Returning to our new home
It is sometime in the morning. We’re sitting in small motorboats moving down a big river. Why are we sitting there? We’re on our way from Bocas del Toro, the last stop of our stay in Panama, back to the place where we’ve been staying for the last three months. Then we see it. The Thor Heyerdahl. 50 meters long and six and half meters wide.
When we arrived in Panama and left the Thor it was the first time in three months that we didn’t sleep on board – unless you count that one night on a Caribbean island, where we had slept in our hammocks, of course. Because of that, it was quite an experience for us to leave our new home for more than two weeks.
After the motorboat has docked to the Thor, we step on board and greet all the adults who hadn’t come with us, so most of the teachers and crew. We exchange our stories and eat together. After lunch, it is time to unpack, even though we’re only going to be on board for nine days before we leave again to explore the island of Cuba on our bicycles. Nine days may seem like a pretty long time, but after having crossed the Atlantic Ocean, which took us 26 days, it sounds like it’ll be over in a minute. Moving in is very chaotic, like always. Especially because we try to store our stuff in a smart way, so that packing for Cuba will be easier. What makes it even harder is that some people are a bit sick, maybe because of some water we have drunk in Panama. In the end we manage to finish unpacking and tidy up our cabins. In the evening, we hear great news! Our cabins are tidy enough so that Corinna, our project manager, says that we can go ashore again the next day at noon, in order to call our parents for the last time before we are going to leave the day after.
It is the next day. Even though some people decide to stay on board and use the free time for swimming, because we won’t have the chance to do so very often anymore, most of us decide to visit Bocas del Toro to shop some last snacks or to call our parents. So we jump into our dinghies, ride to a small bar (a lot of restaurants have a pier here because most people use boats as their main form of transportation) and step on solid ground, which we won’t see for the next few days. I stay in the bar the whole time and talk to my family on the phone, because I have already bought enough snacks. When the dinghies arrive to take us back, we quickly say goodbye. After dinner, we end the evening by watching Pirates of the Caribbean part two and then we go to sleep early, because tomorrow will be a long day – the day that we’ll start our voyage to Cuba, where we’ll make new memories, have a great bicycle-tour, and hopefully learn a lot about the Cuban culture.