A bit of island life to ease us into the Panama leg of our travels. Bocas del Toro (where we will end up being when we stop to learn Spanish) is a group of islands close to the Cost Rican boarder. We drove for an hour to the border, took about half an hour to get through (and didn’t have to pay for a tourist visa for some unknown reason), drove for another hour and then took a water taxi to our island. Knowing that we were coming back here, we were not in a hurry to complete all the possible activities. Apart from looking around town and eating, I went snorkelling while Laurence had a rest day. The beaches and islands were beautiful.
From Bocas we travelled into the mountain region to Boquete. This was a beautiful little town at a much more reasonable temperature (in the 20’s instead of the 30’s). In fact, there was no air conditioning and we used a duvet overnight – the novelty! Apart from exploring the town and admiring the sights, we spent a morning rock climbing. By the end of the morning neither of us had working fingers, we would hold onto the rock and slowly slip off. The heat of the rock might have also had had something to do with it!
Our second to last stop on the trip was Santa Catalina. This was my favourite place in Central America for snorkelling. I spent a whole day out in their Marine National Park (which took a very bumpy hour long boat ride to get to – not good on a hangover) and snorkelled in two spots. I saw so many brightly coloured fish, some white tipped sharks, green turtles, hawksbill turtles, sea snakes, and heard the whales singing!!! Unfortunately, Laurence had decided not to come snorkelling (money, sleep, hangover, I’m not sure) so he missed out. Although he would tell you that he had an extremely interesting day playing with cats and watching them be de-sexed. I can’t say that it would be my kind of day, but we all know that Laurence is a bit weird.
Our last stop, Panama City looked incredible whilst driving into it. However, we definitely went through the slums of the city before coming to the ‘pretty’ or ‘touristy’ areas. We had dinner at a lovely place on the waterfront. We did stop by a small canal, the Panama Canal to be exact. Laurence and I watched two boats go through one of the locks. The canal is pretty big and was really good to see, we are thinking about taking a trip up the canal (it goes through 2 locks and then we return to the city by bus).
As we had to get back to Bocas, Panama City exploring will have to occur on our return.