SEPT 1, 1997 // PANAMA
BOCAS DEL TORO, PANAMA We were roughly nineteen years old and crossed the border from Costa Rica to Panama by walking on a bridge over a river. The air was warm and tropical. We took a boat to the island Bocas del Toro where we lived for about a month with a fisherman named Emiliano, and his wife Leighia, who taught us Spanish Lessons. We also got certified in SCUBA diving by a Canadian man named Alexi and his girlfriend Sana who was Danish. The center of our social life was at a bar on the docks called the Blue Ox which is where a man named Ivan cut coconuts with a machete and gave life advice. I liked him. This was a pleasant time in life. I saw a poisonous Sea Snake and ate tuna out of a can and smoked single cigarettes and drank fifty cent Balboa beers and swam across the bay at night in the dark. Michael Lippenholz took most of these photographs.
