September 29, 2015

You don’t get to Santa Catalina by mistake. It’s not the kind of place you stumble upon while driving through on the way to somewhere else. Santa Catalina is at the end of the road, about sixty miles down a road to nowhere else at the end of the Veraguas Peninsula. It’s mostly a small fishing village, but as with others along the Pacific coast of Central America, the surf has attracted a separate tourism industry. 

The ride down from David gets nice as soon as you turn off the InterAmerican Highway. The first sixty miles of InterAmerican Highway (I always called this the PanAmerican Highway, but it seems to have changed names somewhere along the way) are full of construction as they widen it from two lanes to a divided four lane road. After turning off at Tole, it’s mostly twisty road through the hills with glimpses of ocean.

Far background is a large island; ocean between.

There must be some serious fishing here, as I pass lots of places with large Grady White and Contender fishing boats with twin Yamaha outboards. Some have matching high-end homes, others are parked next to very meager houses. The boat is clearly worth more than everything else on the land. 

Somewhere about 15 miles before Sona, I ride through a swarm of wasps. The noise of them smacking my face shield and the sudden realization that I’ve been stung in the throat happen about the same time. I immediately think back to the last two times I’ve been stung by bees while riding, and start grabbing at my shirt and jacket to try to keep any that might have fallen down my shirt from stinging me. The pain continues through lunch in Sona (a great carne guisada, rice, beans, and a bottle of Coca Cola for $3.25), but begins to lessen by the time I reach Santa Catalina.

It’s off-season now, and there are only two German women staying at the hostel at the moment (and it’s managed by another German woman — is there a secret Central America movement I don’t know about? Clearly this part of the world has some heavy word-of-mouth advertising in Germany). 

I have a private grass hut overlooking the beach with a shared bath. Hammocks hang just outside the door, and the ocean breeze helps to mitigate the humidity.

Home for the night.

Town and a fish dinner is an easy two kilometer ride. Otherwise, I don’t plan to move from the hammock for the next several hours.