I hate to be dramatic but sailing away from Panama felt like the only plausible way to finish the Central American leg of this sunburned Latin American meander. Flying would’ve been ordinary; bussing would’ve required emotional resilience I absolutely do not possess, and a speed boat would go against the aesthetic. So, myself, my sister, and our friend joined seven strangers on a boat that smelled faintly of diesel, rum, and past confessions – committing ourselves to a week of forced intimacy and me chasing the fantasy that maybe the sea breeze would cauterise the messy little heartbreak I’d been dragging around like a damp beach towel. 

Allow me to introduce the crew; we’re shackled to them for the better part of a week.  Oliver, the chef, was a tough egg to crack, which is rich coming from someone who spends his day cracking eggs. Fortunately, we had him scrambled by mid-week. Roy, the deckhand, was the kind of man who appears exactly two seconds after you’ve thought of something you want – I want to dance, we dance; I want to go home, he brings round the tinny; I want a tall island man to stitch up the wreckage of my heart, he gets me…a beer. Obviously, he’s not a genie but if he’d handed me the meaning of life, I wouldn’t have blinked. Maria was both essential to the boat running and provocative scenery. Speaking of eye candy the last of the crew is the captain. Now, in the beginning my friend and I remarked he “wasn’t so cute” – high as a kite we were transparent to him. Then came the storm: three hours in, five to go, hair tied up, rain lashing his shoulders like a Renaissance martyr. Something in our shallow little souls recalibrated, and he became, quite suddenly, a dripping maritime deity. A god, yes – but one with just enough predatory vagueness to make you wonder if you’d survive the night.

While we are at it, I should take a moment to introduce you to the seven strangers who  joined us. We have Lucy and Ashley, a Belgium couple who were both very cool and very kind, which is frankly a suspicious combination. When you meet people who embody both, you cling to them as if they might unspoil the version of love your parents accidentally vandalised. Then we have Mike, another Belgium but flying solo, I didn’t have much to do with him because my sister had a little crush, and men offer me very little unless they’re the object of my desire, otherwise they’re set dressing. But from my observations, he was tragically handsome in that bland, European way that makes you think he reads philosophy. Then we have Tim, an insufferable masc caricature – every sentence a command, every gesture a performance of manhood so insecure it practically squeaked – a walking testosterone leak. His friend Justiin was his more palatable, less chest-beating shadow. Laura and Alan are next, a New Zealand couple, brought the warm, apologetic millennial energy that prevents groups like ours from collapsing into anarchy. And lastly, my people: Libby my smoking comrade and confidante in all things unserious, doing elegant dives while I yelled unsolicited critique from the sidelines like an unqualified stage mother. Kyra, my sister, who cleaned a fish so thoroughly she may have unlocked a new form of therapy. And me with razor wit, a bruised heart, and a wholly unreasonable obsession with her new swim skirt ricocheting between vanity and existential dread flinging herself at foreign experiences in hopes of outrunning her own emotional incompetence.

Now that you’ve met the cast of this nautical farce, we may – God help me – set sail. (The fact I’ve just written that makes me gag; I’m clearly undergoing a nautical personality crisis and at the stage of travel where my personality has eroded into a pamphlet.)

Before the long hauls of blue-on-blue monotony, we drifted through the San Blas Islands, where our days dissolved into volleyball, awful performances of versions of ourselves, and snorkeling. I love having my face planted in the water, loitering above the reef like a nosy neighbour, watching fish and coral go about their tiny, consequential lives. It’s an intricate world – fussy, nuanced, full of dramas and rituals I don’t recognise, and just as many I do. Down there, everything is busy being itself with absolute conviction.

With your head submerged, the rules shift. No one speaks. No one can. The ocean imposes a silence that feels less like absence and more like permission – a hush so complete it becomes its own kind of language. Up on land, people are forever barging in with questions, opinions, observations nobody asked for. But underwater, the world finally keeps quiet. It leaves you alone with the pageantry of scales and swaying coral, with the steady pulse of your breath in the snorkel, with the uncomplicated fact of simply being there.

The coral had, against all modern odds and marine pessimism, kept its colour. Not the anemic pastels of a reef on its last legs, but a full-throated choir of purples, reds, and greens – an underwater parquetry laid by a god with a taste for excess. It’s astonishing, really, to drift above a floor this alive, this gaudy, this utterly unapologetic, like hovering over the world’s most extravagant bazaar where no one’s thought to raise the rent.

Down here, the residents commute in slow, deliberate pulses. Little black fish glide past wearing a starry night sky as if they’d mugged Van Gogh for the pattern. Others appear in striped pajamas, late for bed or early for trouble; some shimmer like they’ve just stepped out after a sun shower, dew-fresh and smug about it. A couple of sharks in scrubs rest between rounds under. A lion struts about in zebra drag. There’s a tiny creature drifting past who looks puffy from crying all night, gold-rimmed eyes swollen with aquatic melodrama. A trumpet hangs nearby, elongated and brassy, as if waiting for the cue to start a jazz set.

And then there are the nameless passer-byers – the extras in this submerged city – each flicking, darting, weaving, making the whole improbable metropolis tick. And somewhere above them floats me: a pale intruder with a sunburnt bum so violently red it could be mistaken for an emergency flare.

In the middle of this voyage, somewhere between the heat and the horizon, I turned a year older. I’m not a birthday person – an admission usually made by people who very much are birthday people – but I swear I’m the exception. Every ritual of the day makes me flush like a schoolgirl caught cheating, so I’ve long preferred my own quiet traditions: bake myself a cake, sit alone on a beach, and have a small, dutiful cry before midnight. It’s tidy, efficient, and requires no witnesses.

This year, the universe conspired otherwise. By the end of breakfast, I’d been sung “Happy Birthday” three separate times, each more earnest and mortifying than the last. The sun, apparently in on the plot, came out and stayed out just for me. We spent the day on an island so perfectly tropical it bordered on parody – snorkelling, volleyball, and a lunch of fish so freshly caught they probably still thought they had plans for the afternoon.

Later we lounged around a palm tree, smoking and passing rum like a communion cup. Libby, the captain and I attempted paddle-board yoga – an activity clearly designed by sadists – and I developed a brief, intense crush on a construction worker, as one does when surrounded by salt, sweat, and the illusion of possibility.

Dinner arrived like a maritime procession: octopus, prawns, crab. And then Ollie, sweet, sunburned Ollie, emerged with a cinnamon-lemon cake coated in Nutella, topped with a solitary gold question-mark candle – as if even the cake wasn’t entirely sure about my age. They sang again. I was late to blow out the candles waiting for the hip hip hoorays. Ollie beamed at me with such pure delight that, for a moment, all my allergy to fuss subsided.

After cake we changed clothes and Roy ferried us to the island for card games and karaoke. The construction guy showed up; we chatted amiably until my friend and I agreed he was undeniably cuter in daylight – a common affliction. We screamed “Gasolina” with religious fervour, then sprinted through a thunderstorm toward the bathrooms, drenched and exhilarated, suddenly aware that it was past midnight and the birthday had expired by natural causes so the celebrations should follow.

I waved goodbye to the construction worker like we’d shared something meaningful, though neither of us could say what. Then I returned to the boat, ending the night on its bow with Libby, a cigarette, a dangerously charming conversation with the captain, and the quiet, unceremonious fact that I was now twenty-two.

After a nap in a hammock – a sleep so swaying and soporific it felt prescribed – we set sail. From that moment on, it would be just us and the boat for the next 48 hours. A floating monastic retreat yet sea sickness hung over us like a biblical omen. Card games were abandoned, books became abstract concepts, and any attempt at meaningful conversation dissolved into a collective, queasy silence. Instead, we all entered intense, co-dependent relationships with the horizon, staring at it as if it were the last stable thing in our lives. Bedtime arrived early, not out of virtue but survival. We woke to Cartagena.

The conclusion of our Central American wandering felt less like closure and more like being ushered out of a theatre mid-performance. One minute we were drifting through jungles and border towns, collecting mosquito bites like souvenir fridge magnets, and the next we were being nudged toward the exit, the curtain closing on a cliffhanger. It was as if they had double-booked us. Central America is benevolent in its chaos – verdant, fervent, magnificently improvised – and this is the moment you’ll feel most transient.

We crossed the final stretch like people sobering up after a very colourful party. The road got longer, the packs heavier, the stories more embellished. Every cheap hostel and questionable street meal became a relic of a pilgrimage we didn’t know we were on. And then, without ceremony, we looked up and realised we were standing at the edge of a new map. South America – vast, wild, and staring back with the confidence of someone who knows damn well you’re not prepared.

If Central America is a bright, unruly novella, then South America is a seven-volume epic dropped on your lap without warning. One is a flirtation; the other expects commitment.

And so, the journey begins again – new borders, new bus stations, new fruits you’ll pretend to recognize. The compass resets. The horizon stretches. And you step into this new continent the way you step into cold water: braced, breath held, already thrilled by the shock of what comes next.