How to get to Colombia - in style

It was quite a shock to discover that there are no roads connecting North and South America. Instead, a wild malaria-infested jungle known as the Darien Gap separates the skinny isthmus of Panama and northern Colombia.

Crossing over from Central to South America requires a little creativity, and unfortunately a sizeable wad of US dollars – the currency of choice in Panama. Flights are expensive, a one-way ticket costing several hundred dollars, and the option of climbing aboard a narcotics-infested cargo ship (although probably more of a risk of a bust going in the opposite direction) didn’t exactly appeal.

Coolrunning II

Luckily, a bunch of ingenious yachties have invented a solution. For little more than the cost of a flight, they shepherd groups of backpackers from Panama to Cartagena on Colombia’s beautiful Caribbean coast, with three days of cruising through a chain of Panamanian islands thrown in.

Finding these seafaring types wasn’t difficult – hostels in Panama City advertise upcoming departures on their noticeboards and help you arrange a berth on a yacht. Of course choosing a captain is quite a gamble, seeing as you’re not able to meet them in advance and check out the state of the yacht. We heard tales of people who had sailed to Panama from Colombia of overcrowding, people having to sleep on deck, running out of food and a certain mentally unstable captain playing with himself below deck in plain view of his cabinmates.

Fortunately we struck it lucky with Austrian couple Sandra and George, who are preparing to sail around the world on their 43 foot yacht Cool Running II. They had spent the past few months sailing across the Atlantic and around the Caribbean, and had done the crossing from Panama to Colombia several times already.

We were also lucky to have a small crew – aside from us and our captains, our only other person was a German girl, so there was ample room to stretch out on the yacht and sleep in separate berths when it got too hot.

The weather didn’t exactly turn itself on for the first three days of sailing through the San Blas island archipelago – a storm delayed the start of the voyage itself was delayed by a day. But as we cruised in and out of microscopic islands dotted with palm trees and ringed by spotless beaches, we barely noticed the looming clouds and intermittent rain.

The San Blas islands are on the opposite side of Panama to Panama City, and getting there required a ghastly 4am wakeup call and hair-raising ride in a four-wheel drive over the country’s central mountain range to reach the Caribbean cost of the country. We were dropped off in a jungle clearing alongside a murky brown river, a speedboat arrived, and somehow the driver knew just where to deliver us, to the Cool Running II that was moored near the mouth of the river.

Eating like kings

Within minutes of boarding the yacht and receiving a warm welcome from Sandra and George, we were being fed a delicious European breakfast (including cream cheese, which I have not eaten for months!). This theme continued for the entire five day trip – there were substantial breakfasts, delicious summertime salad lunches and hearty Austrian food dinners. They even baked chocolate cake, and on the day we sailed over the choppy open ocean from the island chain to Cartagena, there were delicious baked sausage and cheese-stuffed doughy treats to enjoy.

Besides eating like royalty, Sandra and George also made sure we got the best out of the San Blas Islands. There are over 300 in the chain, ranging from the fairly large and populated, to outlying ones inhabited by just one or two indigenous Kuna families living in simple palm thatched huts.

We moored alongside a beautifully unspoilt isle that couldn’t have been more than 40 metres in length and just a few metres wide. Three or four Kuna families lived there, and when we came ashore in the dinghy, some of the children raced out to say hello and chat.

Our captains had a pretty sound local knowledge of which islands were the best for snorkelling. One tiny island – just a lump of sand really, too small to even support a palm tree, had a fantastic reef wrapped around it that dropped away from it in a steep shelf. Different types of coral were layered all the way down, and the variety and sheer number of fish were amazing.

Later we checked out another island that was home to a Kuna family and also had a reef you could access easily from the beach. This time we saw a group of three metre-long barracuda in the metre-deep water (and regretted not having bought the spear gun!).

It was great to come face to face with them, but after a while we did start to feel a little uncomfortable, especially when one of them started moving slowly towards us. Could there be truth to the old fishwife’s tale we had heard on the Corn Islands that barracuda mistake white people for fish when the water is a little murky?

Adam the ever-hopeful fisherman

Cruising in and out of the islands was blissfully easy from a sailing perspective, seeing as there was no wind we had to use the boat’s motor rather than the sails. Adam was keen to learn to sail though, and quickly became Captain George’s apprentice, eagerly lapping up advice on when to use the main sail, how to tie various complicated-looking sailing knots and how his GPS system and navigation instrumentation worked.

So when we finally left the islands to sail across part of the Atlantic to Colombia, Adam’s excitement was palpable. “I hope its really, really rough,” he enthused, picturing five-metre swells rolling across the top of the yacht as he strapped himself to the side while lure-fishing for giant marlin.

I, on the other hand, was mildly terrified. Not because I had any doubts that our sturdy vessel or our trustworthy captains would complete the crossing, but because I was worried I would be seasick the entire time – which depending on wind speed could last anywhere from 24 to 40 hours. I nervously refrained from drinking the day before we hit the open seas, and gingerly tucked in to the delicious Austrian beef casserole they had cooked for the occasion before we departed.

George - our fearless captain

The actual experience turned out to be somewhere in between our varying expectations. It was a bit rocky and rough at times, and when below deck you would find yourself being instantly shoved from one side of the cabin to the other. There was enough wind to use the sails for roughly half the journey, which excited Adam immensely, especially when he was entrusted with helping raise the main sail and make adjustments to the steering.

Fortunately, I did not get seasick, a combination of a steady diet of seasickness tablets and not drinking during the day. If anything, the heat of the sun baking down on the unshaded deck provided greater discomfort than the rolling waves, but it was possible to find some shade at the back of the boat and drag our feet in the water to cool down.

Arriving in Cartagena port at  night-time

As we started the crossing at night, it was an amazing experience to wake up in the morning rocking gently back and forth in time with the waves, and emerge from below deck to find out we were in the middle of the ocean, bobbing along with absolutely nothing else in sight in any direction. The only things we saw the entire trip were a couple of half-empty cargo ships and some wayward flying fish that jumped out of the sea and into the boat at random intervals. At night time the deck was beautifully illuminated by the silver moonlight reflecting off the main sail.

We reached the wide open embrace of the port of Cartagena just after sunset the following day – after 28 hours at sea. We cruised past the luminescent container port, the historic pirate fortress walls and rows of high-rise apartment blocks until we reached a sheltered inlet where dozens of other yachts – no doubt many of them containing other seafaring backpackers – were moored.

Waking up on the yacht moored in the middle of Cartagena’s massive harbour – the centrepiece of a city with a population of over a million people – was totally surreal. The harbour was flanked by the container port, huge apartment towers, a stone wall and a pretty palm-lined esplanade.