Panama > Cuba Pt. 1

It has been something like three months since last checking in and I’m in Havana. In a cafe full of old wooden furniture, up a cast iron spiral staircase, hidden from the bustle of the old town. Incongruously, one of the Pirates of the Caribbean films is on the wide screen TV by the authentic looking bar. It’s nearly a week since I arrived in Havana. Dad flew out to meet me here last Thursday. I flew from Costa Rica via Panama. He’s gone home now, after several very productive and warm father/son days. 

The motorbike is gone too. Sold for $1000. A definite bargain for Alejo, the guy who bought it. He’s a Costa Rican surfer who had seen the bike around Nosara (the nearest town to Pacha Mama, where I’d been staying for a couple of months). He’d said to himself: "if there’s any way I could get my hands on that bike, I would do everything in my power to make it happen." 

Lucky for him, I’d been struggling to sell it. £2,250 was my starting price, then $2,000. Some interest but no buyers. Then I decided that it wasn’t worth my time grappling with inventive ways to get it sold. My understanding was that I needed to prove it had changed ownership before I left the country and I’d have to pay the import tax if I couldn’t. I just needed rid of it. (In the end, no one checked a thing at the airport.) So I’d dropped the price to $1,000. There was a mechanic who was interested but resistant - he couldn’t be bothered with the faff of getting it imported. On a visit to discuss whether he wanted it through very broken Spanish, Alejo, who was there for an oil change on his clapped out 125, popped up. 

He did everything he could. Close connections to a lawyer meant that bit by bit, the sale was completed. I had my proof of sale and Alejo was the happiest man on the planet. He said in a text afterwards: ‘You are like an angel sent from God to make my dreams come true!’ It felt, and somehow still feels, as if the whole point of this leg of the journey, the ride from Canada to Panama and back up to Costa Rica, was to bring Alejo his bike. There’s no doubt that he loves it more than I ever did, though it has been a wonderful companion. 

The plan now? After Cuba, I'll be doing a couple of month remote work for my brother's company, then buying a bicycle and riding half the length of the Andes...

The last time I wrote, I was on my way to Tribal Gathering, a three week festival on a beach bordering on jungle, far off on the most remote part of Panama’s Caribbean coast. The festival purported to be run by a charity called Geoparadise that works with indigenous populations around the world. 

In hindsight, this ‘work’ was always vague, and when the organisers eventually put up posters showing what ‘work’ they had been doing, the highlight was that they had given two pigs to a small island community somewhere or other. Two pigs. The photo of this grand occasion showed ten men stood looking unhappy with a couple of them holding the pigs by the hooves. The longer the festival went on the more it became clear that it was most likely a money laundering operation for the ‘gangster’ who ran the thing. 

(In favour of this view: this ‘gangster’ apparently supplied all the recreational drugs at the festival; the land was rented from a cartel; the police had been bribed to allow the thing to happen and when the police turned up they were forced off the property; there was a complicated electronic system through which payments were made and could very easily be manipulated in the background to make it appear that more money had passed through the festival than really was the case...)

So I couldn’t help feeling slightly sorry for the indigenous people who had made long journeys to find a festival built around the ingestion of psychoactive substances of one sort or another and not a huge level of interest in the tribal peoples beyond a kind of patronising fascination. 

It was, I’d imagine, an anthropologist’s nightmare. Big time fetishisation of indigenous people and a seemingly unified consensus around the idea that ‘they’ were the carriers of some secret, perfect knowledge that we in the west have discarded in favour of our imperfect, ‘unnatural’ knowledge systems. 

For me, it’s clear that it is a huge shame that indigenous knowledge is being lost and that the spread of the Western model is looking like an evolution towards a global monoculture, and it is absolutely certain that with the loss of this knowledge the world is a poorer place, but this does not mean that all indigenous knowledge should be seen as beautiful, pure and factual and that all western knowledge should be denied as dirty or unnatural. 

I think my criticism of the attitude of the festival can be summed up by two overheard comments at a moving presentation by the San Bushmen from the Kalahari Desert. One, just: “Oh my god they are so beautiful.” An English woman who sounded as if she was in a zoo looking at some rare species of animal. Another: “They are so simple, totally uncorrupted by the modern world.” A man who has no idea if this is true or not, projecting an ideal onto the Bushmen. Later, when one of the bushmen was out of his traditional dress, dancing to the corrupting modern music through a corrupting modern sound system playfully trying it on with a corrupting Western woman (as he has absolutely a right to do), the reality may have broken through - the Bushman is a complex human being just like everyone else. 

Another thing that felt jarring and that was linked to the bushmen was the campaign to get rid of the ‘controlling’ and ‘irrational’ Gregorian calendar (i.e. our January, February, March etc calendar). I’d heard this before, in Guatemala. The criticism is that it was introduced by the church and there are an uneven number of days in it which is somehow controlling. The solution to this apparent problem is (in some bizarre leap of not quite logic) to reset the calendar to 13 months of 28 days. Some people have taken this on as their life’s mission. The guy who arranged for the Bushmen to come to the festival was one of them. 

This 28/13 calendar chimes with the Mayan calendar (which some thought predicted the end of the world in 2012). Apparently, 2012 was the beginning of a new age of consciousness and because the San Bushmen were apparently the first humans to appear, they would also be the first to ascend to this new state of consciousness. This all seems very unlikely and I felt a little pity for the guy with his religious fervour and certainty. 

It struck me that I couldn’t care less if it’s the 31st or 30th of any month, that if you were going to campaign for a change of the structure of our lives, the most effective way to improve people’s lives would be to reduce the working week by a day. A 4/3 week sounds much more appealing than a 28/13 year (in which one of the months would have to be 29 days long, two in leap years). And, it seems like it's probably best not to drag the San Bushmen into your delusions if you can avoid it.

There was also had a brief brush with a reincarnation of Jesus Christ who, after showing that he keeps a bottle of his own fermented urine to drink in his bag alongside some jasmine which he likes to insert into his anus, and after confessing his belief that he was Jesus as a side note to me, saw some money being counted and said ‘Oh, that’s a lot of energy!’ Then proceeded to try to wangle a donation from us.

But the festival was not as negative an experience as all this makes out, I'm just very clear that I'd never go back or recommend it to anyone else.

The truth is, while at the festival, I wasn’t really at the festival. I’d reunited with Ola, who I’d met in California, at Ananda, in Porto Lindo, near to where the festival was to take place. W’d been in nearly daily contact since I left, California but even so, we had a day or so of sniffing around each other, a little uncertain of the decision to do the festival together - each hardly knowing the other but from text and fairly regular voice chats - but soon found our flow and a great warmth.

At the festival we initially accidentally set up our tent by the shitholes in which they planned to pile up the kaka from the toilets, so relocated to an upgraded spot with an unencumbered view of the jungle (one of the very few camps with this luxury), where troops of howler monkeys traversed above us and we had a perfect couple of trees for hanging our hammock.

A slightly blurry version of the view from our camp

We began beautifying the place. Suddenly we were children building a fort, and so began several days of the simplest possible living. Wake up around 7, build a little fire on which coffee is made in an Italian coffee maker and boil up some muesli, fruit and water. ‘Check-in’ with each other - how we’re feeling, a few minutes to speak and be listened to. Breakfast always took us nearly to lunchtime. Next, hang around, maybe build something, add to our little shrine, go to the beach and maybe get naked, go to a talk or presentation by one of the indigenous groups. Lunch at one of the food stalls. Then hang around again, boil up some more coffee, go for a walk, whatever we felt like, together or separate. Dinner. I was asleep or at least in bed by 8:30 most nights. Ola and her sister Asia (pronounced: Ash-ah, who joined us a day or two in) would normally go out to listen to the music and have a bit of a dance. I remember complaining one night that I couldn’t hear the sound of insects around our camp at sunset over the sound of the music from the stage. 

I was totally in my element in our jungle home. Tent, hammock, fire. Nothing else required. I still had my ukulele but barely played it. It was a time of total freedom to do as we wished and all I wanted to do was play in the jungle all day and go to bed early, not to mix with the people becoming increasingly inebriated as the day went on. Ola and Asia were perfect company, I needed nothing else.

Asia, me and a washed up walking stick

Something I’ve noticed this in the past couple of months: you have really allowed yourself to be totally free when you give yourself permission to be ‘boring’. That is, you are free when the external pressures which restrict you from what you deeply want to do are removed, but also those which compel behaviour that doesn’t really sit true with you (who goes to a three-week festival and doesn’t dance once? Me, apparently). 

Ola and I created a beautiful bond (Asia and I too, she felt like another sister to add to my collection), but it did occasionally break down into anger or annoyance, as things tend to do. But we had decided to practise ‘ridiculous honesty’ (normally known as radical honesty) with each other. This meant really taking the time to discuss exactly what we were feeling without trying to sugar coat it to protect the feelings of the other. It was through this method that each time we fell out, we learnt something important through the reconciliation. 

There had been a lot of discussion between Ola, Asia and myself about whether we should do any of the plant ‘medicine’ at the festival. The shamanic medicine ceremonies were the real draw of the festival. They were why most people were there and they were willing to wait for hours in the blazing sun to sign up to the ceremonies of their choice. Ayahuasca, san pedro, peyote, bufo, kambo, iboga and a bunch of others whose names I have forgotten were on offer. 

We were tempted, but we’d both been totally sober since before Christmas and for me, there was a sense that I had experienced similar things through meditation to what the ‘medicines’ promised. Why did we need medicine anyway? Were we sick? I certainly felt like I was not. But the temptation was strong in a place where everyone seemed to be there for the psychoactive plants. 

One morning we decided that we would do ayahuasca (a very strong and seemingly life-changing psychedelic substance). We went to queue up. People had been waiting four hours already. We couldn’t be bothered to queue and so, realised that we didn’t care enough to do it.

A day or two later, Ola was talking to a Mayan shaman, Shuni, who offered her a 'clandestino' mushroom ceremony, if Ola could find six people to do it. I’m not normally one to turn down clandestine events and Ola and I had agreed that if we were to do a ceremony, we’d do it together, so I was in. Asia too (eventually, after some umm-ing and ahh-ing) and a few others who heard about the ceremony through the grapevine. 

The ceremony was ‘clandestino’ basically because the festival organiser took a large cut of however much was paid for any of the official ceremonies and Shuni and her partner (also a shaman, always referred to as ‘Maestro’) said that they did not want to contribute more to his unethical behaviour. Fair enough. 

We not-so-stealthily made our way out of the main festival site and down the beach, came across a place with a ready-made fire and set up for the evening with rain threatening to soak us throughout the trip. Soon though, the clouds parted and revealed the stars. We took the mushrooms, chopped up and mixed into balls of chocolate. Very tasty. I took a while to start feeling the effects (and actually had to take more) but before long Ola was bubbling over with laughter like a manic child and it was infectious. Eventually, I felt the shift in consciousness. It was less visual, more of a change in the way reality was processed in my brain. Everything looked the same but was far more fascinating.

We went around the group a few times, first of all being told what our Mayan astrological symbol is (each has a number and an animal representation, mine was 4 Deer - later I remembered that at Marie’s home all the way back in Canada, the card that I’d pulled from her fortune telling deck was the deer… coincidence? Probably…) 

Following this we each shared the thing that we wanted the most in life at that moment and after each sharing, we spent a moment ‘sending’ whatever that was to the person. A kind of focussed meditation. Then the round was repeated but each asked for the group to ‘send’ their energy to a loved one in need. 

I am sceptical of all of this sending of energies, it seems unlikely to affect anything 'out there', but in the moment it felt as if it was totally effective. I could feel with far greater clarity than in normal consciousness. Ola was having a different time, and without sharing her experience, had gone another order of magnitude further into the empathetic potential of humanity.

Eventually, the ceremony drew to a close. Maestro was like a wise kung-fu monkey throughout the ceremony and had stood across the fire during a moment when we were focussing our energies on one of the group and flung his own energy like a character from a cartoon summoning some supernatural power at the person concerned. After the official close, he came to me, as he had to one or two others and said: “Your eyes are burning.” I did not understand what he meant by this. He then proceeded to hit my chest with a cupped palm and I felt the impact spiral down deep into me. A physical sensation that connected with a part of me that I did not know existed. The sensation remained for some time. 

Ola, me, and our hammock

The festival changed soon after. From something dissatisfying that could be largely ignored, it became a booming psytrance party and it was repulsive. It made my skin crawl. There is no better way to destroy paradise than erect a stack of speakers twenty foot high and blast out psytrance’s ugly monotony. We decided to leave. Asia was flying home before the festival finished anyway and Ola and I got ourselves a nice white hotel room with a balcony in Panama City’s old town to while away the days before Ola flew back to California where she would do a yoga teacher training. It took me next to no time to reach Panama City on the bike (which had no back brake and hadn’t for a month or so by this point). It took Ola and Asia somewhat longer. 

The last few days that Ola and I had together were a little complicated, as partings tend to be, but an utterly joyful sushi dinner on our last night closed out our time beautifully. It was more expensive than any meal I’d had on the trip so far, but it was sheer pleasure eating sushi for the first time since Canada (and it was good, too). We parted well - she took my ukulele, I took her kindle (which I'm sad to say, has revolutionised my reading habits) - and though it was very sad to see Ola go, I kept my eyes on the road, jumped on the bike and made tracks, north, to Costa Rica and Pacha Mama.