It’s about the tits on the mannequins. I mean really. They’re huge. These tits would fill out the spinnaker on a Australia’s dash to victory for the America’s Cup … Dolly Parton would bless them. How on earth the local Panamanian girls aren’t intimidated by these fibreglass models of enormity is beyond me. I reckon the mannequins get night jobs as zeppelins, drifting around at 500 foot, with projectors working the beer and the boobs.

And even Jesus’ fibreglass girlfriend, or mum, or pen pal foot washer, or whoever she is: she too has monster tits in the nativity scenes, just next window.   The Da Vinci must have been big in Panama. Tits sure are.

Being this is a publication in my now, my now finds me sitting in the closing down stages of Panama City’s massive Allbrook shopping mall, waiting for another bus. The planes were all booked, so bus it was, right back up to north to the Costa Rican border, from whence I commenced the sail south, but this time on the Caribbean side. The last bus, or bust, to Bocas Del Toro, to where I hold my $15 ticket to go, was cancelled, just as I was about to step aboard. Lucky I didn’t down those feeble sleeping pills yet.  Fortunately the coffee shop, whereupon my Dell finds a table, has put more tea bags in my cup, than water.

The bus being cancelled, means I have the options.  I love a life of unlimited possibility. Option 1: catch a cab miles back to the Panama Canal’s Amandor causeway, and swim with 15kg of luggage, in the night, back to the boat via the shipping lanes, OR, option 2, find a back packers dorm and do the dormitory thing myself, till the same time tomorrow night, or option 3, care of my careful observation of some Spanish speaking Germans, who occasionally slipped into English whilst my ears were pricked like Dobermans: there is the-take-a-punt, option 3.  I love gambling, so long as it involves adventure, not money. This punt involves basically milling around here till near midnight, and taking a bus to the northern Panamanian of David, or Dave let’s call it.  From there, I can try and jump a pre-dawn connector bus to Bocas, home of the excessive backpacker. I’m heading to a backpacker rack and bar, so Lonely Planet tells me, that has free tequilas. If you are willing to snort the salt, eat the lemon, and have the cheapest tequila on the market thrown at you.

Anyway, the punt bit, in this gamble, is the rumour about a giant landslide across the road. Very sporting. “As if,” I thought, I bet the bus blew a fan belt, and the second best excuse to, the dog ate my homework, was the road was blocked by rainfall and slides, in the dry season. Or so I thought.

Either I could be caught up in some Panamanian shithole for a week, we renamed Dave, or, with luck, we will get an mountain climbing bus, or more likely, a connector with a hoof it bit across the rocks. Hey, my trusty trolley home has backpack straps, as cool as any James Bond accessory.

Why worry, be happy. Besides, the tea bags are kicking in, as is Jose Padilla on the Ipod. Never ever travel alone without an Ipod. Music, aside of keeping me in permanent state of tinnitus, makes all sorts or dull experiences fun, and all sorts of fun experiences glow. It’s a whole inner world of your own, when zoned into the sweet spot of the musical connector. In an e-book format, I need a soundtrack to this novel, which I think I’ll add, somehow, someday, copyright be damned.

It looks like I have 15 minutes before I once again must enter the chamber of bus departure, for dear Dave.

That should be enough time to basically summarise the universe and everything in it, as far I understand it. But there will be no room for detail or fucking around. Basically we live in holographic universe, with many dimensions, ours being the third, whilst there are as many other dimensions as stations on your dial. They are all just frequencies, or vibrations, as the new agers like it. The Matrix was onto it, in its cult, first edition. We think we live in solid, 3D world, but actually, it’s just the holographic programme we have entered. The programme says if you drop a brick on your toe, you bleed, in accordance with all you ever learnt about physics, biology and chemistry. Eek, this will have the be fast, they are dimming the lights and shooing me out….it’s getting late.

Ok back here in the bus terminal once again, and everything out there looks real enough, but when you get down to it, the centre of an atom, that nucleus thing, is in such a vacuous space, that if it were was a coin sitting on this laptop, the electron would be out there on the edge of this once, US B52 air hanger. That’s a lot of nothing. It gets worse, should you dig in to the nucleus, or the electron for that matter, there is, well, no matter. There is just some airy fairy fields of energy. The ones that had Einstein fucked. You look at it, and it’s a wave, you look away, and it’s a particle, so then what the fuc is it, eh? Relatively speaking, ah, either E=mc2 is wrong, or the theory of relativity is wrong, or even worse, both are wrong, because they don’t align. Problematic, this science stuff. No wonder Einstein grew a Three Stooges haircut in his old age. Philosophically, to the useless mind, it’s enough to drive you bonkers, but personally, I have no deep seated objection to being bonkers, as my mind can go to buggery when my consciousness below is where I’m really at.Nonetheless, with my mind’s belly full of evidence from classic works like the Holographic ( or the Elegant) Universe, I’m convinced I’m onto it, or if not an it, a wave at least.

There just ain’t enough density in matter, for you not to be able to see right through it. Or even worse, see right through my argument.

I won’t get too complex here, but latest and most intriguing view, suggests it’s not your eyes that decipher this 3D holographic universe, it’s actually and an advanced receiver transmitter molecule known as DNA.  But that is the advanced level course.    And we are just meant to be mainly focused on outboard repairs in this book.  But understanding that your outboard is just and arrangement of energy, it is sometimes therapeutic,  especially when you are attacking the stupid thing with an oar, when it won’t start. As a tempter, however, the DNA molecule, more than 90% of which is foolishly deemed junk, unlike my writing, is a role model design for both a broad spectrum receiver, and  transmitter, and blow me down with helix spiral, some mad scientist has actually recorded a miniscule laser transmission from a DNA molecule. What the? We think we see all there is, but statistically, we really only perceive less than a tiny fraction of one percent of all spectrums of energy, visible light being but a part that tiny fraction, yet we conclude that we’ve seen it all before.  But we ain’t. Or we aren’t, to be more now. Ask Dr Who, he knows….or is that Dr Know? Whatever.

Could it be, Mad Professor Davis speculates, that the so called, “junk” DNA is infact the receiver transmitter for all the other frequencies we can’t see? When this nasty ‘fall’ thing, occurred, was it like Murdoch ringing up my cable provider, and saying, humans forthwith shall only see my Fox News? Last time my TV took a fall, it lost more than just a few channels. Something tells me there is a whole lot more cosmic bandwidth out there, that our cable provider has programmed out of our receiver. The excluded programming could well include God, The Universe and Everything, live from Eternity Stadium.

So also implied in this theory, is, well, everything is just energy, not matter. Like my mum told me as a boy, like some clever sage she was, ‘Never matter, Roddy”. She was  maybe even a part time Buddhist, it seems, with her “Never mind’. Now there’s good tip.

I know this is all a bit rushed, but once you get the hang of it, everything, and I mean everything, hangs together perfectly. The mystic’s teachings.  Beyond the string theory to the M theory. The spirit world. The multi-dimensional universe. Vaporising UFO’s…you name it. The theory fits all. The best bit about it, is summarised in that word that was once plastered majestically all over the Sydney Harbour Bridge, at midnight December 31, 1999…. ‘ETERNITY’, as, if you were paying attention in school, you would have learnt you can’t just make or break energy. Mind you, Tesla was a teaser.

Mmmm, this bus trip, true to subject, is looking more like eternity every minute.

I had just reopened the Dell, when it was time to board.  So board I did. And this bus, is  bus is one big mother of a double-decker thing.

I thought I had lucked out, when I got seat number 2, right at the front,  on level  2, high up, with a majestic night views, with a seat all to myself. That’s until I realised the curtains were pulled anyway, and my double seat to myself, was suddenly filed with man of proportions that only a Panamanian mannequin’s bust can rival. My all night seat has just become a compress.

Anyway, when the sleeping pills kick in, at least I won’t sag. They never kicked in.

We have just been told, or so my German/Spanish speaking spies have informed me, that the road ahead isn’t just blocked by a small landslide, we have no road at all in parts.  But what the fuc, I say, what will be, will be. Surely Dave will have amphibious, mountain climbing buses. Besides, I can swim, and I’ve got the kayaking bag to keep the Dell alive.

So back to the universe and everything. Um, well, that’s about it. It’s a big hologram in which you exist, or at least, in which your mind is telling you exist… or maybe that’s just my mind, telling you that…whatever.

Anyway, everything will work out just fine. For example, some low hanging branch could wipe out the first three rows of this bus’s level 2. In which case, the last thing to go through my mind, will be my arsehole.

But hey, my mind ain’t me. Besides, I’m pure energy, no matter at all. Given this indestructibility, you can be reassured there ain’t much to worry about. We live in perfectly safe universe.  Sure, my mind can be splattered through my sphincter, but hey, my consciousness, a part of the big gig, and a happy one at that, is indestructible.  Accordingly I’m bad at funerals. I never see it as sadly as everyone else. In fact, it can be quite refreshing to get rid of that old worn out body, take a quick look through your family movies after carking it, and go on a cosmic shopping spree for a whole new 3D you.

If the world was only to wake up to its invincibility, and stoped the mad panic to get as much sex and money under the belt as you can, before ya die, it would be whole lot more relaxed place. You reincarnate when you are good and ready, so I gather, once you’ve picked suitable parents, made contractual arrangements for some karmic re-training, and, well, out you come again, round 10,000. It’s like a video game where can get blown away by a TRex with a bazooka, but you always get a replay.

Those sleeping pills look more and more important,  as the 200kg guy next to me is making snoring hints, already. This is gunna be interesting, and finding the Dell keys, across Panamanian roads, is like batting pop up gophers from a pogo stick.

But so be it. On> On> as those Hong Kong expat, hares and hounds holler.

Reading needs aid of my caver’s headlight. They blacked out the bus the moment the thing pulled outta the dock. No sensitive, gay, Qantas steward is managing this flight with piped tunes like, “I still call Australia Home” as the lights gently dim. Besides, with Qantas outsourcing all it’s staffing and maintenance to the third world, it can hardly call Australia, home, anymore.

Hopefully the guy alongside me won’t fall asleep before me, or I’m orange crush…and not the Electric, Cool Aid, Acid type. Albeit, it could be a heavy trip.

Ah, we’ve pulled over and the lights are briefly back on, so here’s a quick chance to bang out more quick details about life, the universe and everything.

Um, where was I.

Ok, we are just arrangements of energy, no matter exists, we live forever, and all that weird indigenous mystic stuff just needed me to pull it all together with some contemporary quantum physics. The Dalai Lama and his mob love a bit of quantum physics, so I read.  And that joy sick, dribbling genius, what’s his name?…you know, the quantum physics genius guy who wrote a Short History of Time, what’s his name, he wrapped up his best ever novel with the suggestion we are on the edge of seeing into the mind of God. A messy start, in that direction, I would selflessly proffer, is to see into the mind of Rod.  But not via my sphinxter.

Hawkins, that’s it.  No, Hawkin….Stephen Hawkin. At least someone can see into the mind of god, as my memory for names has a librarian doorman in control, who’s permanently unavailable due to book worm commitments.

Yep, its time. Or so says the Mayan evolution of consciousness alarm clock. We folks, are just about at the cross roads of where the mystics and the scientists all agree.

Sure, the magnets, and then this, and then that, are all conspiring to bugger up the world’s most expensive experiment, that will allow the physicists to catch up with the mathematicians, and prove, via billions of dollars worth of underground doughnut, in thing called the Hadron Collider, that this silly concept of matter needs to be revised once and for all. But we are getting there. 2012 should be a likely year for accelerated results. Maybe 2011.

Once everyone gets it figured, a whole new world in medicine, energy and spirituality will kick in, and outboards will be forever obedient. And as I see it now, with my thermometer firmly up the world’s arsehole, we are right on time to make some pretty big leaps and bounds in my life time. Or this lifetime at least, that is, assuming no low hanging Panamanian branches ahead. Jeez, it would get real messy if the guy next to me was pulped in an instant. I used to think Jesus was my airbag. Now I reckon it’s the guy alongside me.

Dave is ahead. Pablo has Ave Maria happily all to himself for a few days, occasionally rolling around in the maze of commercial wash that is the aftermath, of a flotilla of overpowered pilot boats, at the entrance to the Panama Canal. In a gap in the buses’ curtain, I can see a few orange blurred street lights, through my grade 2 reading glasses.

The best reading glasses are always the cheapest.

The pair I’m wearing are totally eccentric, and cost two bucks. All that staring at the Lamp of Babylon, the Dell, has flat screened my eye muscles. So like most baby boomers, who once, and once alone paid $300 for  reading glasses, before sitting on them, (like the fuca beside me is starting to do)….I now buy reading glasses from chemists, Chinese street vendors, and Panamanian book shops. I’ve had a good run with the flat, rectangular, urban intellectual styles. But my favourite frames are the Maxwell X, southern preacher type, kinda neo-Wayfarer, with clear lower frames, but the current set, at 2 bucks, will suffice, and are, very, ah, google. They go well with the strange new Cortez the killer micro strip beard I’m growing below my lip, crossed with some Chinese chin hair developments. I never succeeded in successfully producing any credible facial hair design, so I’m enjoying the weird new experience. Besides, we are about to plunder into to Caribbean aboard ship, pirate Depp compass in hand, and so some Spanish galleon facial hair, seems totally appropriate. I should send some W.I.P photos I suppose, albeit my vanity says wait unit we have facial hair lift off. As it turned out, being rarely found in a warm, fresh and even hot water shower,  such that when I do, it’s rather indulgent, and my mind wafts off like a tenor about to break song,  or fart, and accordingly, in the process,  a moment of absent mindedness whilst shaving can , and did, set me back weeks. I feel like the newby farmer who used the herbicide instead of the fertilizer.

The recent resurgence of the super geek, black wayfarer frames for clear reading glasses has me worried. Are those gay style setters in Melrose’s  Armani, stalking me?

I was wearing the preacher geek frames a few years back. I couldn’t believe it when all the uber hip were wearing the uber geek frames of my preference, last time I was retail prowling Melrose. Even the sexiest maître di’s are wearing them, regardless of the fact they have perfectly good, 20 20 vision. It will be interesting to see what’s ahead in Europe and NYC. I could buy a set for $500, but stumbled on set for $12. Fashion is like that. They say the poor get it in the neck, but sometimes I think it’s the rich who really suffer. I mean anyone whose mind set insists on paying $12,000 for a Vuitton hand bag that you can buy in Ho Chi Min city for $25, has got to be classified as a victim.

On the subject of fashion, sweeties, I was a bit amazed to find fully fledged dance station on the Panamanian FM dial. How very urbane. It’s called Party FM.  88.1 on the dial. Just 0.1 FM away from my own attempt at broadcasting sexy house. For breakfast today, they were playing a lovely little tune, sung in the style of a new Barry White bartone, suggesting he would fuck me from the speakers. I will fuck you from the speakers, is the lyric, as I recall. How Christmassy . How Catholic.

I had the most fun I ever had blowing $400K on what was Australia’s longest playing dance radio station, TRIP FM, ‘on ya dial, and off”. Not everyone survived the party. My sound technician was taken out in body bag, my manager contracted deadly cancer, but then she was a Jedi, and shrugged it off, and overall we had a lot of fun.

I have to confess a past passion for the deep, heavy and complex guitar harmonies of teams like Crazy Horse and Neil Young live, Like a Hurricane, but there is just something deeper inside me that goes yeah baby to the wild world of tunes coming out of the complex world of cyber space. Besides, all music needs to work itself around the pulse of humanity, four four.

It’s a bit odd being 53, and being heavily in new electronic chill and doof, but its a healthy part of being in the now. Those who at 53, who can only enjoy playing old hits and memories, are subtly locking their psyche into the past, sawing off their branches so as to count their bark rings.

The day you date your music preferences to the past, is the day you lock yourself into accelerated old age. Don’t go there.

Besides, file sharing, or ripping off the stupid and greedy recording industry, is good sport. Where there were once 7 different sets of  greedy dealer’s fingerprints on every CD sold, Bit Torrent, is now, to my way of thinking, a sporting kind of way of bye bye greedy record industry dinosaurs. Fuc ‘em. I was there in 2001, dot com team at the ready, offering to move music sales online, in a streamed, hear music, buy music format, but I might just have well asked the recording companies to shoot their children. Now, their ship is going down in sea of greed. Mind you, I’m dot gone too.

So log on and get ya’self all ya need by way of what’s new and appealing to ya soul. For free.

As time has it, my perspective has changed. The illusion of time, eh. The all night bus trip had its difficulties, not the least being the tendency of my sumo travel companion, to roll his giant head in a slumbering snore, and release gaseous smells my way, that reminded me of what happens when a bear keeper loses his shit shovel. I mean, this guy was that big, even an Airbus A320 would have trouble getting him airborne. Until he farted.

Maybe I got some sleep in there somewhere, but I’m not really sure, and I prefer not to force a replay. So staggering out into the predawn darkness at Dave,  it was indeed somewhat of a relief, one, to be out of the compress, and two, to be able to resume normal bodily temperature after being snap frozen by the megalithic bus’s insensitive air con settings.

A couple of sharp young Chicago guys, of Vedic blood and Obama’s law school training, had suffered air con rigamortis badly.  But gratefully, in between Obama’s lectures in racism, sexism and constitutional law, Vish’ had picked up some Spanish, and was functioning well enough to help enquire how the fuck we could get more than 150k through a mountain pass, where all the flights were booked out for days, so we could enjoy snorting salt whilst having Tequila thrown at us, on New Year’s Eve.

Aside of no sleep, and frozen and or compressed body parts, the town of Dave looked like a convincing shit hole.

The first news was bad. The road was still blocked. There was no bus to Bocas. And it’s bleak, and dull.

But hey, there is a spark in Austo-American enterprise, and with the power of $100 divided by a gang of us newly banded, 3 Aust-Gringos travellers, we soon found a brave taxi driver, who, like the US Mail, assured us he would get through.

So into the iddy biddy taxi we all climbed, and as I shuffled pockets to adjust my Ipod from some numbing doof, to some more relaxing chill, the boys in the back seat slumbered. It was pretty dark, with dawn barely a suggestion, but the farm labourers were already sitting on the road edge in darkness, awaiting their pick up. “My name is Manual, my work is my name”, kept repeating itself in my sad lost lobos of pathetic jokes.

You’ve gotta remain cheery after blowing half you daily budget on a taxi ride into the abyss. As the need to take a piss and attend the more difficult waste disposal built, so too did our altitude. I should take a moment here, to clarify the intent of this short trip. Basically, as far as I was concerned, I was heading to a warm set of Caribbean islands, where a pair of budgie smugglers, some crocs and a T shirt would get you happily through a week or so. Fortunately I don’t believe in travelling light, which is I why I prefer to travel the world in 50 foot yachts. My anal travelling habits paid off, as upon calling a piss stop to the taxi driver,  and upon getting out of the said taxi, it became very obvious, very fast, that all that second gear climbing had in fact got us way, way up high, into some very cold and windy tropical alpine environment. If this was Sri Lanka, we had suddenly found ourselves atop Adam’s Peak, where some frozen deity first made contact, or in the case of my home zone, I was on-top of the one countries highest tropical mountains, Thornton’s peak, in a winters gale. This bit was not in the Lonely Planet Guide.  And I was not dressed for the occasion. But at least I could take out every single summer shirt, T shirt and singlet, and put every bit of it on, until my cupboard was bare. Unlike my chest hair.

Suddenly, all the homes started looking like they were built for quaint ginger bread men. Then, the geology went weird on us. You would be happily driving along, and all of a sudden, 50m sections of the road would just drop 300mm, in some sort of jellified San Andreas fault. With some experience in road maintenance, from previous, seemingly lucid dream of being a shire alderman, this one had me stumped. I did years of soil mechanics at university, and I hadn’t seen anything like it in all my millions of miles. It was as though the whole mountainside was built on a soufflé that was sagging.  Maybe this was indeed Mount Flummery.

Things didn’t look too promising, so far as that landslide story just being a bus company’s bullshit excuse.

With not a soul in sight beyond the odd mountain goat, suddenly, around a crème caramel corner, appeared a truck stop of idle semi’s. With it, appeared to be a cross between a restaurant, a hotel, and an alpine dungeon. A sort of Gringo-Swiss Alps road stop.

The news was bleak. There was indeed no passable road ahead. Ever the ‘On, On’ instinct however, had us extracting translations as to whether the landslide was passable by foot, with full packs, wearing crocs and beach ball attire.

The deciding factor came when we asked what the terrain looked like, that we would have to traverse, for the apparent 90 minute hike. The guys just pointed to the hillside above the road shoulder. Had it been a ski run, it would have been marked with 3 black crosses.

So then could we stay here at the Mt Dungeon Inn?

Not only was it full, but we weren’t even welcome to sit and eat. It was just after dawn, I suppose, and two Indian Chicago backpacking law students and a gonzo yachty didn’t exactly fit in.

What the hell, what could we do but urge on the taxi driver. But the taxi driver soon lost his urge, as parts of the road started to disappear like jelly after Cheech and Chong got the munchies.

Here enter-eth the ridiculous sign. It’s thick, tropical alpine jungle. It’s infact Panama’s first National Park area.  Its misty, clouds are making their way through the trees like the Hounds of the Baskerville, and we notice, then pass, a daft, an end-is-nigh type of roadside sign, reading Lost and Found Paradise. And not much else. No cars. No driveway. Nothing in sight, just a rocky goat track, climbing vertically up the mountain to God knows where. So we drive on by.

But then it came to me. We are indeed Lost.  We’d like to be Found. And like any Muslim holding the detonator, we had an eye to Paradise.

Turn the car around.

What did we have to loose.

Surely we could bribe some Panamanian nutter to spare us a soft spot and hot drink, even if the end was nigh.

But then, scrambling for breath as we made our way up the rocky trail,  taxi driver in tow, a little A4 laminated piece of paper appeared to tell us, ‘Take only photographs, leave only footprints’.

The Muslims are right.

God is Great.

For there, perched on a razor back ridge, 150m above us, was Panama’s very own, “Where Eagle’s Dare” nest, in the form of some bright yellow backpacker’s eco lodge, painted with Iluminati pyramids and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

I mean, how silly of us.

How we hadn’t known that was what was awaiting us, was simply remiss of us.

I don’t drink coffee or sugar, but is wasn’t long before I downed two cups brimming with powdered milk and sugar.

Not only did they have a bunk (if we waited till some bodies woke up), but they had, “the hottest shower in Panama”. A hot shower is one of the world greatest luxuries, and never take it for granted. Especially as I had not had one for a month. Let alone had a shower in fresh water. I confess to tripling my 6 minute limit, and showered as a alpine gale blew through the arboreal bromeliads right outside the shower’s window, loving every second of it.

Then some sleep, in an equally mountainous dorm, where bunks rise three stories skywards, packed with all manner of interesting stranded travellers.

I’m on bunk level two with the window view out across tropical volcanoes, and misty mountains, where I can keep an eye on any sign of bus life below, and if it’s blocked for days, who gives a shit. The coffee’s hot. As are the showers and a couple of the girls. The view is sensational. The weather is a bit, foredeck in a gale, but hey, it’s better than eating beans at Dave, or rolling around in the Panama Canal.

And to think, if I there had been a $75 dollar air ticket available, I would have missed this whole story.

The next day was like a game of strip jack naked in the front seat of a mini bus. The lower the altitude, the more layers of clothes came off. From Alps, to the Caribbean, literally. Eventually I got down to just my Port Douglas Singlet Hire singlet. And pants, you idiot.

Just as well we didn’t attempt to hoof it over the landside.

There wasn’t just one landslide, there were many, and they were massive. It seemed the Panamanian Government had muscled up every bulldozer, tip truck and diggy south of the Rio Grande, and had put them all to work, to get the tourists through to Bocos, which to Panama , is their tourist Mecca. It was Christmas. I can just hear the calls between the tourism minister and the minister for big trucks, rotating every 30 minutes, in an edgy rub where crocs and boots meet toe to toe.

The tourism minister is to be seen in this month’s Panamanian glossy English language magazine, prattling out the usual shit that tourism ministers the world over love to sprout. The guy was in white shorts, and blue untucked shirt, displaying his tapering legs, that could barley get him from the luncheon table to the bog. These legs were elegantly placed on the teak deck of a million dollar Swan, the Mercedes of yachts.  Meanwhile, most of the yachts in Panama, out of frame, where a motley mob, noting all the 80 foot Swans are at Antigua, impressing people their owners hate.

I’ve heard it all before: the Minister had the mindless nodding press convinced that what Panama needs is high end, big spending tourism, with flash yachts, just like the half, of the half, of  the one percent of the population, that the Minister is lunched by daily.

So what Pamama needs is rich fucas, who demand total insulation from everything, hot, cold, ugly or non Spanish speaking. I think the Minister has been spending too much time in elegant French restaurants, whilst attending European tourism trade conferences, that double as sleep deprived drinking competitions. So much so, I read, that the majority of pathetic Panamanian tourism adverting budget, is going to the French market, when nearly all tourists here are from a $250 flight away, in the US and come wearing back packs.

The Columbians have got it figured, they advertise on Panama’s hotel bound CNN watchers, telling them the only risk in going to Columbia, is that you won’t want to leave. I’m not sure if that risk is about not being able to leave, or not wanting to leave. Either way, I want to go, as my Vedic law grad mates are today,  apparently in pursuit of racks of girls and powders, not necessarily in that order. Shiva would shit himself.

There is no road between Panama and Columbia, and it looks like staying that way. Aside of being the most inhospitable jungle on earth, it has equally inhospitable neighbours, where Colombians don’t want south bound gringos in combi’s, trying to score, and Panamanians don’t want the whole of South America turning up at the border on a donkey.

They say you can hike through the border forests.

But there are problems. The Columbians tend to shoot first, assuming you are a rebel mob coming south. The Panamanians do the same, on their side. In the middle, the tribal types tend to shoot first, knowing they guy in the cross hairs is an unauthorised poacher. Then, every man eating animal in the mix of both North and South American carnivores, have an eat first, ask questions later policy.

There are a few entomological issues too, of the type that killed 20,000 workers building the Panama Canal, but really, nothing you should worry about, being that you will be covered in head to toe in fluorescent bullet proof body armour, with a peace logo on you pack full of antibiotics.

How the fuck they had rebuilt roads where the flood had taken out Aswan Dam sized valley crossings, in just 2 days, amazed me. I was glad to be in mini bus, not a 20 tonne mother load bus, when we were shepherded over a loose packed bridge of fill, with an embankment gradient of 1 as to 1, and a drop of some 6 storeys, drained with a one small pipe, where 2 days before there had been the dam busting flood of  a Chinese, 3 Dam, catastraphobic proportions.

The pathetic occupational health and safety officers of any other country would have had us waiting another week, before daring heavy traffic over that 3 minute, instant land bridge, that even Moses would have balked at, regardless of a LA freeway full of chariots up his arse.

The trip down the mountain was indeed spectacular. The flood devastation was massive, and hey, I thought this was meant to be the dry season, but then I thought I was going to warm dry Caribbean island. Apparently the wet and dry seasons are highly localised, as for example Golfito, just across the Isthmus, a mere 25 minute Cesna flight away, was going dry.

The bus trip’s company was splendid, with a wonderful German couple of my age, Karl and Christina, who the night before had been on level 1 of my rack-packing accom, and we exchanged ideas about long distance motorcycling tours, offering each other a bike swapping deal, so I could maybe tour Europe in summer, and they could tour Australia in due course, being we both had a range of bikes in our stable, including a mutually shared BMW 650 range. I love older travellers who enjoy the challenge of the tight budget, and who are willing to give up the life destroying comforts of their baby boomer colleagues, and just get out there and breathe in the pulse of the real adventure trail. Karl and Christina have matching BMW 650’s…how cool. Hopefully our mountainous liaison will lead to new, “On the Road” experiences for all 3 of us.

I watch in horror as my same age colleagues go on annual or bi annual, world holidays, in search of that retail surprise that no one has seen in their home town, blowing budgets in a 3 week holiday that I can spread to a year. Life is about the experience, not the possessions.

Back in the mid seventies, the Australians published travel guides called, Europe on $10/day. It came well before the Lonely Planet explosion, that I hear recently sold out for $180Million, when the book series was meant to be based on the insights and experiences of the cool, bandana crew.  $180M should buy a few $10/night dorm beds. Yeah right.

Anyway, with the aid of a 500 quid, a split windscreen Combi, and an occasional crew of 5 living aboard, I managed to stay laid, loaded and laughing all the way around Europe for $8.30 day at 20 years old. In 1975. The Combi was one of those land yacht types, well fitted by a gentlemanly Devonshire joiner, with a cupboard for everything, pipe berths in the roof, double bed below, and front seat for Stu and his stinking feet. The elegance and royalty of the enamelled stove’s name, Dudley, became the name of our much loved home, easily my most favourite car ever. Just looking at it made me feel like a cuckoo about its cuckoo clock.

Dudley had a roof rack over the cabin, and by way of warning about our braking issues, it was emblazoned with a British number plate, that we had found roadside with the first three letters being MUR, which we modified to MURDUR 1.

Upon the roof rack we had two bicycles. One night in Naples, after mistaking the local tip, in the dead of a drunken night, as a nice leafy retreat upon which to spread our mattresses under a Mediterranean sky, we were awoken to the looming presence of machine that wanted to compress and pulp our already compressed and pulped livers. Hurriedly, and horrified about the hygiene implications,  we made our way nervously out, onto the confusing streets of Naples, theoretically heading  Sorrento,  but feeling like we were to be snap cooked under Vesuvius, and in no time, we were completely lost, having a very bad hair day.

Our timing was, shall we say, perfect.  We could not figure what all the fuss was about, but the streets were packed full of people lining the pavements and hanging out the balconies, in between the undies.

There were all manner of barricades and police at each intersection. Then we noticed the odd cyclist.

Each intersection we approached, somehow magically opened up in front of us,  Walt Disney style, as the Caribineri waved us through with a big smile. People then began to wave and cheer. What the fuc was going on, we wondered.

Was it the MURDER 1 number plate? Was our bad hair actually the Napolitano scruff up style de jour ?

But then we got it.  Suddenly we were overtaken by fast pack of cyclists, followed by an equally pack of vans and cars, with bikes on the roof racks. We were smack bang in the middle of the Tour d’ Italia. They had seen the bikes on our roof rack, (not noticing they were as functional as Italian politics), and had assumed we were just another back up van.

Given the choice of quietly pulling over to avoid arrest, we decided to instead, to milk it for everything we could, and make hay whilst the Caribineri still smiled.

So out the windows came 5 massive French flags and their poles that we had nicked in Calais, shortly after arriving by hovercraft, and hitting the supermarket for 10 bottles of 1 Franc wine. It was in Calais, we discovered that the roof rack had other uses. Like for example, post vino, at night, sitting on the roof rack whilst driving, was damn good fun, plus, it was the ideal height from which to strip civic flags mounted on telegraph poles for Bastille day or whatever. 20 year olds.

Anyway, despite the British registered van, with the steering wheel in the passenger’s seat, the French flags brought the crowd to new levels of excitement, and we were smoothly guided through Naples to the cheers of the massive crowd.

I lived in another car called Bruce, in the States. Bruce was a fine piece of American technology, with 351 cubic inches under the bonnet of this Ford Ranch wagon, a bonnet that twisted and bent with one side’s movement having little relationship to the other. Besides, both sides were meters apart.  The internal plastic wheel liners were that vacuous, that a quick modification with the jigsaw allowed us to store huge suitcases in either side. As a station wagon, our road crew of 3 agreed upfront to rotate nightly, so you only got the front bench seat of the station wagon every third night. Being that the road crew comprised myself and two very elegant, hip and adventurous Sydney girlfriend/buddies, I was very happy with the sleeping regime, being a cosy winner 2 nights in three.

Bruce was subjected to the same sort of dazed regime as Ken Kesey’s bus,  where we were doing the our own 20 yearold’s thing in the mid seventies, in a preppy version of the Electric Cool Aid Acid test, and accordingly, my memories of the 6 weeks, US, cross country tour, are welded into my retina with all the strength the other Oppenheimer’s little discovery.

In the Rocky’s, Bruce became Bruce the Alpine sleigh, with similar handling capabilities as a sleigh less reindeers. In the Las Vegas desert, after a night developing the plot that Hunter S Thompson must clearly based on us, Bruce became Bruce the Desert Camel, after we took him to water, after a messy night melting down in the Casino’s, escaping at dawn to the boat ramp of some nearby dam, opening Bruce’s front doors, to unbuckle and fall straight into the water, after discharging my can of shave cream over Cath and Jackie, in a fit of hysterics.

Bruce served us well as Bruce the Mississippi Ferry Boat, camped happily in puddles of dredged shells and mud that made up our levy bank vantage point, before hitting Bourbon Street.

It was in NYC that Bruce excelled, this time manifesting as Bruce the New York Taxi. We arrived on a hot September Thursday night, somewhat over cooked by Oppenhiemer’s mis-creations, needing to exit the car at an inappropriate location because of our state of mind, only to be assuaged by a charge of the light brigade, or so it felt, as 100 mounted police charged at us in the crowd, a protest crowd apparently, in front of Madison Square Garden, 10 minutes after reaching our final destination.
I’m going back to NYC this year, and I hope they don’t hit me up for those parking tickets we got, one per hour, for 2 months, that made nice paper carpets in our front and back seats.  With a devil come…what’s that saying?….anyway, with a who gives a shit attitude to Bruce, being that every panel had been reshaped on a loose but fast, Red River crawdad fishing trip with Oki rednecks, there was really very little worth in protecting the bodywork of the big gorgeous Bruce, appropriatly emblazoned with a massive upside down map of Australia on the tail gate, warning, “AustrALIENS!”

So come night time, after a few too many everything’s at Studio 54, where Cath and Jackie got jobs on Steve’s out of jail reopening, Bruce became dangerous competition to all those De Niro taxi driver types with gunho, stock car driving style. We were beyond being intimidated, and being that there were only a few private cars on the road at the early in the morning, it felt like us vs the NYC cab army. No one ever dropped in on our lane. They never got a chance. No one ever got us at the lights, where we traditionally assumed the lane alongside the pavement, where you had barely 20m to jump ahead of the adjoining taxi, with clean dart and lane shift, or KO into the parked car infront. 351 inches helped, but more successful was our technique of simply dodg’em car’ing it into the taxi lane anyway.  Bugger’em. Not that we were that worried by red lights. The poor cops watching the traffic camera screens form NYC surveillance central, must have not been amused. The grid pattern layout of NYC sees traffic lights at about 200m spacing’s. With application of Studio 54 looseners, at around 4 in the morning, we discovered that a speed of about 58 miles per hour through Manhattan could keep us just ahead of the lights turning orange. Slip to 56, and immediately, Manhattan became a  blur of dangerous orange, requiring application of pressure to the pedal, to a basic 62 miles per hour, to catch up speed, and get out of the orange, and into the green. We were young once.

BOCOS, remember Rod, Bocos.

Ok, Ok…enough of those tall tales and true from the legendary past.

Bocos del Toro. My usual modus operandi, in deep research into my travel destinations, starts with the introductory pages of Lonely Planet guides . Quite often, its ends there too.

Besides, there’s what you are told, then there’s what you experience. 23 years of school and university taught me that you retain maybe 5 to 10 % of what you are taught, whereas what you learn through experience, you well and truly retain. Intellectualising what you learn, isn’t that useful to anyone trying to live in the now, but you inner gut recalls all. My inner gut recalled today, with its noisy little complaints, that some of those charmed island streams where we extracted our drinking water, may well have been full of parasites. Being this is New Years eve, I thought the cluster bomb approach to parasites might well exorcise my micro demons. So I just located a Farmacia, did a few parasite-esque charades, got a $4 dose of Apex, whatever that is, and tonight, combined with liberal dose of annual New Years’ vodka, those fuca’s shitting in my own stream have a slim chance of survival, going out very pissed. Tomorrow, we sweep low and hard over the burning landscape, with Apex dose 2, clearing the remaining resurgents from their staging camps.

Bocas are a discount Caribbean paradise, where the Panamanian $1 beers, $4 meals and $12 rooms have attracted every mad backpacker south of Mexico, and add the overlay of Christmas, and Bocas is rock’n. Packed.

After the bus ride down the Panamanian Alps, a cold brewing from the snap frozen experience, it was off the bus, and onto to Panga, a concoction of outboards and fibreglass, in a long open speedboat format.

As a yachtie, the first experience of the Caribbean was a winner. To start with, there was no 5m tide like on the Pacific side, so everyone has decided to live a foot or two above the water, On Golden Pond.

Getting on and of the pangas, because of the non tide, is like getting in and out of the gondolas in Disneyland’s Pirates of the Penzance.

It soon became apparent that everyone could, would, and should, like any civilised mob, live directly over the water, on short stilts.

As a guy still affixed with childhood Popeye consciousness, I was in heaven.

Then, instead of cars, everyone had boats. Fast, simple ones. Client parking signs where not found in the street, they were at the front of the bars and restaurants, with cleats instead of kerbs.

I’m very happy about this, dreaming half my life of living on the waterfront, whist living the other half of my life, actually on the waterfront.

What a blessing its is to be free of those anal Australian regulators who seem to think, that despite the country having more waterfront that any other country on earth, no one is allowed to actually live over the water, and if you do, as per a few of my past abodes, one day the government will resume, harangue or bill you out of the most comfy place you could possibly live…over the water. One day I’ll get around the law, by building a 2 storey boatshed loft on a barge, adding an outboard, and deeming it a boat, with no rates, no land tax, a range of waterfront views, wireless data, clean rain water, and solar energy. Plus, it will be tenth of the price of waterfront land, and a happy participant in sea level change.

Ah, the soothing lapping, as you read in bed with a fishing line tied to ya toe.

Anyway here at Bocas, everyone, a whole community it seems, is living over the water on stilts.

This makes me very happy. As does transport for a couple of bucks, by 50 HP pangas. They third world knows how to go fast on water. To start with, make the boat long. Then keep all the weight aft. Steer from the aft end, as that is where the wave hammering is mildest. Don’t get fancy with gel coat and deck mouldings, just keep it long, open, and full of chopped matt fibreglass. US western try-hards sure know how to design a speed boat so as to need a chiropractor after a fast boat ride. And I even had one with me today, a chiropractor of  the sparkling female type, that, along for a fast panga ride, inviting me to alluring beaches, which I shall dutifully pursue come manyana, as tonight, its partay time baby. It’s getting closer to 2012, and the rate of change is accelerating. The big New Years day cosmic download has already commenced, and today at breakfast, I could Skype my friends and family as they partied at midnight. We Australians have a big jump because of that Pacific date line. We lead the world in New Year’s Eve parties.

And with a million bars, restaurants and backpackers dens, I dare say Bocas will be bonkers tonight. At 53, I must remind myself not to come up with any of those family man type excuses about how I’ve been there, done that, at New Years, and instead of being over it, be into it.

Today one of my more pressing claims was settled. You don’t really get that many pressing issues when on holiday away from your holiday, but nonetheless, I was not just going take a grinning, “que?’ from the receptionist at my hotels, after the fuca’s gave my laundry away to some other dick, who now has my favourite German/Balinese traveller’s shorts, that have carried cash, Ipod, and passports unfailingly for years. And with it, a few favourite shirts, one embodying everything cool about the Bocas of Bali…the Gili Islands.

I tried not to loose it, and whilst I confess to slipping out a few “stupid aresholes” under my breath, I eventually negotiated a settlement equivalent to 4 nights of hotel charges. $US60. For this, I get the romantic third floor, corner room, above the busiest supermarket in town, with its own hot shower, and a great Will Smith movie on cable last night. CNN comes on air every now and again, reminding me of the stupor with which the US sees and righteously justifies its international perspective. CNN now comes with sell-out Australian news readers…shame on them. It’s a blight on the world, as is Fox. Albeit after no TV for some weeks, I confess an attraction to the dysfunctional Lamp of Babylon, evil mind fuc it is.

It’s starting to sound like Mexican gunfight outside, as the West’s normally banned fireworks are going off like Hamas missiles. I notice this week that Hamas have been sending the Israelis the odd missile or two for New Years. I think the score is the usual. 3 dead on the Israel side, and the Israelis are disgusted and outraged. The typical Hamas missile can blow a meter wide hole in concrete. The Israeli return missiles do more that blow a small hole in the building, they level a whole apartment block. And of course the US, even with the Zionist surrounded Obama, are disgusted and appalled. At the Palestinians. Of course there are always a few small facts CNN don’t dwell on. Like the fact that the Israeli retaliation has now killed 100 Palestinians for every I Israeli dead. A minor detail. The fact that Palestinian hospitals are so full, they are turning away the wounded, is no reason why the US should not chastise the Palestinians for their recklessness. One wonders what skills the Israelis war leaders picked up in Deutschland 1940?

Fireworks. They are always big around this time of the year.

At least there was no Tsunami this Christmas.  Mind you, those tsunamis can be helpful, however, especially to US/Australian and Indonesian corporatocracy, who, in the guise of military guarded aid   to help Aceh, went about the systematic rape and murder of all surviving GAM independence fighters, standing in the way of the US/Aust/Indo corporates, with a throttle hold on Aceh’s massive oil and gas fortunes. It’s a sick world. How much longer must we suffer the evil that CNN so nicely sanitises?

But anyway, some peace came upon the Zappapitos supermarket Hotel, once the lost laundry dispute was settled.

I started the day with a peaceful intent, taking a fast panaga to an old United Fruit company island called Bastimentos, where there is a true west Indian, Caribbean feel, with even more real deal weatherboard shacks over the water. Pity my Sony digital camera’s lithium went splat, as the photogenic charm of the rickety island is breath taking.

Laid back is the way to pitch it. But a little hippy-esque sign took my attention, with something about organic and book exchange mentioned on the sign. Something told me I had to go there. But it wasn’t a quick trip to the supermarket parking lot, this was a hike, up the island’s spine, through fresh wet season mud where my crocs were dead keen on landing me arse up.

At the hill top, or as the www.upinthehill_shop@yahoo.com name suggested, something cool was ahead. And indeed it was. What a treat. Surfer’s organic heaven, mixed with Swiss Family Robinson, all came together is  a happy gathering of sparkling eyed dads, smiling kids, and happy mums, decorated with surfboards, organic architecture, organic gardens, and gentle balcony. We in suburbia have got it all wrong, and UP IN HILL SHOP is my proof.

I’d spent days hunting around Panama and Costa Rica for old fashioned, virgin pressed coconut oil, once the staple oil of Central America before the evil American Soybean Association muscled in on the $3 Billion dollar US food oil market, with complete lies and deception about the properties of coconut oil, falsely alleging that any saturated fat like coconut oil meant heart disease, back in the 80’s.  Tropical oil exported from Asia, the Pacific and Central America had no hope, without the lobbyists, PR bull-shitters and press on their side. The consequent win by the vegetable oil manufacturers has contributed to more deaths in the world, than any cluster bombing ever succeeded in achieving.

I haven’t got all day to explain, but I will cut to the chase. If you have vegetable oil, particularly Canada’s GM canola oil on your shelves, you need to do some very fast learning, as you are nothing short of suicidal. Don’t forget, cigarettes were deemed harmless for years. But you might just as well smoke a pack a day, as to cook food in hydrogenated, trans fatty poison, that is rancid by technical definition before is leaves the shop… but hey, it’s cheap. Any tour of the aisles of any Panamanian supermarket will reveal hundreds of gallons of new cheap cooking oil. With Central American food being basically fried everything with beans and rice, these guys here know how to eat cooking oil. And it’s killing them by the thousands, as it has already done in the West, where you can, if you are a male like me, expect a one in two chance of contracting cancer in your lifetime.

Vegetable oil goes rank quickly, unlike coconut oil that can stand unrefrigerated for over two years. But the rancid behaviour of vegetable oils can be solved by a process of heating and hydrogen saturation called hydrogenation. This turns crook oil, into poison.

If you then add more heat, or dread have it, even get a whisk of smoke from your fry pan, kiss good bye to your shiny old age.

But hey, back in the 80’s, the Wendy’s, MacDonald’s and Burger Kings all swallowed the ASA’s bullshit, and started cooking your food in a new toxic bath. Aware countries are fast banning this stuff, but that does not stop KFC pumping it down the west’s throats, and here in deep fried Central America, who needs Reagan’s hit men, when oil can do it quicker and quieter.

Coconut oil, on the other hand, is a direct combatant of the degenerative diseases sweeping the world including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and arthritis. There was this bloke to whom all western doctors swear an oath upon becoming qualified healers. His name was Hippocrates….but the Hippocratic Oath has become the Hypocrite’s Oath, where $1,000,000 US medical degrees are now paid for by drug companies to insure the doctors push the Roche poisons.  The teachings of Hippocrates about healing through food put coconut products at the top of the page. But then what would doctors know about food. In 5 years of University, they are lucky if they receive 40 hours of nutritional guidance…just look at the body and health of your own doctor for example.

I got sad email today. I couldn’t believe it. A fun old school buddy of mine, a great guy,  under the jovial school nick name of Dobber, studied medicine and rose to international prominence as a colorectal surgeon, making his life’s cause to treat patients with complications, ‘in places that the sun don’t shine”. He chaired just about every medical body and hospital where you can find an arsehole. You would think, that with all that acquired experience and medical understanding, you might just have gleaned a few things about bowel cancer’s causes. But doctors have no idea what Hippocrates had in mind, when it came to healing by food. I could not believe it, Dobber died of bowel cancer,  yesterday, aged 53.

People are going to have to take back their own lives, and stop being sheep to the slaughter on the direction of your priest, you doctor, and your politician.

The Polynesians off New Zealand known as the Tokelau and Pukapuka have been the subject of extensive nutritional studies. These tribes set up the perfect controlled experiment, with some moving onto western diets in NZ, whist others  remained on their islands, where coconuts made up key part of their diet, as the main beverage, from the green nuts,  which was their main munchy snack,  and also from the coconut meat, and as the main food additive , as oil, grated coconut or coconut milk. That’s a lot of coconut. The differences showing up in the results were staggering. Aside of huge differences in degenerative disease,  simple things like digestive problems where way different, with islanders doing waste removing shits 2- 3 times per day, whereas those in the West became more and more full of shit, literally. There was no constipation, no bowel cancer, haemorrhoids or heart disease amongst the coconut consuming islanders. And the results were not based on the taro intake of islanders, as wheat and rice are superior carbohydrates than taro.

Bullshit still remains around cholesterol in theories about atherosclerosis, or blocked arteries, as cholesterol is not the main culprit, rather it’s proteins, in the form of scar tissue residual of toxins, free radicals and viruses that form the main anchor for the blockages, and coconut oil, through digestion, forms fatty acids which act as powerful anti-microbial powerhouses, that wind back the fungi and all range of microbila nasties, including for example, coconut oils’ caprylic acid that will get any vaginal Candida on the run.

Eat fat, loose weight….there’s even a book by this name about coconut oil.

Never cook in anything else, if you can find it, coconut oil that is, and today, I found it, and blew two days travel budget on getting myself a good stock, complete with a skin care version with the healing ylang ylang embodied in it, which I will need soon, as I must soon shower and flash up, to smoke the dance floor through New Years.

Living at sea, in salt and sun every day, means skin care is an issue. Never put anything on your skin that you would not eat. Or alternatively, never let anyone eat your skin until you’ve eaten them first.  Oops.

Skin feeds its coverings direct to the blood stream without the acid bath of the stomach first. I refuse all skin care products aside of coconut, or maybe olive oil, for this reason. I’ll go into the subject of other ways to degenerate yaself with haz chems like sodium laurel sulphate and it’s other mates, later.

But back up that hill, to the Shop in Hill.

They also grow cocoa up there. I bought a couple of balls of the stuff that I will grate into drinks, or whatever comes to mind. I learnt today, that a Harvard medical professor called Norman Hollenberg had been doing some research into the diets of the local Kuna tribe from Panama’a San Blas islands. Again we have the ideal experiment. Some Kunas have moved ashore to be poisoned by western supermarkets, whilst others stayed traditional. The Kuna’s are mad keen on drinking cocoa, kinda like screen jokey traders, needing their coffee. On the islands, the Kuna drink unprocessed cocoa, that is rich in flavenoids. In the city, the Kuna’s maintain their cocoa habits, but this time they get the same cocoa as us, which has been processed to remove the bitter flavoured epicatechin flavenoids. Flavenoids are the bullet proof jacket of heart disease, and Kunas, island ones at least, are addicts.

Flipping through the death certificates, it turns out that island Kunas are 10 TIMES less likely to die of cardiovascular disease than their urban relatives.  Cod liver oil and St John’s wart are good products, but unprocessed cocoa, as far as a new heath food is concerned is a sleeping winner, according to Dr Paul Kroon, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Food Research at Norwich, who notes, “Someone will make a lot of money out of this”. But not before a lot of indigenous mobs meet an ugly, western diet death. As for us westerners, we were fucked over years ago.

Eat as little as you can the from the central aisles of the supermarket. To prove my point, just strip off, in your mind, all the older bodies you see in a western supermarket, and try not wince at the thought.

It’s at this point, I can wish you a very happy new year.

There was no chance in the high of the party, to take out the Dell, so the story will have to be relayed through my annual hangover.

Bocas has no shortage of party pads.  Mondo Taitu, the coolest backpacker den, made for an ideal heart starting ground zero, aided by me mate Mick, from KPMG Dublin, where I think the KPMG he works for stands for Kill the Pig Mit Grog, as is the Irish way. He’s got me convinced to go there this year. Things get pretty social and animated as the first vodka’s lifted my space shuttle. Mick’s drinking mate from Atlanta, Joseph, doesn’t drink. But that seems to have no problematic impact on their ability to send each other an email and end up on some foreign shore parting together.

In fine form they had collected a group of girls and international hangers on, and were ready for some reconnaissance.  I’d already spied, ticketed and downed a couple of drinks at the Barco something or other, where some genius DJ was warming up a room full of no one, but this was surely the spot where the action would heat up. It did.

Joseph had gone deeper. Across the channel, about 200m , there sits a bright boatshed style hostel called Aqua, consisting of three primary elements. Element 1, water, lots of it, with a swimming pool in the form of a dock missing its central timbers, Element 2, speakers from hell, and Element 3, a bar so packed, it might just as well have been a helicopter on the top of the US embassy in Saigon, as Ho Chi Min flattened the gates.

This place was a licence to print money, as bikini and doof central, from lunch every day, where everything on the menu was carnal.

From Aqua, it was by boat, back to Barco something, again on the waterfront, where it was time to be showered in champagne. Service in Panama is hopeless, and so getting a drink can be a battle. So when I finally got close to getting a drink, it’s was a pity the service couldn’t get it in a glass, as they barmaids, come 2009, had more fun showering me with the stuff. Surely all those car racing types don’t shower themselves with real champagne? Its sticky, and it aint long before it stinks.

Anyway, there was no way to smoke a dance floor made of sand, so a bunch of us kicked up a desert storm instead. Joseph, as it turned out, was a shocked as I was, to know how much he, or we, knew about what was really going on in this dimension. I sometimes think I’m a lone freak, in my awareness of what is really happening through a spiritual perspective. But it seems many people are learning fast. Joseph is one of them, embodied in his current West Indian styled American, green eyed, and IT employed incarnation. Who knows, there might even be someone else out there who knows what is really happening.

Moments like New Year’s, for those who are fully aware of how big the glorious real game is, is goose bump moment. Especially, I add, in these times, as the evolution of consciousness is accelerating at rates that are indeed amazing. For example, what has changed in this 12 year unit of time, was as much as what evolved in the past 260 years, and if the Mayan’s schedule is as reliable as its been for thousands of years, the next unit of time, only 260 days, will see as much change in it as the previous 12 years…scheduled for around 2011 or 2012.

You are reading this on the net aren’t you? And has the net changed things a tad, by any chance? And it wasn’t there infront of you 20 years ago?

So I’m on the balcony of a rambling old Caribbean weatherboard hotel, on that Island called Bastimento. The Latino and reggae parties are still rolling on in the houses below, again, many of them built over the water. Its New Years day, and it’s a holiday. Bastimento does not have a main street, it has a main footpath. On the ocean side of the island, I’m told are some very glamorous beaches, where I will head out to tomorrow, when I can keep my lunch down. My room, at $10, isn’t big on a view, but hey, it has a bathroom, and besides, all the travellers are slung up in hammocks right in front of me, enjoying the view. If I can find a power point out here, I’ll plug my dead battery camera in, and show you the view.

It was a bit of a tough call, getting up and packing, making porridge and beans, and getting a boat over here with shitful hangover, but hey, at least I’m away from the lunatics who keep lighting bungers day and night on Bocas, making it me feel a tad Palestinian. Some righteous Israeli foreign minister called Livni, or something, ( more like Live NO to a Palestinian) had all the air time she wanted on CNN, to justify her countries brutality. She’s upping the score, whilst maintaining her ratios. Since last CNN broadcast, she has managed to blow another 100 Palestinian men, women and children into oblivion, raising her death toll score to 400, whilst only one more Israeli has been killed, keeping a fine balance on her 100 to 1 retaliation rate. The manipulators of the Zionists deserve a word or two. They should be ashamed of themselves, is the tright way to summarise it. With the Fourth Reich US on the edge of implosion, without the evil black hand of the US to pat the murdering Israelis on the back, it could get real messy for Israel in a few years.  The Israelis just don’t know how badly they have been used by the Rothschild Iluminati as a tool antagonise the Middle East, and urge earth to war.

My favourite freak, and lucky to be alive conspiracy theory writer, sent out his weekly blog yesterday. David Icke, former professional soccer player, and one time spokesmen for the UK Greens, doesn’t tend to twaddle around with the story of Israel…he’s our best yet conspiracy theorist, just that he’s all conspiracy, and no theory:

“So yet again the people of the virtual-concentration camp, known officially as ‘Gaza’, are being bombarded from the sky by the bully-boys of Tel Aviv.

State-of-the art Israeli jets, paid for by the United States, bomb civilian targets in this tragic, poverty-stricken wasteland which acts as a holding camp for the human beings the Israeli government would rather be dead. Waiting in the wings are Israeli tanks preparing for a possible ground invasion of Gaza, again paid for by the United States.

The world watches as a nation of people, the Palestinians, are systematically crushed and destroyed by the tyrants who call the shots in Israel on behalf of that country’s real power structure - the House of Rothschild.

And, taxpayers of America (and elsewhere), you are paying for this calculated slaughter.

American aid to Israel accounts for something like a third of all US overseas aid when Israel is home to just .001 per cent of the global population and has one of the highest incomes per head in the world. This is even without all the ‘private’ donations from US corporations and individuals which are tax-deductible even when given to the Israeli military, unlike any other foreign power.

According to 2007 figures, the United States government gave more than $6.8 million to wealthy Israel every day while to the desperate and devastated Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank they gave just $300,000.

This and other support makes Israel the biggest recipient of United States foreign military funding since the Second World War.

In their book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt write:

‘Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing the amounts provided to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct U.S. economic and military assistance since 1976 and the largest total recipient since World War ll. Total direct U.S. aid to Israel amounts to well over $140 billion in 2003 dollars.

Why do they do this? Because the House of Rothschild controls Israel and the House of Rothschild controls the political system of the United States. The network that links the two is called ‘Zionism’, a Rothschild creation - just like Israel itself.

The might of this Zionist cabal spanning Israel, the United States, Europe and beyond is yet again, like the playground bully that it is, attacking the little kid in the calipers - the people of Gaza.

At the time of writing the death toll is 430 Palestinian men, women and children with more than 2,000 injured. They are bombing the unarmed innocent knowing there will be no credible response - the way all bullies operate. Oh, brave men of Israel; oh how Yahweh would be so proud:

‘When the LORD your God hands these nations over to you and you conquer them, you must completely destroy them. Make no treaties with them and show them no mercy.’

Deuteronomy 7:1-4

What we are seeing in Gaza, and have seen so many times, both there and in the Lebanon, is merciless Old Testament slaughter: cold, calculated, heartless slaughter.

‘So they sent twelve thousand warriors to Jabesh-gilead with orders to kill everyone there, including women and children. “This is what you are to do,” they said. “Completely destroy all the males and every woman who is not a virgin”.’

Judges 21:10-24

‘Then I heard the LORD say to the other men, “Follow him through the city and kill everyone whose forehead is not marked. Show no mercy; have no pity! Kill them all - old and young, girls and women and little children. But do not touch anyone with the mark. Begin your task right here at the Temple”.’

Ezekiel 9:5-7

‘So they began by killing the seventy leaders. ”Defile the Temple!” the LORD commanded. “Fill its courtyards with the bodies of those you kill! Go!” So they went throughout the city and did as they were told.‘

Ezekiel 9:5-7  

Imagine if Iran or anyone else outside Israel and the United States (both Rothschild assets) was doing what the Israeli military is doing in Gaza. There would be global condemnation, not least from Israel and the United States, resolutions passed in the UN Security Council and talk of the need for sanctions or military intervention to ’save the innocent’.

But when Israel does it we have vacuous calls for a truce, an end to the violence while ‘understanding Israel’s position’, and, in terms of soon-to-be President ‘Change’ Obama, silence. It’s all a fraction of what others would face because Israel is a wholly-owned asset of the Rothschilds and so is not subject to the same rules as anyone else. As former Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, said:

‘Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial.’

And Prime Minister Golda Meir betrayed the same Zionist arrogance:

‘This country exists as the fulfilment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy.’

Ah, it’s all in the Old Testament?  Gotcha, right, well do as you like then.

The ‘Jewish homeland’ was from the start a Rothschild fiefdom orchestrated through the global secret society network of interbreeding families  where The Rothschilds funded the early European settlers in Israel,  and manipulated events in Germany that led to the horrific treatment of Jewish people and others, and then used that as the excuse to reach their long-term goal - a Rothschild-Illuminati stronghold in Palestine using the Jewish population as fodder to be used and abused as necessary.

They called their plan ‘Zionism’. This term is often used as a synonym for Jewish people when it is actually a political movement devised and promoted through the House of Rothschild and opposed by many Jews.

After the Rothschild-controlled Zionist terrorists had bombed the State of Israel into existence in 1948, an estimated 800,000 Palestinians were made refugees and fled what had been their own country. Their descendents are said to number some four million.

And the world simply looked on - just as it does to this day - because Israel is a law unto itself and so terms like justice, fairness, decency and mercy do not apply.

One writer recently described conditions in Gaza:

‘ … Israel nails shut the coffin that is Gaza under a siege that has lasted nearly three years, steadily intensifying so that malnutrition rates rival those of sub-Saharan Africa, sewage runs raw in the streets and pollutes the ocean, homes are still being bulldozed to super-add collective punishment upon collective punishment; men, women and children are still being sniped at and killed; children are deafened by continuing sonic booms, the vast majority of them suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, and many of that majority have no ambition other than becoming “martyrs” …’

The Bush administration for the last eight years has been dominated by the Neo-conservative, or ‘Neocon’, network which is, itself, dominated by US/Israeli duel citizens and/or Zionists like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle, Dov Zackheim, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, Robert B Zoellick, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others. The neo-con godfather is the late Leo Strauss, a German-born Jewish ‘philosopher’, who believed that people must be governed by a ‘pious elite’.

But surely those days of Zionist dominance are over because ‘Mr. Change’ is coming to ‘power’ now. Er, if only. Barack Obama has packed his ‘new’ administration with Zionists like Rahm Emanuel, his White House Chief of Staff.

Emanuels’ father, Benjamin, was a member of the Irgun terrorist group in Palestine and we can clearly expect the Obama administration to be balanced and fair on its Israel/Palestinian policy. No wonder Obama has kept quiet on the Israeli bombing of Gaza.

You got’a hand to the Illuminati, they are very professional lot. They indeed know how the Illumination works, just they use it for the dark.  Still, no point in complaining I suppose, we all signed up to reincarnate to a planet of duality, of good and evil, and the trick is simply to observe and not absorb.  Maybe, I add a trite spiritual phrase, ‘observe and not absorb‘, is only that can come from the comfy pens of western spiritual writers, not watching their families bleed under yet another bombing. Nonetheless, some argue you can’t “fight” to save the world. Peace kills according to P.J ORourke. There is only one way to sort things, say the likes of Gandhi’s image, and that’s inside ya’self, not outside ya’self. The world will change as the consciousness evolves, not because the peace comes upon Israel.  The answer, in that top secret hiding place, is inside humanity’s heart.

I did manage to get myself in the shit, this morning, at the breakfast table of Hotel, free wifi, Bocas. There joining me was Lord Mick of Dublin, and buddy Joseph, heading off to the mountain range over to Panama City, hopefully less the landsides.

All I said, was the Israelis were keeping up their ratios. The 100 dead Palestinians, to 1 Israeli. I should have noticed the head scarf and the nasal profile. Oops.  Was I in the shit. The mum, feeding her baby at the next table, was, you guessed, a passport carry Israeli.  Did I get a hammering.  No end of explanation, like for example, I like just about every mongrel, has a bit of Jewish blood, had any concilliatory impact. My comments, suggesting the Israelis were maybe tad heavy handed in 100 to 1 retaliation, was tantamount to assault on Mt Zion. I had to stand obediently, whilst my dinning neighbour, laboriously made me watch her own Dell slide show of blood and guts, courtesy of Mosad Internet, showing Israelis in pieces. Then I had to listen to all her tales of now dead friends. Then a lecture on the 1940’s battle, where 5% of the Jews died, she claimed, (as they fell for the trap the Rothschild’s had laid out in perfect Iluminati order). Poor Jews, talk about set up. Poor Palestinians, way worse off.  And the Zionists think it’s their return to the promised land, when all their DNA can be traced to Moses. Lucky the cops got a blood test done on Moses, when he was caught speeding crossing the Red Sea stoned, otherwise the whole Jewish blood line story would be fucked. Poor Palestinians, at 100 to one. What perfect mess, for those who planned it. What a great beachhead, for the US Fourth Reich. What mess for humanity. How much longer does the world’s longest running fake Semitic divorce, need to wreck everything for the kids?

This  trip, as much as anything else, is about learning how to drop the fight for this cause, or that cause, and simply be our soulful us, not my personality/position/past me. So happy New Year, I need a cuppa tea. Not more CNN.

The path to enlightenment, here in Bocas, or now, the more West Indian styled Bastimento, where I sit over the water, is best found with the aid of a flashlight.

An Oh shit of Samasara can come thy way very fast, if you misplace your feet. Especially at night.

The imperialist leg opener, the US’s United Fruit company once ruled this charmed and run down weatherboard paradise, and given the propensity for the more Afro Panamanians to have their roots here, even the language is not so much Spanish, as more Jamaican flavoured, mon.

This means local Bastimento social life is more to do about party, music and sex: not altogether dull pursuits. And with African genes breeding the best bodies on earth, why the hell not drink and dance:  both vertically and horizontally. On holy day Jan 1, 2009, the main street of Bastimento, which technically is only really the main footpath, was one big noisy street partay. I must say, for a tight budget, everyone looked very flashly dressed on New Year’s day, a day of drinking and music, where what tight there was, was confined to jeans. There was a nice spirit about the party, and despite the booze, no one was behaving like many of the obnoxious drunks of our own hometowns, everyone seemed to have a grip. Sound systems that would give cops in home town of Port Douglas, yet another party busting front page, raged as though Latinos were born deaf. They sure like it loud down here. My first introduction to how loud a Sunday night can be, came at Fish Hook Marina in Golfito, Costa Rica, where participants not pinned to the disco walls like flies in a radiator, hammered by a wall of sound,   were out on their boats,  absorbing a sound so loud that even us yachties and marlin freaks on our boats had a month’s tinnitus,  just from visiting the showers, from the next morning onwards. David Bowies 1970 sound system, that could be heard in Bondi from the centre of Sydney’s central Showground, had nothing on the power of what the boys wheeled at Fish Hook Marina.

Lunch just arrived at my table, and I sure am looking forward to Asia after Central American food. Fried pollo again, in deadly oils to boot, with dead salad.

Mind you, the setting is beautiful, in a quaint thatched boatshed, out over the water. Lots of things are out over the water here, like pig pens and toilets, just a few doors down from the restaurants. I’ve booked myself a room over the water tomorrow, from $10/night at Hotel Bastimento, to $12 with lap lap. Beats Bora Bora at $500 night.

Hotel Bastimento is the grand old weatherboard mansion of this Isla, and as you approach from below, its like walking into the set of a Survivor series, mainly because half the left over set from the Survivor series flanks the hotel entrance, like some Aztec hoodoo voodoo in koolite.

I snuck in bit of Yoga and Qui Gong whilst slyly using the Bastimento washing machine, just on dawn today, after going down like sack of spuds, the night before, being the night after New Year’s excess. My yoga mat, ripped of a swinging garden seat, was surrounded by very odd pieces indeed, as it was the store for all sorts of voodoo-esque survivor set, whilst also being liberally adorned with stored statues of fibreglass Jesus, ready to be dragged around town, for when Saint Some Local has his day. Today, I feel great. By the by, this restaurant has just become Circular Quay, as a panga full of punters has just arrived. The sun is out, and the pangas are running hot to the surf beaches.

Oh no, here we go again, “Sad to say, I’m on my way, I won’t be back for many a day, my heart is down, my head is turning around, I’ve gotta leave my little girl in Bastimento Town”.  Once again, my mad Calypso singer, who works all the restaurants for tips, has managed, without fail, to find me every day, since I’ve arrived, as though he’s stalking me with music. I leave the Ipod ear pieces in, without the Ipod being on, and smile and nod. When it comes to ‘leave my little girl in Kingston Town’, he simply changes the place name, according the Isla he is working on the day. Yesterday he was sad to leave Bocos. Today it’s Bastimento. Truth is, the guys looks like he’s having a great time, and I would love to make a living walking around with a $20 guitar, singing calypso to waterfront holiday makers. Where did I go wrong?

He’s a real piece of work, straw hat, beaten up guitar, long and lean, looking like he’s hanging out to find a wharf upon which he can tally some bananas with Harry Belafonte. The real deal. He even got me the next day, but at night as the lead singer in the Bocas Beach Boys. Spare me.

I had to take the panga to Bocos this morning, as someone has sent an email in response to our backpacker posters, calling for “ADVENTUROUS, COOL CREW”.

I actually had to go to Bocas, as the net was down in Bastimento. Photos lifted from earlier blog pages did the trick for the poster. I sent a reply saying I’ll be at the crazed Mondo Taitu bar at six. The first applicant, a girl, which is a good start, had more sailing experience than Dennis Connor. Which could be good, or it could be bad, being that Ave Maria is no Australia 2.

We tried, in the poster, to diplomatically hint that 2 guys at sea isn’t that balanced, and not wanting to sound too silver back gorilla, we really seek women not men. The trick in putting the poster up, is to put it in one of the places sacred to women alone . On New Year’s Eve, I plastered the posters on all the mirrors of the cool bars and backpackers in Bocas, in the female toilets, only. Sacred space.

Oi, the restaurant has just turned into a reggae sing along. I want to live here.

I’ve just earlier had a another super chilled few hours, at the little hippy Shop In The Hill organic cafe, this time, turning onto the simple joys of hot cocoa, with just a dash of milk, and tinge of sugar, and I’m feeling completely anti-oxidised.

I’m reading two books, 3 really, but the two main ones are variant, one being Perkins disturbing piece about American imperialism, or the Fourth Reich as I see it, but the other more enlightening piece, by famed American indigenous writer and publisher, Barbara Hand Clow. The singer has just broke into a Calypso version of Dylan’s, Knocking on Heavens Door. And if you can believe the treatise in Clow’s Mayan Code, the singer may well be prophetic.

The book send shivers of excitement up the spine of anyone who is aware, of what at least is possible, in the realm of consciousness evolution. The accelerating patterns mapped out by the Mayans have well track history, and how its evolves in bursts, and falls, and there is no doubt about the fact that the Classic Mayans have mapped out a pattern which, todate, going back millions of year in fact, has been right on the money. Or maybe the heart, more that the money.

The world is fast re-awakening to what consciousness is all about. ‘All I want to hear, is redemption songs’ according to the singer, as he breaks into Bob Marley, “As all I ever have, is redemption songs, deese songs of freedom”.

I don’t know if I buy the religious redemption stuff, and some sad death of a master, Jesus, didn’t redeem me, but it sure gave a few hints as to what is the way ahead, even if it’s dam’d hard figuring out what Jesus said, after every fucker in Constantine’s New Testament editorial team messed with the words.

I do, however, believe things, as far and consciousness is concerned, are shifting fast. People misunderstand the Mayan, end of time 2012 concept, projecting it more as the end of times, some Jehovah’s Witness Armageddon crap, designed to scare the shit out the sinners. Spare me.

I was interested, to note that in the Veda’s, the ancient teachings at the foundation of all that eastern wisdom, had a word, “Maya”. Maya in the Veda’s meant, The Illusion of Time. The Vedas had a spiritual calendar, that like the Mayans, that was based on a 360 day year, separate from the 365 day agrarian calendars we use, concurrently. There is a root to this  ancient mysticism that is common, like a root of the World Tree, whether the Celtic Oak version, the Vedic Bunyan tree of Buddha’s enlightenment, or one of a range of other  mystic tree traditions the see the World Tree as the metro of the universe’s many dimensions.

So the ‘end of time’ may more be about the end of ‘The Illusion of Time’?

My game here, in this spiritual adventure comedy, has something to do with time, in the Eckhart, Power of Now sense of time. The only time, that exists, is now. It’s in the peacefulness of the now, when the fucking monkey mind can be cut off from its perpetual referencing of the past and future, that we can find some quite joy, just observing, not absorbing. Try it.

So what are the Mayans on about? Could it be something about the gift of the now, a gift so cute, its wrapped up, and called,  ”present”.

I wonder what is possible. Could telepathy develop, being an end to bullshit?

Could people become a bit more psychic? With added psychic bandwidth all sorts of things are possible. One thing is for sure, our 5 senses only give us a tiny fraction of the energy spectrum between you and this computer you are reading.

Time to jump a panga to Bocas, and go see who is applying to be crew. Eeek. Bet she ain’t go the message yet.

Yesterday was spent touring the Bocas Islands at 30 knots, on one of the four racks seats of a Jamaican skippered panga, along with two Venezuelans and a German.

They sure have the dolphins well trained around here. The low lying back islands, with miles of shallow waters, are the mid morning playground of Flipper and his extended family, and when you see a panga circling like and Indians around the Cowboys, it’s simply to get Flipper into the game. Flipper gives the nod to the whole family, and soon you have a bunch of dolphins chasing after the boats, surfing the circling wakes, like greyhounds around a track.

The beaches are nice here, but those that you can access through hillocks from mangrove to surf, like red Frog Beach, are clearly in the gun sights of Hotel Obscene. The storms that caused the land slides, did to the Red Frog, what the Tsunami did to Sri Lanka. Add an overlay of backpackers so thick they could be curdled, and I sure was happy to be taking up my future beach exploration by boat, miles from the madman crowd.

Little kids came out wanting a dollar to show the tourists the cute bright red frogs of the beaches name sake. In an act of merciless disposal, if the tourist denied the $1, the kid just dumped the frog on the sand, kinda’ like leaving  a manned Apollo on the moon.

Snorkelling was quaint, but this sure isn’t the Great Barrier Reef.

Moving into El Jaguar, my $12 boatshed hotel is a winner. Only  today, I was reading the Mayan suggestion, that 2006-07 would see the seeding of a whole new army of spiritual writers and teachers. As the sun went down over an oily bay, with a few lemons squeezed into a dash from my small $2 bottle of vodka,  my new ‘shed-mate’, asked me what I do. “Oh, I’m writing spiritual comedy” I quipped.  I mean, what else would I be doing drinking vodka on boatshed deck in Panama? This ‘shed-mate’, was the same sparkling girl who had invited me to Red Frog, two days back. “Oh, that’s interesting, I’m writing a spiritual book too” she quipped in return, as if I didn’t already know that. What the? Maybe the Mayans were right again.

Rhea, and her family of professional dancers, biologists and wrap stars, was, as you may recall, a chiropractor, but not just any bone manipulator. Her book, like mine, takes form, from editorial input by friends, (that’s you), in the form of a blog branching of her web site at www.blossomlife.com .  How 2009. It appears Rhea and Rod we will now be joined in thought space, as is the way it seems, as the net leads the way to the oneness. I look forward to see what she, and others like us, are making of their views on the shifting sands of consciousness evolution, as Rhea, like Rod, has her focus firmly on this evolution of consciousness stuff.  I was truly amazed. I mean, how many times in your life do you quip to someone you have never met, that you are writing a book, and the person responds with, me too, and the subjects are paths to the same door?

That is indeed Holy Shit.

We spent great night, plying the island waters in overloaded pangas, feeding up at grand tables full of bright, sparkling Americans that constituted Rhea’s mob. Americans are everything…both the worst, and the very best of humanity, and last night, I cracked their very best.

Travelling is one of those things I’ve done heaps of, but this time around, I’m perfecting it. Or imperfecting it. Or something in the middle. We will find out at the end of the book, as I have as little a clue, as to what will enfold, as you, my editors.

Jaguar, the boatshed owner, has left the power off, so there is a time limit to this section, directly related to the strength of my Dell’s battery. The boatshed has been busy of late, with barely a room to spare, of the 7 available. Jaguar, he da man, he’s out fish’n. Rod, he da writer, he’s typing.

And to conclude my little stay of Bastimento, I thought I’d share a few thoughts on Zen and the Fart of Travel. Matt, the maybe 20 old, long  blond surfer, from England, if you can believe that, is brewing up some local cocoa, with milk and sugar, courtesy of my Shop In Hill cocoa acquisition, and his babe, as is culturally normal, is working on her tan on the deck of our watery hotel. I’ve just been for a walk through the faded weatherboards, past the Rasta’s and the  restless, along the main footpath, enroute to a quick swim off the point, away from the pig shit, and every toilet that flushes into the bay. Ironically, the most full of shit aid agency on earth, US AID, is meant to be organising the installation of a local sewerage system. Which is why the place is still full of it.

That said, not everything that comes out of a toilet is shitty. Take these gems, for example, that I found and plagiarised from the back of the toilet door at Mondu Taitu. Here we go. This one is from is Lao Tzu. Not that I’m suggesting Lao himself wrote it on the door… “A good traveller has no fixed plans, and no intent upon arrival“. I like this, and think it comfortably can be rearranged to say, “A good writer has no fixed plans, and no intent on page 1“….and the reason why I make this suggestion, is simply because it’s better than, “the cat ate my homework”, should someone asks me of my intent for how this plot will unfold.

Here’s one from a guy called Herman Melville, who like me, must have been lost on twelve lanes of an LA freeway, when his hire car’s GPS said, ‘elevate 500meters : now’…. “It’s never down in any map, true places never are.”  From this, I conclude with some quantum physics, by suggesting true places are like matter. One minute they are a wave, the next minute, a particle. In the end, they never are.

Here’s one by Rumi, after he bought the Beattle’s Sergeant Peppers album, and swallowed the brown acid… “When you are everywhere, you are nowhere. When you are somewhere, you are everywhere”.  I kinda prefer the pop version, “You’re everywhere and nowhere, baby“.  Without the ‘baby’ bit, Rumi’s version just doesn’t cut it.

It’s all bit esoteric, but then I like it like that. You know, the bit how we are just living in an arrangement of atoms that behave strictly in accordance with school boy science, but are, nonetheless just an arrangement of energy, in some holographic, Matrix masterpiece.

Putting all three toilet door quotes together, I conclude, “A good travel writer has no fixed plans, and knows that somewhere is everywhere, and it’s not on a map, baby.”

The next quote on the toilet door asked me to put my shit paper in the bin. I preferred the instruction in the all masonry mountain toilet of “Lost and Found’. It instructed me to take the lighter, and light the last bit of shit paper I’d used, and throw it in the metal bin full of shit paper. Indeed, a shit hot idea. It was that cold up there, I was starting to wonder about myself, when I found myself standing over a bin full of burning shit paper, warming my hands. Will all the world come to this, I wondered?

One star travel, is by definition, about being social.  Oscar Wilde had this to say, colourfully painted just above the Taitu Mondu toilet roll. “Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and is far the best ending for one”.  Laughter is one of those things you generally don’t find in the foyer of a 5 star hotel. They say laughter is a valuable but fading commodity in our lost humanity, where by comparison to kids, who laugh on average 300 times per day, the average western adult laughs only 17 times per day. The communal kitchen of any regular backpackers dig is certainly a lot more fun than watching CNN in your Hilton Hotel room, dick in hand. Mad surfers, or starry eyed biologists and even the odd esoteric travel writer, sure have more fun than the suits in a Hilton Hotel foyer.

The only fun had in a Hilton, is either boozed induced, or stems from greed gratification, after the business deal went your way in the foyer. Both come with hangovers.

I’ve designed and built all manner of 4 and 5 star tourist accommodation, even building and owning my own boutique hotel, in a moment of delusion.

But you wouldn’t catch me staying in one. Even when I was rolling in it, very briefly, the thought of spending $200 a night on a bed seemed to me to be the ultimate in waste. All those nights in Kombis, yachts and backpackers has maybe warped my sense of perspective, but the warp is in my humanity’s favour. It’s certainly in favour of my budget. Many years living on the road will attest for that. Europe on $8.30 a day was a walk over. These days, it’s more like $US70 a day, the odd indulgence allowed.

Most people’s idea of an annual holiday is one you take for a few weeks each year. My idea of an annual holiday is one that lasts an annum.

I should point out that I have bought myself an around the world-in-365 days, air ticket. I should also point out that this around the world idea was not one built of desire and planning, it’s just that ticket was only 15% more that the cost of the return flight from Australia to Panama. Aussies are big on Asia, so they can get blown up in bars, and we rarely think to go to Central America, as we can’t afford it.

But given this is a make it up as it goes along kinda’ gig, today I thought I’d see if I could make it up a bit. It’s been far too long since I lived in New York and London, and judging by the horrifying stories I have heard from colleagues my age,  chatting about the hotel costs of NYC and Europe, I was wondering if I would ever be able to afford to see my old stomping grounds again. So today, I punched a few questions into Google, and I am pleased to announce, that if I’m willing to sleep in mixed dorm with cute girls half my age, it seems there are very few places I can’t stay for under $20 a night.

Google also was pleased to announce, that as far as transport is concerned, I can own my very own fabulous, but out of vogue BMW motorcycle, for around $1500, which I can likely dump for a $grand. All told, the future, aboard the yacht Ave Maria, and various mixed dorms and motorbikes, looks totally affordable, and damn good fun.

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