nine-gallon gas tank. He finds the 650 way too big and heavy for the trip.
Ming the Merciless has a red line across his throat. Three kids jumped him half a block from his downtown Colón hotel. All three carried knives. One held a knife to Ming’s throat. The remaining two emptied Ming’s pockets: five dollars.
Is Colón dangerous? Too damn right!
The harbourmaster on the Fifth Street wharf shows me the .38 revolver in his desk drawer. On the street, he carries the revolver tucked in his belt. Today he is wearing black baggy shorts and a gold-on-black Ghana shirt that balloons over his belly. I don’t like to ask how he expects to make a quick draw from under his belly. Fact is, he would be dead, buried and gone to wherever such men go before laying a finger on the revolver’s butt.
I stop off at the shopping mall and meet the Polish software engineer with a yacht and his giggly Brit. I say ‘his’ because she is his – not as a possession, but, as one says, ‘my love’. They are in love. I notice so many small signs, the touch of a finger, the way their eyes meet, the ease with which they laugh together. They had read on my blog of my boat delay and had been planning to run me down to Cartagena on his twenty-eight-foot sailboat. A Honda 125 would just about fit on the deck.
Meanwhile they are searching for three-dollar shirts for him and a skirt for her. He needs a new shirt. The one he wears has lost its sleeves and advertises a career in boat maintenance: varnish, red lead primer, teak stain. For a top, the giggly Brit wears what might once have been a see-through nightdress now cut off above the belly.
They tell me that the unpleasant little American yachtsman with attitude had been thrown out of every bar on the Rio Dulce, Guatemala. I try to imagine what would get a man thrown out of a bar on the Rio Dulce. Fronteras is the AA capital of Central America. In their day, these AA members were serious drunks, men and women who could start a riot while barely capable of crawling across the floor. They were never thrown out. So I guess the American was thrown out for boring his fellow drinkers half to death.
Colón, Friday 4 August
Ernesto has been driving me round in his 4x4. We visit the Fifth Street wharf. A French biker on an ancient BMW with sidecar has come to inspect our transport. He has been travelling forever.
I visit Ernesto’s home in the evening. Javier, the son of the owner of the Harbor Inn, has waited up. Javier runs the restaurant and bar. He and I sit at the bar, drink beer and yak until two in the morning. Untrue to write that I will miss Colón. No one could miss Colón. However, I have made good friends, kind and generous, with whom it will be a privilege to keep in touch.