Panama!

I went to Bocas del Toro, Panama for Semana Santa (Holy Week). The week before Easter all of Latin America basically goes on Spring Break because no one has work and the kids don't have school. To get to Bocas del Toro, which is a chain of islands in the Caribbean, was a bit of a difficult process. I was supposed to leave on Friday morning but I got a stomach virus along with the rest of my host family and I ended up leaving on Sunday morning with another group of friends. We got up at four in the morning and took a taxi to San Jose. From San Jose we caught a bus to the border in a town called Sixaola. This was about a 5 1/2 hour ride. When we got to Sixaola we had to go through the process of getting out of Costa Rica. Then we walked across the border over a very scary bridge pictured to the right...Once across that bridge we had to go through a very long and very poorly organized process of getting into Panama...all while sweating because it was about 96 degrees outside. After that we got in a van that barely fit all of us and our luggage and that was blaring gospel music. This van drove us about an hour and a half until we got to the ocean. Then we got into a little boat and had a 40 minute boat ride to the main island, Colon. It was definitely worth all the trouble though because the islands were beautiful and I can safely say I had the best week of my life!

We got to Colon around 2 and checked into our hostel, the Gran Kahuna. I had a beautiful view of the ocean from my room and went to sleep every night listening to the waves. The first night in Colon we went to a bar called el Barco Hundido (Sunken Ship). The bar was all open and at the back there were tons of windy little docks that went out into the water and circled around big pieces of coral...it was absolutely beautiful.

The next day we went on a incredibly cheap tour, the whole thing cost about $12 and it went from 9 in the morning until 4:30. First we went dolphin watching and saw bunches of dolphins! After that we went to a restaurant that had a porch/dock off the front of it and there was kind of a makeshift cage with a shark in it so we got to see this big tiger shark that was about four or five feet long. After that we went snorkeling in shallow water and deep water and saw tons of starfish, sea cucumbers and beautiful fish. The coral here was some of the most colorful coral I've ever seen and was literally neon green, deep purple, red and bright blue.

Next the tour guide brought us to a beach called Red Frog Beach because it is home to lots of tiny little red frogs that are poisonous. It also happened to be one of the prettiest beaches I've seen while abroad, and I've seen quite a few beaches! After the beaches the boat took us back to the main island.

The next day we took a boat to another island called Bastimentos and went to a beach called Wizard Beach. Also very gorgeous, pictures to follow. We had met some people at the hostel that were really fun and part of our group was leaving the next day for Panama City so we decided to move to Bastimentos for the rest of our stay and stay at a hostel with the people we had met.

I liked Bastimentos much better than Colon because it was not the main island and therefore there were less people and less tourists. We stayed at a really fun hostel run by a man named Dickson who was a native of Bastimento. Most of the people on the islands are not Panamanian, they are descendants of different Caribbean islands such as Jamaica and the Caymans. They speak Spanish but with a Jamaican tempo and a few English words thrown in the mix, very hard to understand. Once again we had beautiful views from our hostel and there was a full moon while we were there and I didn't know this, but apparently the night after a full moon if you're in the right spot you can actually watch the moon rise, like you would watch the sun rise. Very eerie experience but awesome at the same time.

Every day we walked about a mile through the forest to Wizard beach. The first day we went there we were the only people on it and it literally looks like something out of the tv show Lost. There were wild pigs running around everywhere and big, beautiful horses. On the other days we went there were more people there but it was still far from being crowded. There were lots of surfers to watch and horses in the water and fun dogs to play with.

I think Panama was the best week of my life because of the beautiful beaches and people of Panama, the fun and interesting people I met while traveling and the abundance of wild life all around. I hope I can go back sometime soon!