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The blue 75-foot sailing yacht, worth 300.000 dollars, is going help us pass the Darien Gap. Two weeks of Caribbean heaven.

Valhalla, sailingyacht by Gijs Bekenkamp
The Pan-Amercian highway is said to be the longest netwerk of roads on this planet. Starting in the northern tip of North America and going all the way to Southern Chile.

At one point the road is not connected allthough. This is at the Darien Gap. A 54 mile stretch of land between Panama and Colombia. This stretch of rainforest has may hazards. Not only you can get lost easily, you also have to deal with jungle, swamps and insects. But probably the biggest problem is the Guerilla activity in this area. People have been kidnapped by these troups while trying to cross the gap and unfortunately not everyone has been found back alive.

There are three ways to cross the Darian Gap.

#1 Over land: The preferable way if you had enough of this earthly live

#2 Through the air: Fast, cheap, save and utterly boring.

#3 Over water: Find a seaworthy ship and a captain and start a caribean sailing adventure never to forget.

In Panama City I meet up with Dennis. This guy owns a big sailing yacht called the “Valhalla”. Once in a while the wind carries him to Cartagena, a colonial town in Colombia. He happens to go this Sunday. If I want I can join him.

With a couple of other people we head for Porto Bello, a small town on the Caribbean coast. This is where Dennis his Yacht lays.

The blue 75-foot sailing yacht, worth 300.000 dollars, is going to bring us to Colombia. We will first go to some of the San Blas islands, where we will stop for a couple of days. This is the home of the Kuna Indians. After this visit we will continue to Cartagena, Colombia.

Normally the boat is chartered by wealthy people who come to South America to roam the Caribbean for a couple of days. These people pay for such a trip approximately five times the price we pay.

The ship is a two-master with a spacious kitchen, a living room, three bedrooms and a couple of bathrooms. There is also a fridge to cool our drinks and the 25 dollar Cuban cigars.

When the diesel- and watertanks are completely filled we are set to go to Chichime, the first of the San Blas islands we're going to visit. Because there is a lot of coral reef around Chichime, we have to be sure to arrive there during daytime. Herefore we have to wait till the evening before we can leave.

While Dennis starts the engine, I weigh anchor together with Dena, Dennis his girlfriend, and Anthony, one of my travelcompanions. With a couple of people we stay on the front of the boat to look for reef or other boats and to give directions to Dennis who is at the helm. When we've properly left the port we hoist one sail to increase our speed.

Early in the morning we get close to Chichime. We pass one bounty island after the other. The San Blas archipelago consists of hundreds of small to middle-size islands. Most of them are uninhabited. On a couple of them the Kuna-Indians live. This is a tribe which still has a traditional lifestyle. By the second island we drop anchor in the bay of Chichime and women in Kayukas (dugout canoes) come to our boat. The women have brought a lot of handicraft with them. All the shirts, scarves and bags have Mole. This is a typical decoration technique. Most of them are colorful patches with abstract figures or animal figures. Most of the women have short hair, many times covered with a bright red scarf. Around their legs they wear long strings of beads in all different colors. After we’ve bought some patches from the women, we go on shore. The island is small. Within fifteen minutes you can walk around it. In total there are about ten wooden huts. The only thing you can buy on the island is fresh baked bread, seafood and pipas (variant of the coconut which is mainly used for its milk). For a while these pipas used to be the currency on the San Blas islands but recently they've changed that into the Balboa of Panama. In the evening we buy some pipas. One of the locals cuts them open and we bring them back to the Valhalla. Here we add some rum to the pipa and voila, a cocoloco.

After spending another day on Chichime it’s time to move on again. Because we will leave Panama soon we need to be stamped out. This is only possible in El Porvenir. A bigger island with an airstrip, a hotel and a customs office. After a four hour sail we arrive. At first the custom officer doesn't want to cooperate. It's Sunday, he's drinking in a bar and he doesn't feel like doing anything else. When Dennis offers him to financially support his drinking habit, his attitude changes. He jokes around, mixes Anthony up with a famous Panamanian boxer and me with David Beckham. By accident he stamps me out twice, but nothing seems to bother him anymore.

In the early afternoon of the next day we set sail to the island group Hollandaise. Most of the islands are uninhabited and all have the bounty-look again. Yesterday we got some fr

Interesting pre-programmed, primitive and instinctive reaction, from two young members of the Homo Sapiens Sapiens species, in front of danger. One ran for his life...the other one, just frizzed...of fear...

(What danger did you ask, while looking at the photo ??? Well you are obviously not from planet Earth in the year 2010. The year of the "Rising Snow Men" !!!! Never heard of it ? Ok so here is the story.

Once upon a time....blablabla... global warming...blabla...snowenetics...(the science of synthetic living snowflakes ((no ! Not the cereals, you fool !!! )...blabla...Al Gore...Futurama...blabla... and then ONE day, somewhere ; (did anyone saw Sofia Coppola 's Somewhere movie this week, heard it' s great...!?! ) ; Where was I...Ha yes, and so, somewhere on Earth, some regular kids were making snow men in a park and IT happened !

We still don' t know how it started (if you ask me..probably with some snow... stupid scientists...) We don' t even know where was the first snow-rising (a ski station... ? ), but we do know that in the year 2010... snow men became alive, rose out of the cold ground and became Humanity 's nightmare every fracking winter... Every year, they evolved. Upgrading from the usual rocks, sticks, vegetables, scarves, hats, to body ballistic vest, snow ball slingshot, giant condom-cellular membrane ( to keep the all entity from melting too quickly) and even ultra modern portable fridge unit, to keep it cool in the battlefluid... until Spring would show up...melting them to Dea...snow and H2O, bringing us back, what we now call our G.W.S aka Global Warming Saviour (or as kids today call it...Santa !)

Ok need some sleep !!! =) Good night Earthly snow makers !!