Bocas Flood 2K8

Today is the first day I've had access to the internet or a phone in 4 or so days. The archipelago that Bocas del Toro makes up has been hit by torrential rains, perhaps a tropical storm..? Who knows, since we have no access to the real world on this island. It started raining about a week ago, which was fine because November is the rainy season and usually it will rain for a couple of days and then be sunny for 3 days or so, then go back to rain. So we were waiting out the storm, ready for it to turn sunny again, when Friday morning I trudged through the pouring rain at 8 a.m. to open and hopefully find dry refuge in the Mondo Taitu Hostel when I found myself splashing through water all throughout the hostel. It had been a long night the night before, so I was a bit too tired and overwhelmed (and maybe still a little drunk) to do anything about it. I opened the rest of the hostel smoothly and then just sat at the desk and looked around in utter disbelief. Forty-five minutes later Daniel, one of the owners, came downstairs and by this point the water had risen. He took one look out the back door and started running around freaking out. Apparently this wasn't normal and hadn't happened the whole time he's been in Bocas, which is four years (I later found out from one of the cleaning women that this hadn't happened since 1991!). Usually when one looks out the back door of the hostel he or she can find the street, a house across the street, a dock that goes off of the backyard of said house into the sea. But not this day. Instead the ocean was literally at our doorstep. There was no road, kids were paddling canoes in the road. There was no cutoff to where the ocean ended and the flooding of land began. It was wild! By 11 p.m. when Molly woke up the water inside the hostel was ankle deep. And it wasn't just sea water, water had come up through the toilets, it had seeped up from under the concrete floor, there were pieces of food, wrappers, and other discarded items floating in the water.

  Shot out of the back door of the hostel 

It was time to take action. Daniel and the cleaning ladies grabbed brooms and pails and started pushing the water out of the hostel through the back door. All of the guests were up by this point, had checked out early, but had no way of getting anywhere so the flooded hostel became a great resource for people funnel their pent up frustration and giddiness through. Everyone started grabbing any type of scooping device they could find and were bent over shoveling the water out of the hostel. We had Israelis making pancakes in the kitchen who then started to bang on pots and pans and stools singing some Hebrew jingles to entertain us. People started dancing along while sweeping out the water. When we had gotten most of the water out some Spaniards started detailing out plans of how we were going to use surfboards and pieces of wood to keep the water back. It was definitely a united effort on all fronts.  

My feet in the gross water ahh!

Later the rumors start about what is actually going on: a tropical storm, a hurricane, just heavy rains that are flooding the island because we sunk 30 cm because of the earthquake that happened a couple weeks ago. For the past 3 days there have only been 5 people in this 56-person capacity hostel, it feels like a ghost town. Meanwhile over at our sister hostel, Heike, since there is nothing to do on this island when it's raining and there is no way for people to leave, it's ridiculously loud and crowded. The roads on the mainland that connect the port town to the rest of the country are washed away by landslides so there is no way to travel by land. The river at the border with Costa Rica flooded out the bridge that connects the two countries. The airport here was people's only hope, but it's been closed because of the weather for the past 3 days. We still don't know what is actually going on, but there's still water everywhere and today is the first day that it hasn't rained all day in over a week. We're slowly but surely pulling ourselves out of this rainy depression. It's Thanksgiving soon! I'm supposed to go off to Colombia the day after, but who knows if/when I'll really go!