Monday, 2 February

Major bad news: Walt’s Sony digital camera refuses to acknowledge the chip that stores the images. All repair attempts fail. “It’s dead, Jim.”

Jay and Irene arrive, picked up at the airport by “Rinso.” Their room at the Palacio is bigger than mine, but doesn’t come with its own bottomless pit.

Now intact, the Posse has its first dinner together at Pat’e Palo, Spanish for “peg–leg Pete.” Wow…shrimp and crab–filled pasta shells, salmon, fettucine, chicken rolled in salmon and a whole phalanx of half–frozen Presidentes.

The lights rise and fall, but it’s not romantic ambiance. Power outages are a nightly occurrence here. The taxi drivers have every pothole memorized, but on the equally cratered sidewalks, you’re on your own. A vast square, Plaza Colon, stands right in front of the restaurant. In the warm, cloying rain and inky darkness, we walk by it twice without seeing it.

NEXT: Day Three