I stop off at Mamitupo. Romerio is waiting for me at the runway in a motorized dugout cayuco. He’s telling me all this stuff, but I don’t speak Spanish.

Gracias. Cerveza. Baño.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, as loyalists were fleeing America for the Bahamas, a whole different set of people were fleeing the mountains and rivers of their homeland. I wanted to find out about how the Kuna ended up in the San Blas Islands, and how they settled and prospered in one of Earth's most bizarre and beautiful island regions. I will learn as I go - traveling with Romerio along the San Blas coast and visiting their islands and communities.

Home base is an island called Uaguitupo. It's the size of four basketball courts. I ask my hosts if there are any guests on the island. I ask this by waving my hands. Yes, they say, an English teacher.

When you meet a fellow English speaker, you think: will you be my friend? Mary says let's go to Achutupu.

We canoe to Achutupu Island, and Mary says something about forty-nine. "There are forty-nine people living on this island?" I ask in disbelief. Achutupu is the size of two football fields. "No," Mary says, "what I meant is that forty-nine of the islands are inhabited. There are actually 1,800 people living on this island."

How on earth do you fit 1,800 people here? We walk through the narrow streets of Achutupu. Grass shacks made of bamboo and palm thatch. The huts hanging over the water. People have property - they have yards, they own trees, there are family compounds. But everything is small, like the Kuna themselves. An extended family may live in one small compound - the homes, the yard - all the size of a living room.

Mary points to a large bamboo hall and says, "This is the government center. They sit in hammocks and lounge talking politics." I poke my head in the dark room and see a dozen hammocks hanging ten feet in the air.

Any suspicion that life and politics are lazy here probably lies in that old idea that indigenous islands are simple, content and backwards. No - islands are filled with their own prejudices, their jealousies, their wants, their loves and their gossip. And no, Kuna politics have a history of being fierce, swift and strategic. Imagine a dozen chess grandmasters swinging in the sweet air, deciding the fate of their families and their way of life.

I turn around and I catch a glimpse of a Kuna woman holding a white baby, and then she is gone. And I'm thinking, huh?