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    Hitch Hiking from Panama
    Hitch Hiking from Panama
    Hitch Hiking from Panama
    Ebook44 pages58 minutes

    Hitch Hiking from Panama

    By Jack Nelson

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    About this ebook

    In 1967 with almost no money I traveled from the Galapagos Islands to California, through Ecuador, Colombia,Central America, and Mexico. My recollections of the experience are more about the people I met along the way, rather than a description of places and things. It was a very different world then.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJack Nelson
    Release dateJan 23, 2012
    ISBN9781465849212
    Hitch Hiking from Panama
    Author

    Jack Nelson

    Jack Nelson was born in upstate New York, raised in California, and lives mostly in the Galápagos Islands since 1967, the same year he hitch-hiked from Panama to California. He was the first guide for scheduled tours in Galápagos. He now is a partner in Scubaiguana.com dive shop in the Galápagos Islands. Jack writes social commentary and legal analysis in Spanish. When in California, he drives a hot rod 1962 Chevy Nova, and writes about that too. His other expensive hobby is fishing.

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      Book preview

      Hitch Hiking from Panama - Jack Nelson

      HITCH HIKING FROM PANAMA

      Jack R. Nelson

      Copyright 2012 Jack R. Nelson

      Smashwords Edition

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      ****~~~~~~~~****

      HITCH HIKING FROM PANAMA

      I didn’t really want to hitchhike from Panama to California. There just wasn’t any other way to go. See, in 1967 I left the Galápagos Islands with one hundred twelve dollars. Even forty five years ago that was not a lot of money to travel from one continent to another. So without any real plan or schedule, I hit the road. It’s almost embarrassing to recount some of the details and how luck brought me through. The world was so different then; although danger and strife were afoot, a kind of enchantment allowed lucky outcomes to so many feckless adventures. As I write, describing each unlikely episode, I am amazed at the serendipities that carried me along as if on a magic carpet of invulnerability. I should have checked then, to see if I threw a shadow.

      The sea trip from Galápagos to Guayaquil was the first stage. At that time, air travel to and from the islands was infrequent and unpredictable. The Ecuadorean Air Force ran a few DC-6 propeller planes that occasionally visited a semi-abandoned airfield built on Baltra Island by the Americans during World War II. But I wasn’t going to wait weeks or months for an airplane. I took passage on a little freighter, the Santa Cruz. She was built of riveted iron, about 150 feet length, with the beautiful lines typical of coastwise traders of around 1910. She looked like something from a Bogart movie. A piston had broken in the engine months before, so the mechanics just removed the junk and the ship rollicked on with a syncopated 5/1 beat.

      The Santa Cruz carried live cattle on the return trip from Galápagos to the mainland. Cows, goats and pigs. Yes, the legendary South American Cattle Boat, four days to seamy Guayaquil, with over forty cows on deck, a heap of pigs under the foredeck, and four hundred fifty goats in the hold. Stink? The word is too simple to describe the sulfurous ether surrounding the ship even in the immensity of the ocean’s breezes. The air tasted bad.

      Pigs quarrel screeching with tusked menace, but as our shipmates they settled into an equilibrium of discomforts. Pigs, like humans, adapt to almost any awful situation. But whoever has been seasick must cede glory of suffering to a cow tied by the horns at a ship’s rail; imagine being seasick in four stomachs. I will not describe this unforgettable spectacle. In the open hold were the hundreds of goats. The goats bleat and shriek and reek as imps in a dungeon, the buckest billys striving for supremacy of a higher perch in the ship’s frames, the rest roiling like a furry ant heap.

      We ate whatever died.

      I shared a cabin for four. In the bunk above me was Ian Thornton, a British scientist who had just completed a year’s research in the archipelago. He would eventually write the excellent first guidebook for the Islands. Ian and I were already friends. The other two bunks in the cramped cabin were for a plump honeymooning couple from the hinterlands of Ecuador. They had come to Galápagos to visit the bride’s family. They received two trembling baby goats in a

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