Action!

I decided to be all adventurous for a few days and take part in some extreme sports. Caving and Paragliding.

Caving was a lot of fun, I had wanted to do this for a long time. We did not need climbing gear (unfortunately, but it is always good to have more plans for the future) but crawled around in tiny tunnels, waded in water and dived from one chamber to the next. Adventure!

Someone should have told me however, that Paragliding is a lot like being on a roller coaster. I get motion sick easily, fortunately for the people below me I managed to keep my lunch to myself, but had to lie on my back and breath slowly for a while after we landed. Never again.

Some pictures of the area I took after I recovered:

a new place for my pictures

I used to upload my pictures to owncloud running on my localhost and then link them to this blog, thus hosting the pictures myself.
This worked well until I tried to install a plugin to owncloud, messing up my installation in the process (my guess is that the plug in was not compatible with the version of owncloud I was using) and now only get an error when I try to access it.
As my computer is far across the ocean, my father is linux illiterate and the old pictures can still be seen on the blog, I decided not to try and solve the problem but to find a new place for my pictures.
After some minutes of despair, in which I feared I might have to entrust my pictures to google I remembered I still have an old (and a bit misconfigured) installation of friendica running on localhost as well.
I uploaded a picture, put the link on my blog and voila!



it works. On a sidenote, pagekite(which makes my localhost visible to the world) has been running like a charm since July, and even then it only stoped because I had forgotten to pay...

If somebody wants to friend me on friendica, my profile is: efia@tine.pagekite.me/friendica or tine.pagekite.me/friendica/profile/efia (other friendica and StatusNet users should be able to add me as a friend), but as I said it is somewhat miscofigured, I installed and played around with it sometime in January and then forgot about it, so I´m not sure if it actually works.

Portobelo

I stayed in this little harbour town for almost a week, trying to find a boat to Panama. It used to be a pirate town, 5 old forts surrounding it still bear witness to this. It is a laid back, beautiful place, a good place to hang out and just meet people. Yachties come here for winter, to put their boats and themselves up on dry land for hurricane season. Although they do not stay dry, the favourite pastime seems to be sitting in the one bar (where I was staying) using the wireless and drink. There are people, even whole families who live full time on sailboats, they must be very patient people living together in such a small space and probably do not shower very much.
These people are not the rich part time sailors, but "gypsies" with boats, sailing by themselves all the way from Ireland, only stopping at the McDonalds, which I was told exists in the middle of the Atlantic. I am half sure that this was "Seemannsgarn", but Davie started playing guitar and singing really well after a few rum, so who cares.
I also met a crazy redneck (his word, not mine) from an eastern Texas who had been raised a creationist (they seem to be following me, these creationists), but managed to dedoctrinate himself. He had traded up to a small sailboat after being miserable kayaking in Florida. As he had bought the boat cheap he had to spend the next two years repairing it from top to bottom and learned how it worked on the way. The first time he ever sailed was leaving Florida. Kind of an extreme learning by doing, but he made it to Portobelo and offered me to have a look on the boat. What might have been a romantic date was cut short by me reacting very un -ladylike to the rough weather. The boat was anchored in the harbour, but shaken (to me) around quite a bit and almost throwing up made me a bit nervous about having to spend the next five days on a boat.

Another horror movie scenario and two oceans

I hiked volcano Baru. It is quite a hike, with around 1,700m of elevation. The 13.5km to the summit are quite uneventful, just a steep climb through the forest.
I camped on top and as I hiked to the summit to see the sunset I put up my tent at dusk. As soon as night fell the forest grew quiet. Dead quiet. No cricket, no bird, no sound at all. It was eerie to say the least, there was no one else camping and I felt as if I had stumbled into a horror movie. I started to collect wood and made a fire, just for some comfort. Bamboo does not burn well, especially if it is wet, after all I was camping in a cloud forest.
I did get a fire to burn and ate my sandwiches before crawling into mt tent. I actually had to use all my gear from Alaska again, made me feel good about carrying it through all of Central America as it was quite cold up there.
The next morning everything was different. I went up to the summit and actually saw both oceans and the sunrise. The view was amazing. The view over the Pacific was clear, while the Caribbean was all mysterious, with clouds drifting over.
When I came back to the campsite Hummingbirds were flattering around and the birds were singing. I did not feel like I might get attacked by Zombies anymore. I walked back down and it started raining at some point. I'm glad I camped up there, although it was kind of scary, just walking up and down would have made that trip a bit rushed and a bit exhausting as well.