Since we´ve been in Bocas del Toro numerous people have talked about Wizard´s beach. It´s supposed to be a good surf spot and since the surf was running double overhead stacks (or whatever nonsense surfers are calling 11 foot waves) yesterday Jeff and I figured we´d head out there and watch some surfers.

Now to get to Wizard´s everyone pretty much said ¨just take a water taxi to Bastimentos, it´s easy.¨ Which in my mind is analogous to someone saying ¨oh, you want to go to the mall? just hop in a cab and he´ll drop you off at the front door¨ and what happens? You get out of the cab and you´re in front of the mall. It´s a five foot walk to the door and seconds later you´re eating a Auntie Ann´s pretzel and wondering how you´d look in a new hoodie (Answer? Gangsta, you´d look gangsta).

Now say between the taxi and the entrance to the mall is a 1.2km hike up the side of a hill on a muddy trail in a torrential down pour. Say that hike included fun features such as knee deep mud holes, poison dart frogs, goats tethered to the path, horses wandering back and forth and takes over an hour. You´d include that in the brochure right? I certainly would.

Not in Panama. I´m not sure what horrors these people have endured in their lives that a 1.2km death march doesn´t rate mentioning but believe me, if I ever tell anyone how to get to Wizard´s the first thing coming out of my mouth is BRING YOUR MOUNTAINEERING GEAR AND SAY YOUR PRAYERS.

But despite the fact that I´ll be discussing the aforementioned hike to my therapist next time we talk, Wizard´s is so totally worth it. It´s absolutely picturesque and when Jeff and I first got there, we had the entire beach to ourselves. It was awesome. After about an hour, some of the people from our hostel showed up with a cricket bat and we had a quick game in the surf. I don´t want to imply that I know the game of cricket or that I knew what I was doing, I don´t but neither did anyone else. For a game that is supposed to be popular all over the world, the only person who really understood what was going on was the guy who brought the bat.

One other event rates worth mentioning. So there´s probably 20 of us who hike back to catch the water taxi before it starts getting dark. I´m towards the back of the pack as we get back into town and by the time I get to the dock where the water taxi is, he´s boarding the last couple of people ahead of me. Pay attention to this next part because it´s important. AS I´M WALKING DOWN THE DOCK HE PUTS THE BOAT IN REVERSE AND PULLS AWAY. I´ll stop here so you can picture it. I´m standing on the dock, mud up to my knees, yelling for him to come back. There are twenty people yelling at him ¨una mas! una mas!¨ and he´s just slowly shaking his head as he pulls away AND LEAVES ME STANDING THERE ALONE. Son. Of. A. Bitch. For the sake of the children, I won´t repeat the vile string of words that came out of my mouth as I watched everyone fade into the distance but believe me, I wish I could have had a picture of me standing on that dock, middle fingers in the air, screaming out into the ocean.

In any case, it didn´t matter. The next water taxi came by about ten minutes later.

Posted by Ben Corman at 8:00 AM

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