Today Christi woke up feeling better. Thank goodness. Fortunately, antibiotics didn’t seem like they would be necessary now. Jeff was leaving today, so this morning he packed up and got ready to go. When he was ready, we went to shore and had lunch at the closest restaurant to the dinghy dock, just on the backside of the shopping center we mentioned. As we were walking in, we saw the strangest thing. A car was towing a small airplane!

The restaurant is a cute place — a round hut made of bamboo and palm fronds with a very high ceiling. We got ceviche for an appetizer. Ceviche is a dip made of small pieces of raw fish or other seafood marinated in lime juice and flavored with things like onion, tomato, cilantro, and chili peppers. It is a Mexican staple and we all like ceviche. Usually, you can’t taste the fish at all. Everyone makes ceviche a little differently. Some are amazingly good and you can’t stop eating them. Others are just OK. This one was pretty good, but not great. Christi didn’t have any, worried that raw fish might be too much for her digestive system right now.

We all ordered fish, and the dishes came with fried plantains and yucca as side orders. The fish was great. The fried plantains were exactly the same as the ones we got in the marina, bland and tasteless.

The yucca looked just like French fries. The flesh is slightly firmer and the taste slightly sweeter than regular potato French fries, but the difference is so subtle that had we not known, we would have never realized the fries weren’t regular potatoes.

When we first read that yucca was a staple of the Panamanian diet, we assumed they ate the yucca cactus. Tom and Susan had explained that what is called yucca here is what other countries call manioc or cassava. It is a root vegetable that has a white, sticky flesh and a thick skin. Ah, so the “yams” Christi had made in Bonaire was actually yucca. Ah ha!

After lunch, Jeff caught a cab to the airport. Eric and Christi walked down the bridge to check out our surroundings. The first picture is the anchorage from the causeway, facing south. The second is the downtown Panama City, taken from the exact same spot but facing north.

The shopping mall on island two is mostly restaurants. Most of them looked good, but few of them were open, which was weird since it was lunch time.

It looks like island three has some sort of resort on it. Island four, where Bennigan’s and the marina are, also has some yacht brokers, a coffee house, and an industrial area for ship haul outs. While in Colon, we had inquired about staying in the marina. They said it would be $120 per night and they were full and couldn’t take us, anyway. The marina didn’t look like anything special enough to justify $120 a night, and it didn’t look full. Here is a shot of the marina look at height of the floating docks! While the Caribbean side of Panama doesn’t have much tidal activity, the Pacific side has 20 foot tide swings.

We found a 5 gallon bucket of high grade engine oil at a really good price on the fourth island, which was exciting. The last island, Flamingo, has a cruise ship terminal and a duty free store on the north side, which aren’t visible from Kosmos.

We returned to Kosmos to drop off the oil. Christi considered getting in to scrub the bottom, but after sticking her feet in the water decided it was way too cold for her. If you are wondering why she’d get in to scrub when the barnacles are dead, it is because they don’t fall off on their own, they have to be manually removed. We debated going sight seeing, but decided to have a low key day, instead. We have been really busy and stressed with all the canal preparations and all the house guests, and a day of total and complete rest was exactly what we needed. As the day wore on, Christi felt worse and worse.

We got an email from Tom and Susan today that had some interesting information in it. They said that Joel, who has been through the canal a bunch of times, said we treated him better than any other boat ever has, which is a nice compliment. And, they found out that Edgar had never been through the canal before. We are a little frustrated with Victor since we had made it abundantly clear that only wanted people who have been through many times and knew what to do if there was a problem. But we won’t dwell on it since all went so smoothly.

And, on a related topic”¦ people are often stunned when we tell them we have fresh water toilets. They shake their head and tell us that was a mistake. Up until now, having the freshwater toilets has never been an issue for us and we have been quite glad we have made that choice. But, we are currently in an anchorage that is unsuitable for making water at a time when Christi is going to the bathroom a zillion times a day. We are still doing OK on water consumption, though.