I'm now on a boat sitting in the San Blas Islands on my way to Cartegena, Colombia, but let's check out the week since my last update.

I stayed at the same hostel in Panama City for the entire time, for a couple of reasons. My only contact with a boat that will take me to Colombia was through the hostel and I didn't want to lose this contact by going to another hostel. My bike was parked safely, I was settled in, the hostel was seven bucks a night. Going in search of another hostel to find a boat that left sooner was pointless since I only had a six-day wait.

Around the hostel I mostly read books (Lonesome Dove), surfed the Internet at the next-door Internet Café, and ate at the Café two doors down. In the evening I went to local bars. I didn't stray very far from the hostel. Really, the only thing I wanted to see in Panama was the Panama Canal. A group of us from the hostel decided to go up to Colon to see the massive cargo ships pass by on the canal. We left the city early by bus and made it to Colon before noon. It was about a two-hour bus ride.

It's the end of the Rainy Season but Panama doesn't know that. If we weren't soaked right after we got off the bus then we were by the time we reached McDonald's, only four streets down, to wait out the storm. After the two-hour time span in which we all had a combo meal, a McFlurry, then hot tea we decided the storm would last the rest of the day. We watched as the clouds poured like a waterfall from the sky to turn the streets into rivers and potholes into fathoms.

We braced ourselves as we stepped outside to return to the bus station. The most optimistic of the group rolled up his jeans, a useless act. The rest of us said screw it and ventured in. The water on the sidewalk reached above my ankles. Once I reached the edge of the sidewalk I took a careful step down onto the street hoping to find steady ground and not a pothole. It was impossible to judge the depth because of the murky flowing water. The ground was a bit further down than I expected and I stumbled. The water was nearly up to my knees. We made it to the bus but not before stopping at a vender who sold us dry cotton shirts for the air-conditioned bus ride back to the hostel.

The next day we decided not to go as for to see the canal. There's a tourist place right in Panama City to see the locks where the ocean meets the entrance to the canal. It was a good time. There were a couple museums and we go to see a massive cargo ship going through.

During the next few days we became nocturnal; going out to bars and clubs until the early (and later) hours of the morning and sleeping until lunch or dinnertime. The time spent waiting for my boat went faster this way.