Blissful insanity

I have experienced a lot of great things in the past two weeks. So many in fact, that I haven't had time to update the blog (this might be a recurring excuse throughout the trip...).

In LA, I got together with all my friends and had some great "cooking kicking nights" as Halla has come to call them. With Ardy, I ran into Martha Stewart at the grove and politely declined to buy her new book. I drove up to San Francisco where I had some crazy nights with Juan-Carlos, but luckily still succeeded in getting up early for a 20 mile bike trip around SF ("Comon Graham, you have to man up!"). It was fantastic to meet Marla & Hunter up there as well (and thanks to Hunter for barely getting me out of a parking ticket at Stanford campus ;-) ). After Frisco, I drove up even more north to wine country where Pablo is doing a wine internship and apparently had access to free wine tastings to some of the most expensive and distinguished wines of the region ("Excuse me, do you offer the complimentary interwinery tastings?").

Martha Stewart

Wine connoisseur

Golden Gate Bridge

LA

On my way back to LA I met up with Ricardo who tried (and failed) to teach me salsa. Although it had been over five years that we had seen eachother in Zürich, he pointed out that "it felt as if it was just yesterday". A truth wich I knew could be extrapolated to my entire two-week stay in California. The next day I drove south next to the ocean, experiencing the beautiful beaches and hiking trails of Big Sur. I had to remind myself not to become too excited with the amazing views, because, without any doubt, I would still encounter some spectacular places in the months to come.

Big Sur

Photographer at Pfeiffer beach

Pfeiffer beach sunset

Big Sur

Back in LA I stayed with Stephen and Rehana and had an amazing time. They proved to be excellent hosts, and even took me along to a Bengali party where the women dressed in traditional Sari's and the men participate in a macho pool tournament. I got to meet up with Lynwood for lunch a few times and had a great time. We had long conversations about traveling and movies and life in general. When I got ready to leave LA on Monday morning, Rehana and Stephen insisted on getting up at 4.30AM to wave me out, even though I assured them they wouldn't be able to wake me up at 4.30AM if they ever come to visit me in Belgium...

Once arrived in Panama, I decided to immediately take a night bus up to bocas del toro to meet up with Dimitri. From Dimitri's post you can tell that there are some interesting bus drivers here, and after just one bus ride I can already confirm this. I am pretty sure that for my bus, they hired an international celebrity...

The bus driver

Bocas Del Toro promised to be a relaxing, exotic environment as I took the watertaxi here in a "Far Cry"-like scenery. Today however there seems to be a local annual holiday and apparantly it is expected of every inhabitant of Bocas Del Toro to own a drum and play in a band walking in the parade. Interesting at first, but it has been going on for 5 hours straight now. To make matters worse, our hostel seems to be located in the middle of the parade route, such that we are hearing a blissful blend of 3 or 4 band at a time. Forget about malaria, insanity is the real danger out here.