Sailing back to the Seventies: John Craven finds 'his tribe'
just off the coast of Panama  If you will forgive the pun,
cruising is usually plain sailing, but a voyage can produce
delightful surprises, even unexpected reunions.  That happened
to me when our ship made an unplanned stop and I found myself
face-to-face once again with a tribe that has hardly changed in
thousands of years.  I had last seen members of the Kuna as they
fled their villages to escape a vast new lake drowning their
jungle homeland in Central America.  A view of the San Blas
islands which are dotted with the houses of the Kuna people
Remote: The little-visited San Blas islands are home to the Kuna
people  They were frantically rescuing thousands of wild
creatures, from deadly snakes to two-toed sloths, which had
struggled to the top of the tallest trees.  As the rising waters
engulfed these last refuges, men from the Kuna hurtled their
dug-out canoes into the dense branches and at great personal
risk plucked from certain death any cre