Alone on Two-Palm Island: Travels in Panama

Copyright © Mark Moxon 2024

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This version was compiled on 30 March 2024

This work has been released under the Creative Commons licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). This means you are free to distribute this work to others as long as you retain this copyright notice, do not use the work for commercial purposes and do not alter, transform or build upon this work. For more details please read the full licence.

Front cover: A watchtower and cannon in Fuerte Santiago, Portobelo

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Preface

This book is a collection of writing from the road, covering a three-week trip I made to Panama in 2014. This was part of a larger, six-month journey that took me through Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia during 2013 and 2014.

The travelogue for all these countries and more can be found on my personal website at www.moxon.net, where you can also find travel tips, recommended journeys and further free books for you to download.

I’ve released this book and its companions via a Creative Commons Licence, which means you are free to distribute it to everyone and anyone, as long as you distribute it on a non-commercial basis and make no changes to it. If you know someone who might like this book, please pass it on; I make no money from it, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading it and recommending it to their friends.

Finally, please be aware that this book attempts to be humorous every now and then, so there’s a slight chance that it might cause offence to those who think my sense of humour is as amusing as a puddle of mud. On top of this, some parts will be out of date – which is why each article is dated – and others will betray the naivety of a traveller who discovered his way in the world by throwing himself into it headfirst. It is, however, an honest account of how I felt as I travelled through Central America for six months, and as such, I hope you enjoy it.

Mark Moxon

June 2014

Mainland Panama

Bocas del Toro

Written: 5 March 2014

There are two main types of Caribbean island, as far as I can make out. The first is the classic desert island, with its golden sand beaches, coral reefs just off the shore, corn-blue seas and palm trees dangling over the water; we’ve already enjoyed that particular vibe on Caye Caulker in Belize and Little Corn Island in Nicaragua. The second type is the rainforest and mangrove island, where it’s more about trees, biodiversity and greenery rather than paradise picture postcard shots; it’s this second type that we’ve been enjoying in the Bocos del Toro archipelago.

The difference was apparent from the moment we arrived. We flew in from San José in a 20-seater, two-prop plane, and although it wasn’t half as much fun as the 12-seater we took to Little Corn, it was still a lot more enjoyable than being in a bigger plane, and we had good views of the islands as we approached. But instead of turquoise waters and long stretches of gleaming sand, the waters were deep blue, the skies were dark grey and the islands were completely smothered in thick green forest, and after we landed and got through customs and immigration, the heavens opened and a tropical downpour smudged the taxi driver’s windscreen into a muddy mess.

‘Welcome to paradise!’ he said as he cheerfully talked on his mobile while swerving through the island traffic one-handed. ‘Sorry about the weather – it won’t last long.’

And it didn’t, though we did have to wait for it to clear so we could take a water taxi over to Isla Bastimentos, where we’d booked in for five days of rest and recuperation after our whirlwind tour of Costa Rica.

The Islands of Bocas

There are six main islands in the Bocas archipelago, among a scattering of tiny islets, but only three of them have any sizeable facilities for tourism. The main one, Isla Colón, contains the airport and Bocas del Toro town, and it’s a predictably boisterous seaside town with lots of booming music, a mushrooming party hostel scene, a large number of restaurants, and plenty of traffic; our visit to the islands coincided with carnival season, which stretches all across South and Central America (though it’s most famous in Brazil, of course), and Bocas town joins the party with gusto, which only adds to the noise and drunkenness levels in town. It’s a fun place to visit, and it was interesting watching the drunks trying to beat the crap out of each other in the main park, but I’m glad we didn’t end up staying there, as it’s hardly a restful spot. That said, the restaurants that stick out into the ocean on stilts are pleasant venues for a spot of lunch, and the island does have some quieter beaches away from the town, but the best part of Bocas town is leaving it behind on a water taxi and heading to its more peaceful neighbours.

Right next to Colón is Isla Carenero, which is a quieter affair that contains a number of classier hotels and restaurants, though if you end up in one that looks across to Bocas town, which is only about 100m away, then you’ll still end up enjoying the heavy bass of the party until the wee hours (water is an excellent conductor of reggae beats, as I discovered in a stilt village in Ghana). In comparison, the eastern shore has a bit of a beach and is nice and peaceful, though it also has quite a few friendly sandflies.

The furthest island with any sizeable community is Isla Bastimentos, which is a ten-minute boat ride from Bocas town, and not surprisingly it’s the quietest and most Caribbean of all three islands. There’s no traffic here at all, just a concrete pavement through the centre of Old Bank, the main settlement on the island, and we booked into a jungle cabin at the nattily named Beverly’s Hill hotel and kicked back to do serious amounts of nothing while we washed Costa Rica out of our hair and settled into some proper Panamanian living.

We did manage to do some things while on the islands, though I can’t remotely pretend that we explored them to their full potential, because we didn’t. There is good diving and snorkelling round here, though we didn’t try it, and there’s also sailing, fishing and, of course, swimming, though we didn’t try any of that either. We did, however, manage to walk to the beach, which took more than an hour of wandering through the rainforest, creeping over tree roots and side-stepping mud-holes on the winding path from the main drag in Bastimentos to Wizard Beach on the other side of the island. The locals told us it would take either 20 minutes, 30 minutes or 45 minutes, depending on who you asked, but we did get lost a couple of times, so it’s hard to tell who was right.

In the end, Wizard Beach turned out to be remote (though not remote enough to be particularly tourist-free) and to have a certain rugged charm about it, though it’s nowhere near as charming as the beaches on Little Corn, which are picture-postcard material. It doesn’t help that there are signs along the beach warning you of the lethal rip tide that can suck you under and drown you if you don’t know how to get out of it properly (for the record, if you get caught in a rip tide, you should swim parallel to the shore until you’re out of the tide, and you mustn’t struggle or try to swim against the flow; if you try to swim into the shore, against the rip tide, you will simply wear yourself out until you drown). After such a long journey through the humid forest, tackling the pounding waves of Wizard Beach just wasn’t that appealing, so we turned round and walked back to town again, where we went back to doing nothing for a few days.

Luckily the hosts of Beverly’s Hill made for excellent company. Simon, an ex-punk from England, and his Colombian wife Sandra and nine-year-old daughter Naomi, look after six rooms in three wooden chalets in a little rainforest enclave just up the hill from the main path in Old Bank. It’s hot and humid and you have to share your life with the wildlife, but we loved it; at one point we had a bird fly straight through our room, in one window and out of the other, and the garden was alive with thumb-sized red frogs, the signature animal of the Bocas archipelago.

We went to sleep to the endless drone of the rainforest’s insect population, and we slept like the dead and had long lie-ins, which is something we haven’t been able to do for months. Central America tends to get up incredibly early, and can’t help making a hell of a racket when it does, but in Bastimentos, with its lack of traffic and motivation, we slept straight through to double figures without thinking twice about it. It probably helped that we joined Simon and Sandra for a couple of late evenings for a few snifters on their veranda, where we gently sank into talk about life in the tropics and how it compares to life in England; it was all very relaxing after the preceding couple of weeks of relatively hectic travel.

We were sad to leave, but by the time we did, we’d got Costa Rica well and truly out of our systems, and we were ready to start our long journey east along the winding road of Panama, heading slowly to the gleaming skyscrapers of Panama City and the journey on to Colombia.

Boquete

Written: 8 March 2014

Boquete is a pretty little mountain town in northwest Panama that used to be famous for coffee-growing and vegetable farms, but in 2001 the American Association of Retired Persons named it as the fourth best place in the world to spend your retirement, and since then it’s seen a notable influx of American retirees and a blossoming of gated communities, golf courses and retirement bungalows. As you dodder around town, you can see the effect – there are, indeed, lots of old white people here – though there are still plenty of locals around, so it still feels pretty Panamanian.

I suspect that the retirement atmosphere rubbed off on us, though, because as soon as we stumbled out of the tourist shuttle that brought us all the way from Bocas, we felt our motivation evaporate as surely as if someone had shoved pipes in our mouths and popped slippers on our feet. For the tourist, Boquete is all about coffee tours, canopy walks, ziplines, volcano hikes, bird-watching and white-water rafting, but the rivers are too dry for rafting at the moment, we’re not twitchers, and we’ve had our fill of everything else on the list, so we simply kicked back and settled in for a quick bout of home comforts and empty days.

It helped that we’d booked into a B&B that was not only a fair distance out of town, in the neighbouring district of Alto Boquete, but it was also a very laid-back home run by a relaxed German who let us use his extensive kitchen in his suburban bungalow. Our room was cosy and only had one small window, so we weren’t woken up by the sunlight, and being so far out of town meant that there was absolutely no noise at all, not even the barking of dogs or the morning screech of the cockerels. We slept like the dead, which seemed rather appropriate.

We did manage to go for a short walk around town, but that ended prematurely when a pretty garden we had hoped to visit, which the owner had opened to the public, turned out to be permanently closed, as the owner has now passed away and his son isn’t interested in having the public poking their noses into his back yard; one hopes that he will now take down the sign above the entrance that says, ‘Mi jardín es su jardín’ (‘My garden is your garden’), as this is clearly no longer the case. So instead we booked on a Jeep tour of the surrounding area and spent an afternoon being driven to the various viewpoints and waterfalls that draw walkers to Boquete. The hills round here are pretty steep and there’s a lot of climbing and descending if you choose to walk – as, judging by the number of hikers we passed in the Jeep, a lot of people do – but going by Jeep is so much more... refined for people our age. After all, I’ve got a bad back and I’m not getting any younger, you know.

So in the end we enjoyed the home cooking and relaxation aspects of Boquete more than we did the outdoor activities, which was probably a bit of a cop out given all the bright young travellers setting off for day-long walks into the hills. Sometimes, though, when you’ve been travelling for four months straight, you just don’t have the energy you had at the start, and when you’re in the retirement capital of Central America, somehow you don’t feel so bad about slowing down...

Just Passing Through

Written: 9 March 2014

Junction towns rarely get a mention in travelogues, and if they do, they’re generally just footnotes. Even in the guidebooks, towns without obvious tourist attractions get short shrift, and it’s pretty clear that the authors don’t spend much time hanging round there... like everyone else on the trail, it seems.

But junction towns have one huge advantage for the weary traveller, and it’s this: when you reach a junction town, you can do whatever you want without feeling remotely guilty, and that’s a really novel feeling on the road. When you visit a normal travellers’ destination, there’s usually a reason why it’s a travellers’ destination, whether it’s the hiking, or the beaches, or the architecture, or the local culture, or whatever it is that makes this place worth exploring rather than, say, just spending your time lying in bed or drinking beer in the bar next to your hotel. And this means that if you do spend your time lying in bed or drinking beer in the bar next to your hotel, then you feel guilty, because you should be hiking, or exploring the beach, or checking out the architecture, or soaking up the local culture, or whatever it is that makes this place worth exploring rather than, say, just spending your time lying in bed or drinking beer in the bar next to your hotel.

But the junction town, which only gets one-and-a-half columns in the country guidebook and no mention at all in the region guidebook, doesn’t suffer from any touristic pretensions. This means that you can rock up at the bus stop, pick any hotel that takes your fancy, and go and do what the hell you like – such as, say, spending your time lying in bed or drinking beer in the bar next to your hotel – safe in the knowledge that you won’t bump into any irritating know-it-alls down the trail who’ll say, ‘What, you went there and you didn’t see X and Y? Oh, they were the most amazing things ever! Really, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen them...’

God bless the junction town. It’s the perfect place to get away from the travelling for a while.

Santiago to the Rescue

Our choice of junction town in Panama was Santiago. Panama is a famously long and thin country that’s broadly in the shape of an elongated S rotated anti-clockwise through 90°, and the Pan-American Highway, which passes all the way through Central America like the brown intestinal line in a prawn, follows the southern edge of that S from Costa Rica in the west to Darien in the east. (Here it grinds to a halt and doesn’t start up again until Turbo in Colombia, which is the only break in the journey from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego; the Panama-Colombia border is no longer open, unless you’re a member of a drug cartel.) If you’re travelling through Panama then you can’t avoid the Pan-American, but while there are plenty of attractions on the coast of Panama and up in the northern hills, there are precious few on the Pan-American itself, particularly in the western half.

So if, like us, you’re trying to get from western Panama to Panama City and you want to visit, say, the pretty coastline of the Peninsula de Azuero, then you’re either going to have a very, very long day on the buses, or you’re going to have to take a break somewhere convenient like Santiago, the capital city of the state of Veraguas. And that’s why we found ourselves staying in a hotel right next to the Pan-American Highway, sandwiched between McDonald’s and KFC, and opposite a noisy and grotty little drinking hole called La Candela Viva (‘The Live Candle’).

To be honest, it was brilliant. When we arrived in Santiago after four hours on the bus, we originally followed the advice in the Lonely Planet, which recommended a disgusting dive quite a way out of town where the young receptionist was so miserable it looked like she’d had a stroke, but I took one look at the room and told Peta I’d rather walk back to the highway in the blinding heat of the afternoon sun than stay there... so that’s what we did. Five minutes later we’d taken a cab to the Hotel San David, much nearer the centre of town, and booked into a lovely little room off a pretty little garden; so, safe in the knowledge that we had a room for the night, we hit the town.

We didn’t get far, because La Candela Viva was directly opposite the hotel, and it looked so grungy we couldn’t pass it up. The chairs were plastic, the clientele were seriously drunk, and the traffic on the Pan-American shot past so fast that it made the bottles rattle, but it was just 75 cents for an ice-cold bottle of beer, the service was efficient and the local characters were fascinating, so we settled in for one, two, three, four... well, a number of beers, and watched the locals drink their way through mountains of local lager before getting into their cars, directly under the sign saying ‘Don’t drink and drive’. And all the while excruciatingly loud Panamanian folk music poured out of a speaker above the entrance, pounding the dusty courtyard where we sat with one accordion-based song after another, drowning out the paralytic dribbling of the zonked group of locals in the corner until they too squashed themselves into a car and pulled out into the motorway traffic with an over-revving of the engine and a crunching of the clutch.

Once night fell and the moon came out, we hopped back over the highway and into the hotel, and had an excellent steak meal in the hotel restaurant, neatly sidestepping the neighbouring lure of the golden arches and the mighty colonel, and then it was off to bed for a genuinely silent night, miles away from the busy road. We’d done nothing except arrive, find a hotel, drink beer and eat food, and we revelled in it without a hint of guilt that we should be doing something more worthy. Sometimes the junction town is just what you need, and Santiago was the right place at the right time. Right on!

Pedasí

Written: 12 March 2014

The Peninsula de Azuero sticks out of the southern coast of Panama like a panting dog’s tongue, and perched at the southeastern tip of this parched peninsula is the pretty town of Pedasí. This oasis of quaint restaurants and little guesthouses is a good base for exploring the many beaches in the area, but there is one big problem with Pedasí: it’s been discovered by a small army of North American, European and Israeli ex-pats, and where ex-pats go, ex-pat culture soon follows, and it’s rarely a good thing.

There are two main types of ex-pat. The first slips into the local culture like a hand in a glove, to the extent that you don’t really think of them as ex-pats at all. They learn the local language, make friends with their neighbours and effectively move in and settle down, leaving their cultural preconceptions at the door. Most communities will still regard this type of ex-pat as a foreigner – white skin is a bit of a giveaway in countries like Panama – but the key aspect here is integration; they’re not so much ex-pats as foreign locals.

The second type brings their culture with them and steadfastly holds onto it, wrapping themselves in the blanket of home comforts and regarding the locals with a lofty and detached air. Particularly noticeable are the crowds of American ex-pats who seem to clog up whole areas of Costa Rica and Panama, bringing with them their four-wheel-drives, their golf courses, their awful food, their shouty voices and their world view that places America very firmly at the centre of everything. It feels as if Pedasí is on the verge of being taken over by this second type of ex-pat, and it will be a shame when the balance finally leans too far towards the invasion.

Our hotel was a prime example. The American owner only bought the hotel in May last year, and on our first night, as we sipped a beer under the awnings of his attractive hotel, he sat down and held court with us and a wine-guzzling couple from Holland. He told us, without pausing for breath, how he’d escaped the rat race, sold his million-dollar house in Hawaii and bought the hotel – though he still had a couple of other houses in America, naturally – and how he had nearly finished building his dream house here in Pedasí, and how he was setting up a local school so his son would get a decent education, and how the hotel wasn’t about making a profit but was simply there to fund his family’s costs (which must be fairly huge as it’s the most expensive hotel in Pedasí), and how it was all about ditching the stress of work and creating a new life... and basically he did that ex-pat thing where they simply talk about themselves and how bloody fantastic their life is, without realising that not everyone is as interested in them as they are. It’s one of the most boring things in the world, listening to ex-pats drone on about why life is so much better here than it was back home, and we just sat there in silence while he pounded us with his prepared speech... a speech we heard him repeating at breakfast the following day to another trapped couple.

But it’s easy to see why this is an attractive destination for immigrants from faraway lands. The beaches are long and windswept, and almost completely undeveloped; there is good diving and fishing not far off the coast; the local Panamanians are kind and foreigner-friendly; and Pedasí has a supermarket, a handful of restaurants and lots of small business opportunities that are ripe for foreign ownership, but without any big developments to spoil the area’s character. It still feels reasonably Panamanian, and locals sit out in front of their houses at night and smile hello as you wander past, but the number of foreign accents about town is telling, and it won’t be this way for long. This is fast becoming the kind of town where people pull up in their four-wheel-drives, park them right in front of the restaurant where you’re trying to enjoy an evening meal, and leave the engines running for half an hour while they go off and do their chores, just so they can keep the air-conditioner going; this happened so many times in Pedasí that in the end I was too worn down to be irritated by the constant clouds of diesel exhaust and hot air.

Still, we enjoyed the nearby beach, which was totally empty and devoid of any kind of development – foreign or local – and the cycle ride we took down to the coast was very pleasant, even if this part of the world is so dry that the air seems to suck all the life out of you, leaving you no more than a desiccated husk by the end of the day. Which, come to think of it, is not unlike the effect of having to listen to an ex-pat droning on about how wonderful they are and how much better life is here than it is back home...

Panama City

Written: 15 March 2014

To be honest, Central America isn’t the best place to go for world-class cities. Most of the region’s capitals are dirty, crime-ridden dumps that are have very little to attract the average traveller: Belize City, Guatemala City, San Salvador, Managua and even San José are all places whose mothers would have trouble loving them, let alone complete strangers. And even if their edginess is interesting in its own right, you rarely find yourself wanting to hang around for too long.

And then, pow! After four-and-a-half months on the road in Central America, Panama City hits us in the face with its beautiful skyline, its sophisticated restaurant scene, its bona fide world-class attractions and its friendly people. We stayed in the financial district, purely because that’s where we found a good deal on a decent place to stay, and simply wandering out of the hotel and weaving through the skyscrapers was a massive culture shock... and one I thoroughly enjoyed. I’ve always loved modern cityscapes, and Panama City ticks all the boxes. It’s a great place.

The Panama Canal

When I was a nipper, my favourite palindrome was all about this part of the world (ignore, for the moment, if you will that being a nipper and having a favourite palindrome is gut-wrenchingly nerdy... but yeah, I guess that was me). Here it is in all of its ‘reads the same backwards as it does forwards’ glory:

A man, a plan, a canal... Panama!

It’s genius, and not just because it neatly sums up how one of the world’s greatest feats of engineering came about. The French started building a canal in 1881, but disease wiped out the workforce and the engineering challenges proved too much, so the company behind the project failed. The Americans took over the project in 1904, and the canal opened a decade later on 15 August 1914, mainly due to the drive of Major George Washington Goethals, who was appointed chief engineer in 1907. This man took the original plan and built the canal, and it’s still an amazing piece of engineering.

We caught our first glimpse of the canal on the way into Panama City from Pedasí; our bus passed over the Bridge of the Americas, which crosses the bay at the Pacific end of the canal, but although we got to see lots of huge cranes and a few ships, we couldn’t really see the canal proper. The easiest way to get up close to the canal is to visit Miraflores Locks, a modern visitor centre that overlooks a large set of locks at the Pacific end of the canal; so the following morning we took a taxi to Miraflores, to watch huge cargo ships passing through the locks from balconies that are right next to the action.

It’s an impressive sight, there’s no doubt about it, but I have to admit to being more overawed by the skyscrapers in the financial district of the city. Somehow it’s difficult to appreciate the scale of the twin locks at Miraflores, even though the ships have tiny men on them to lend a sense of scale. I grew up by the Trent and Mersey canal and there were a couple of locks just beyond the back of our garden, and watching the ships passing through Miraflores felt strangely similar to watching tiny narrowboats pass through the hand-winched locks at home. I’d expected to be blown away by the sheer scale of the operation, but in the end it didn’t really feel that astounding; that said, it’s still a great way to spend the afternoon, watching all these monster ships drifting through the gates, and it’s well worth the US$15 entrance fee (though the museum and 3D cinema show are really dire; trust me, you’ll learn a lot more from Wikipedia about the canal than you ever will from the Miraflores visitor centre).

Cinta Costera and Casco Viejo

The canal might be a unique attraction – and it’s definitely the main draw card for the crowds of foreign visitors who flock to the city each year – but for me it pales into insignificance compared to the beauty of walking around Panama City. Yes, there are large parts of the city that are poor and decaying and full of crime – this is still Central America, after all – but as a visitor you can simply avoid those places, and instead you can wander freely and safely along the waterfront, enjoying amazing views all the way.

This is due in no small part to the recent creation of the Cinta Costera (the ‘coastal belt’), a strip of parkland that hugs the southern shoreline of the city centre, all the way from the financial centre in the east to Casco Viejo (the historic centre) in the west. Eager to give it a go, we set off from our hotel and wandered down to the shore, passing clusters of dizzyingly tall skyscrapers and dodging the hectic traffic, before following the Cinta Costera all the way from the modern part of the city to the old centre.

I absolutely adored this walk. As you wander through the tropical heat, heading away from the financial centre, the skyscrapers slowly recede behind you and the bay gently curves into photograph after photograph of skylines, harbours, palm trees and meandering pathways through manicured gardens. All the while the red tiled roofs and old church towers of Casco Viejo grow closer and closer in front of you, until you reach the fishing port and the edges of the old town, where you can shelter from the sun in the thin, winding streets and shady squares of this pleasant part of the city.

It took us a leisurely hour-and-a-half to follow the bay, with lots of stops to rehydrate and hide from the midday sun, and all the while huge container ships sat in lines on the horizon to our left, waiting for their turn to pass through the canal, while to our right the city pulsated with its endless traffic and heat-haze hovering over the harsh concrete pavements. It might be stiflingly hot and a little too young to have grown enough shade, but the Cinta Costera still feels like an oasis, pinched between the city and the sea. It’s a wonderful place to spend the day.

Panamá Viejo

At the western end of the Cinta Costera is the historic centre of Panama, Casco Viejo, which was settled in 1671. However, the original Panama City was founded by the Spanish some 8km to the east on 15 August 1519, where it flourished until it was sacked by the pirate Henry Morgan. Now known as Panamá Viejo, the remains of the original city are in ruins, but they make for an engaging visit nonetheless.

Panamá Viejo (or, as it was known back then, plain old Panamá) was the first European settlement on the Pacific, and all the gold and silver that the Spanish brought from the mines in Peru flowed through here. These riches would cross the country via El Camino Real de Panamá (‘the Royal Road of Panama’), the colonial-era equivalent of the Panama Canal, which followed various waterways from Panamá to Portobelo on the Caribbean coast. From there it would be taken to Spain to feed the colonial economy, so it’s not hard to see why Panamá was an important and strategic port for the Spanish.

All this ended in 1671, when the Welsh pirate Henry Morgan led a group of 1400 men across the country to take Panamá, and due to some pretty useless strategising from the Spanish, he managed to take the city, and it consequently burned to the ground (though it isn’t clear which side started the fire). Morgan’s attack violated a new peace treaty that had been signed between England and Spain, so he was arrested and sent back to England, where he pointed out that he’d had no idea that a treaty had been signed, as he’d been away on the high seas at the time. So instead of being punished as a pirate, Charles II knighted him and sent him off to Jamaica to be Lieutenant Governor – not a bad result for Morgan, really.

Meanwhile, Panamá was in ruins, so the Spanish built a new city to the west that was easier to defend, and this became modern-day Panama City; this time they built a wall around it, hence the name Casco Viejo, which means ‘old compound’. Most of the remains of Panamá Viejo were built over or were used as building materials, but in 1976 the area was designated as a protected site, and today you can wander through the skeleton of the original city, climbing up to the top of the city cathedral’s tower for great views over the whole area. It’s well worth a couple of hours of your time, though the mosquitoes were astonishingly vicious when we visited, so we got out of there quicker than a fleeing conquistador, and happily settled back into the lap of luxury in the centre of town.

And that’s one of the great things about Panama City. It has historical sites, it has engineering marvels and it has modern skyscrapers, but best of all it has easy living, with its high-quality restaurants, comfortable hotels and friendly residents. After such a long time on the budget trail through Central America, that’s what we really wanted – a taste of city luxury – and in Panama City, for the first time in a Central American capital, that’s exactly what we got...

The Taxi Scam

Written: 15 March 2014

So Panama City is a little gem on the Pacific coast, with its ancient sites, lovely walks, impressive skyline and modern engineering marvels. It’s an easy place to recommend, but there is one thing I’ve got to mention, and that’s the taxi drivers.

Panama City’s taxi drivers don’t use meters, which isn’t much of a surprise, as they don’t really go in for metered travel in this part of the world (even in San José in Costa Rica, where they are supposed to use meters by law, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a taxi driver who’s happy to do so). This means you have to do what you have to do everywhere, and that’s to negotiate your fare, preferably before you get into the cab. It’s a bit difficult to know how much you should be paying, of course, and asking the taxi driver to come up with a figure is like sticking a ‘kick me’ sign on your backside and inviting him to take aim, but eventually you get a feeling for how much taxis cost, and generally you end up paying a reasonable fare.

This is true for most of the taxis in Panama City, but not all of them. Sometimes I would suggest a fare to a taxi driver, and they would look at me with genuine irritation as if I was completely wasting their time, shout ‘Pah!’ and drive off with a violently dismissive wave of the hand; I would then try exactly the same price on the next cabbie, and he’d happily accept my suggested price – perhaps negotiating a tiny bit more, but not a lot – and would drive us there with a smile. I have no idea what I was doing wrong with the first taxi, and I still don’t have a clue why some of the taxi drivers treated me so rudely. It was disconcerting, to say the least, but perhaps this is normal behaviour round here; if so, it’s a bit of a shock after the friendliness in the rest of the country.

And then at popular tourist sights, outside the bigger hotels, and in the taxi rank at the main bus station, there are taxi drivers who will only take you if you pay them four or five times the going rate, and they will laugh in your face – often quite violently – when you suggest the correct fare to them. So you simply wander round the corner or wait for a taxi to drive up from the street, and they’ll take you for the correct fare and without all this unnecessary attitude.

I’ve been finding this two-tier system astonishingly wearing, not least because these are the first arseholes that we’ve met on our entire Panamanian trip, and here they are, right in the heart of the capital, and right in the places where visitors to this country are most vulnerable. I don’t really mind taxi drivers trying to charge tourists more – it happens the world over, and you get used to it, even expect it – but to treat customers with such a lack of respect simply because they open negotiations with a reasonable price for a taxi ride... well, that’s not acceptable behaviour anywhere, full stop.

Luckily, Panama City is such an amazing place that even these greedy fuckwits can’t spoil it. One day the city will mature to the point where they also realise that this behaviour is unacceptable, and they will stamp it out; until then, don’t let these idiots take your money, because they don’t deserve it. They certainly didn’t get any of mine.

The San Blas Archipelago

All Aboard The Black Dragonfly

Written: 16 March 2014

For travellers heading south through Central America and into South America, there is one big obstacle: the Panama-Colombia border. If you keep on driving south through Panama down the Pan-American Highway, then you’ll eventually get stopped by a very big man with a very big gun, and trust me, you don’t want that to happen.

It hasn’t always been this way. When Panama gained independence from Spain in 1821 it immediately joined Simón Bolívar’s confederation of Gran Colombia, which comprised modern-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. When this dissolved just ten years later, Panama stayed as a province of Colombia, which remained the case until 1903, when Panama declared itself an independent nation.

These days, Panama and Colombia are definitely not part of the same country; they’re not even part of the same region, as Panama is positively Central American while Colombia is definitely South American. This division is highlighted by the lack of a land crossing between the two countries; the result feels like the border equivalent of a messy divorce. The Pan-American Highway manages to struggle all the way to Yaviza in Panama’s eastern Darien province, but that’s where it stops, because the border area is a no-go area unless you’re a drug trafficker or a soldier trying to catch drug traffickers. So for the average traveller, the only options for getting from Panama to Colombia are to fly, or to go by boat.

Flying is, obviously, the easy option, but the advantage of taking a boat is that most of them go via the San Blas Archipelago, which is one of the most beautiful parts of Panama. Lying off the northeast of the country, the San Blas islands are strung out along 200km of shore, all the way from El Porvenir in the west to the Colombian border in the east. The area is unique because although it’s part of Panama, it’s run by the indigenous inhabitants, the Kuna, as an autonomous region, which has been the case ever since a rebellion in 1925; the Kuna even send a representative to the country’s National Assembly, uniquely among Panama’s indigenous groups. This autonomy means that the Kuna live their own lives here in the San Blas, with their own language and their own economy – which is mainly based on bartering with visiting sailors – and their own distinctive clothes and art-forms. You can fly to some of the 400-odd islands in the San Blas, though as the Kuna only inhabit about 40 of them, by far the best way to see the archipelago is by boat.

So the attraction of taking a boat to Colombia is clear: you get to explore a Caribbean island paradise with a unique indigenous culture, which you otherwise wouldn’t get to see. And that’s why we found ourselves considering the boat trip, despite what we’d heard.

Not All Plain Sailing

The first people we’d talked to about the crossing to Colombia were Neil and Bronwyn when we first met them in Playa Esteron back in El Salvador. Bronwyn did this very trip a couple of years ago with their daughter Stephanie, though Neil had flown, as he’s really prone to seasickness. This would turn out to be an excellent decision on his part, as Bronwyn’s tales of the crossing to Colombia were horrific. The ocean passage east from the San Blas to Cartagena is against the direction of the prevailing wind, and as any sailor will tell you, this means a pretty bumpy ride, and although Bronwyn wasn’t seasick herself, she was pretty much the only person who pulled through unscathed. Everyone was sick, the sea was scarily rough, and the passage was a complete nightmare; and as if the terrible weather wasn’t enough, it turned out that the last time the captain had done this trip was the previous year, when her husband had been in charge. He’d died of a heart attack during that voyage and she’d had to finish the trip in sole charge of the yacht, and after a period of grieving, she’d decided to continue the family business on her own. This was her first full voyage in charge, and she’d filled the boat to bursting with hard-drinking backpackers, only to have them all turn green around the gills once they’d passed through the San Blas and turned east, directly into the ocean swell of the Caribbean Sea.

Now, me and yachts, we have a bit of history. Back in 1997, three of us sailed a 36ft sloop halfway across the Pacific from New Zealand to French Polynesia, and I got so seasick – and stayed so seasick – that the captain declared he’d never seen anything like it. The first leg – a non-stop 28-day bash down into the strong winds of the roaring forties and up towards the Gambier Islands – saw the captain and the chef fall out to the point where they were only speaking through me, and as I was spending most of my time on deck throwing up, conversation ran a little dry. When we reached the Gambiers after the initial 3000 nautical mile leg, the chef jumped ship, leaving just me and the captain to sail the last 1000 nautical miles through the Tuamotu Archipelago to Tahiti, where I escaped onto a plane bound for Australia. It was one of the most difficult things I have ever done, and I made a promise to myself that I would never board a yacht again.

But despite Bronwyn’s tales of hell, I didn’t rule it out, because of something Neil said. ‘It’s one of the last real adventures left,’ he pointed out one evening in Granada, and that was when I knew I was going to have to face my demons, because if there’s something I can’t resist, it’s an adventure. We were clearly going to have to sail from Panama to Colombia, and all we had to do was to find a decent boat to take us.

The Black Dragonfly

There are quite a few websites selling places on the so-called ‘backpacker boats’ that sail between Panama and Colombia. Some of them are better than others, but the good ones let you search by date for boats that are heading in the right direction at the right time, so that’s exactly what we did.

The results were varied, to say the least. The cheapest option, at about US$350 per person, seemed to be some kind of motorboat that takes you through the islands, dropping you off at night to sleep in hammocks or tents. Judging by the blurb, you needed to be able to drink your body weight in beer to qualify for this budget-backpacker experience, so that one got the chop pretty quickly.

Then, at around US$450 to US$550 per person, were a few yachts and a couple of catamarans, where you sleep on board and actually have a sailing trip on a proper boat, rather than a lift in a fancy water taxi. We searched for reviews of the various boats and captains, and again they all seemed to cram as many people on board as possible, fill them with beer, and encourage late-night partying by taking group shots of them all throwing shaka signs at the camera, beer cans in hand. We read one review where a girl had been horrified to find that the berth she’d booked was actually a space on the table in the dining room, rather than a bed; it seems that there are a lot of captains for whom profit is the bottom line, even if it means not having enough life jackets to go round.

And then we spotted a slightly more expensive trip, at US$700 per person, that specifically said it wasn’t a party boat. The Black Dragonfly, said the blurb, is a beautiful teak-lined Formosa yacht, with gourmet food, a maximum of seven passengers, no late-night partying and a very experienced captain. And it was leaving from Portobelo for Colombia on 18 March, just around the time that we were hoping to go, and there were still some spaces left.

We didn’t click on it right away. First, we let the idea sink in. ‘Do you really want to go?’ I asked Peta.

‘I’m happy to go if you’re happy to go,’ she replied, tactfully.

‘But I don’t know,’ I said. ‘There’s an ocean passage involved. And I know what that actually means.’

‘It’s up to you,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to decide for you. It has to be your decision.’

So I sat there frozen, genuinely unable to decide. That ocean passage to French Polynesia was one of the lowest points in my life, and yet it’s also one of my most interesting stories. Could I bear to set foot on a sailing yacht again? Or could I live with the decision to skip what might be the trip of a lifetime, if not for me, for Peta? I didn’t know what to do...

Science to the Rescue

Decisions like this are often made easier by research, so we both started hunting round the net for inspiration. What could we do to prevent me getting seasick? Drugs, perhaps, or a special diet? And would the size of the yacht be relevant, seeing as The Black Dragonfly was listed as a 50ft ketch, and my Pacific nightmare had been in a 36ft sloop? And as we searched the web for clues, Peta stumbled across a conversation on a yacht design forum about which types of boat were best for preventing motion sickness, and someone had posted to the conversation, talking about the Motion Comfort Ratio formula.

This clever mathematical formula, which was formulated by boat designer Ted Brewer, takes factors such as the boat’s length, beam and weight, and comes up with a number that should, in theory, show how comfortable a ride you’ll get in that yacht. The poster had gone through more than 1000 types of yacht and calculated their ratios, including that for a 50ft Formosa, the same type as The Black Dragonfly. The higher the number, the more stable the ride, and the Formosa 50 came in with a score of 52.48. As I scanned the list of all the other makes and sizes of yachts out there, it was obvious that most of them scored in the 30s, with a handful in the 40s, but only a tiny number managed to reach the 50s. In his list of scores, the Formosa 50 had the fifth best Motion Comfort Ratio overall, and was only 2.25 points off the top spot (which, incidentally, was taken by the Herreshoff Walrus with a score of 54.75). There, clear as day, science was telling me that The Black Dragonfly was one of the best possible yachts for this crossing, and that was the clincher.

So after letting the decision settle in over a couple of beers in our hotel in San José, I fired up the laptop and booked a passage for two on The Black Dragonfly. And then I collapsed in exhaustion, literally shaking at the thought that, once more, I’d be sailing across an ocean in a yacht.

Portobelo

Written: 18 March 2014

The bus ride from the gleaming skyscrapers of Panama City to the grungy port town of Portobelo is a bit of a shock, to be honest. It’s been a while since we took a proper chicken bus, and I’d forgotten just how much of an assault on the senses they can be; the last one we found ourselves on was back in Nicaragua, because for some unfathomable reason Costa Rica and Panama seem to be doing all they can to phase them out and replace them with modern buses. But the process isn’t complete in Panama and you do still see multicoloured school buses grinding their way around some parts of the country, so when we stepped off the air-conditioned coach that had whisked us from the capital to the northern port of Colón and mentioned to the bus station boys that we wanted to continue on to Portobelo, they pushed us up the steps of the nearest bus and we burst into the psychedelic and ear-shattering world of the Central American chicken bus for the first time in two months.

We managed to squeeze into a seat – with Peta’s knees jammed up into her stomach, as the wheel arch took up all the space underneath the seat – but it soon filled to bursting point, and after bouncing along the coastal road for an hour and a half with painfully loud rap music serenading us at every turn, we finally arrived in Portobelo with cramped legs and aching ears. And then the rain started, which didn’t exactly help, because it turns out Portobelo is a pretty ugly place, especially compared to the gleaming skyscrapers of Panama City.

There’s a sludgy river dribbling through the centre of town that bubbles and squelches as it sends out clouds of acrid stench, and the buildings seem to be suffering from the same kind of black mould that afflicts Mexico, but even more depressing was the fact that when we arrived on a Monday, everything was shut. In particular, none of Portobelo’s grotty-looking restaurants appeared to be open, and the strangely distracted lady at our hotel said our best bet was a restaurant that was some way back along the road to Colón, which we could probably walk to if we were feeling adventurous. It wasn’t looking good, but luckily we chanced upon Captain Jack’s hostel, where they served a mean burger and cold beer to the few backpackers who’d washed up on Portobelo’s shores, despite it being the day of rest for everyone else.

Captain Jack’s hostel exists because there are two good reasons for travellers to visit Portobelo, even if it doesn’t look like it on the surface. The first, and most astonishing, is that Portobelo is actually a World Heritage site, and it has a long and interesting history, dating back to its founding in 1597. When the Spanish ruled this part of the world, the gold and silver that came up from South America and through Panama City was transported across the country to Portobelo, from where it was put on ships bound for Spain. Portobelo grew into the most important port in the New World and became a tempting target for Spain’s enemies, and a number of forts were built around the harbour, some of which still survive today. These forts are Portobelo’s saving grace, because if there’s something I love, it’s an old colonial fort, and Fuerte San Jerónimo and Fuerte Santiago, which are easily accessed by foot from town, are pretty atmospheric. Their turrets now look out on yachts anchored in the calm bay rather than enemy warships, but there are still some original cannons aiming out to sea, and they’re well worth a visit.

Even better is Mirador Perú, a viewpoint at the top of a steep staircase that has a commanding vista over the harbour. When the sun finally broke through the clouds the following morning, we enjoyed a lazy day perched on the old ruins halfway up the hill, watching the yachts in the harbour drifting in that synchronised dance that they weave when the wind changes and they all slowly turn to face the same direction. Portobelo almost looks pleasant from this distant outlook; the smell of the sludgy river in town doesn’t quite make it this far.

The second reason to visit Portobelo – and the reason why we’d rolled up on its shores – is that this is one of the ports where you can catch a sailboat to Colombia. And so it was that after a day of killing time in this distant backwater, we boarded The Black Dragonfly for our own, slightly more modern adventure on the high seas.

Portobelo to San Blas

Written: 19 March 2014

After we’d booked our passage and paid a deposit, we didn’t hear anything further until a week before the departure date, when the Norwegian captain of The Black Dragonfly, Jan Kåre Stenberg, got in touch to confirm the final details. We were to meet at the westernmost pier in Portobelo at 10am on 18 March, and he listed the items we should bring, specifically highlighting the need for seasickness pills. My stomach lurched at the thought; all of a sudden the trip was real, and not just a date sometime in the future. I replied to the captain to say we were looking forward to the trip, and we set out into the depths of Panama City to buy the best seasickness pills that money could buy.

If you search the web, it says that the best seasickness pills contain Hyocine, while the next best pills are antihistamines, so we asked the pharmacist if he had any Hyocine, specifically to treat seasickness. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘this is Hyocine,’ so we paid up the US$25 fee and went back to the hotel room to search the web for further details on what we’d just bought (which you must always do when buying medicine in the developing world – you never know quite what they’re going to sell you). It turned out that he had indeed sold us Hyocine, but unfortunately it was a slightly different Hyocine compound to the one that’s used to treat seasickness; we needed Hyocine Hydrobromide, but instead we’d been sold Hyocine Butylbromide, which would have been perfect if we’d needed to quell cramps brought on by irritable bowel syndrome, but which was totally useless for motion sickness.

Back out on in the city streets, the next four pharmacists said they didn’t have Hyocine, but they did stock Gravol, an antihistamine that I’d used on the ferry from Granada to Isla Ometepe; it had worked, but it had make me pretty drowsy as a side effect. Still, after exhausting all the options in the neighbourhood, we figured Gravol was better than nothing, so we bought a box of one hundred for US$18, ticked it off the list and went back to enjoying the luxury of Panama’s capital.

Another Day in Port

So the morning of 18 March saw us stomping down to the westernmost pier in Portobelo, pills in hand, and as prepared as we were ever going to be for a sailing trip against the wind and against my better judgement. We met four others waiting at the pier for the same boat, and after saying hello and finding out that they were all German-speaking Swiss – not a bad choice for sailing companions, because if there’s one thing you want on board an ocean-going yacht, it’s people who aren’t going to start a war – we all stood to attention as a small dinghy powered across the harbour with a blond-haired man at the engine.

‘Hello, I’m Captain Jan,’ he said as he climbed onto the pier. ‘Are you here for The Black Dragonfly?’

‘Yes,’ we all chimed.

‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid I must tell you there’s a slight change of plan, for which I am sorry. Our windlass has broken so we won’t be leaving until four o’clock this afternoon, which I know is disappointing, but instead of sailing to Isla Grande today and anchoring there, we’re going to sail overnight straight to the San Blas, so you’ll actually get more time in the San Blas. I hope this is OK, and I’m sorry for the change of plan, but we have rigged up a manual system, and it just means we need to leave a little later than planned.’

And I thought, ‘OK, calm down, we’re not leaving until later, which sucks because you’re all fired up for a day of sailing, but listen to this man. He sounds like a captain. He’s obviously in charge of his yacht, you can tell from the way he’s talking. OK, so his windlass is broken, but that’s only the motor that pulls up the anchor, it’s not an important part of the actual sailing. Listen to him now, he’s going on about how comfort and safety are his top priorities: that’s a good sign. Besides, remember when our windlass broke in Amanu and we had to haul the anchor up by hand for the rest of the trip? It happens, it’s yachting, and it’s OK; he sounds like he knows what he’s doing, and he’s being honest with us about what’s going on. This isn’t a backpacker boat captain, he’s a proper sailor, and he’s doing the right thing. This is a good sign...’

So although we had to spend an extra day kicking around in Portobelo, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because when we finally boarded The Black Dragonfly that afternoon and started settling into life on board, I felt good about it. I knew that this type of yacht was one of the best possible vessels for preventing seasickness; the captain was clearly putting safety ahead of schedules; there were just six passengers in total; and when we were introduced to Holly, the other crew member, it turned out that not only was she a smiling and very friendly Bostonian with lots of experience of working culinary magic in the cramped environment of a ship’s galley, but she was also a fully qualified captain in her own right. And to top it all off, they put the two of us in the aft cabin, right at the back of the boat, which is the most stable part of any yacht, and the best cabin for preventing seasickness, as the back of a yacht doesn’t bounce half as much as the bow, where the other two cabins were.

‘This might turn out to be an enjoyable experience yet,’ I thought as we settled in to meet our travelling companions for the San Blas.

Getting to Know the Crew

On a yacht, you get to know people pretty fast; there’s nowhere to hide, particularly when all the passengers are up on deck and finding their sea legs. This was particularly true on The Black Dragonfly as we sailed out of Portobelo, bound for the San Blas archipelago.

We’d started to get to know each other when we’d taken the dinghy over to the yacht that morning. Even though our departure was delayed, we’d taken the dinghy over to the yacht in the morning and stowed our gear, and we’d all ended up chatting around the ship’s table in the sumptuous teak cabin below deck.

Our captain, Jan, was a real find. His love of sailing was palpable; he’d sailed The Black Dragonfly over from his home country of Norway, where he’d bought her, and he’d got to know her inside out by sailing her across the North Sea, through a nasty storm in the English Channel, and across the Atlantic. As he said, more than once, ‘I know my boat,’ and that’s exactly what I wanted to hear. He’d been sailing since he was a boy, and with two Atlantic crossings under his belt, two yachts in Cartagena, somewhere between 15 and 20 successful Panama-Colombia crossings, a Yachtmaster Ocean qualification, and goodness-only-knows how many thousands of nautical miles of sailing experience, he made me feel totally at ease, and I was incredibly grateful for that.

Second-in-command but completely in charge of life below deck, Holly was not only our cook, but as a qualified captain in her own right, she’d be sharing the sailing with Jan. With six years’ experience working on superyachts – yachts that are bigger than 79ft and often much bigger, which effectively means millionaire owners and very high standards – she’d met Jan while they were both on the Yachtmaster course, and not only had they fallen for each other and become an item, she’d also realised that there was more to life than working on expensive yachts, so they’d decided to combine work and pleasure by running The Black Dragonfly charters as a team. It turned out that his was their first official trip working together (though Jan’s been doing the trip with other crew members for a few years now), and after a trial run through the San Blas with Jan’s family, they were really keen to make sure that everything went smoothly (broken windlass notwithstanding).

Making up the rest of the passenger list were the four German-speaking Swiss that we’d met on the pier. All of them in their twenties: Marco and Stephan had been travelling together through Central America for some time, while Reto and Cordelia had arrived in Panama City just a week before, at the start of an open-ended trip around the world. None of them had done any sailing before, and they didn’t quite know what to expect, so I just kept quiet. I figured they’d find out soon enough.

Into the Ocean

After the introductions, we settled down on deck to eat our first meal on board. When the advert had said that the food was gourmet, they weren’t wrong; I’ve cooked in a galley and I know how difficult it is, but that first meal of chicken with onion and mushroom sauce, salad with balsamic dressing and perfectly cooked rice, was delicious.

As we savoured Holly’s cooking and the sun slowly set at the mouth of Portobelo harbour, Jan talked about the plans for the trip and the safety aspects of the journey; stay behind the wheel when in the open ocean, wear life jackets at night if you go on deck, only smoke at the back of the boat so you’re downwind from everyone else, that sort of thing. And I grilled him about the stability of the boat, as that was preying on my mind.

‘Oh, she’s stable,’ he said. ‘She’s 25 tons in all, and she’s got a nine-ton keel underneath, so it isn’t possible to turn her over – if she leans over too far, the keel just pulls her back. She’s a very safe boat, made from fibreglass this thick,’ he continued, pulling his thumb and first finger wide apart. ‘Back when she was built in the eighties they didn’t know how strong fibreglass was, so they made it extra think to be sure. There’s no way the hull can be breached.’

Once the meal was over, we were introduced to Jan’s manual override system for the broken windlass, and I finally understood the reason for the change of schedule. ‘I was this close to cancelling the whole trip when the windlass broke,’ he said, ‘but I managed to rig up this system, and it works. It’s more effort than using a windlass, so we’ve decided not to sail to Isla Grande, which was to be our first stop, as it has a deep anchorage. Instead we’ll sail straight for the San Blas overnight, and drop anchor in El Porvenir, which isn’t too deep, and clear immigration there; I tried to clear you through immigration here this morning, but apparently the man is “out on an emergency”, which probably means it was someone’s birthday party last night. Anyway, does anyone fancy helping me with the anchor, so we can get underway?’

Three pairs of twenty-something Swiss hands shot up – the boys, naturally – and they set to work with Jan’s quick fix. It was beautiful in its simplicity, and worked a treat. Holly stood on the bow, and started by attaching a rope with a carabiner to the anchor chain. Jan and the boys wrapped this rope round a winch in the cockpit and pulled it, bringing a length of the anchor chain up on deck. When the rope ran out, Holly attached a hook on a short, fixed rope to the anchor chain at the bow, then Jan loosened the winch rope so the bow hook took the strain, and he passed the carabiner up to the bow so the whole process could start again.

It worked like a charm, and would continue to do so throughout the trip. I took Holly’s place for the next attempt, and by the end of the San Blas, the whole process worked like clockwork. ‘It’s a lot faster than the windlass,’ Jan declared, and the windlass issue was solved and the crew bonded, all in one fell swoop. That’s clever captaincy for you...

Shaky Start

That night we sailed the first leg from Portobelo to the island of El Porvenir, which is the capital of San Blas and home to the immigration post where we had our passports stamped and officially left Panama. The weather was being kind and the swell was only about 1 or 2m, so the short overnight passage of about 50 nautical miles was relatively comfortable, at least as far as ocean swells go. This was helped in no small way by the captain’s constant fine-tuning of the sails; every now and then, Jan would grab the winch handle and trim the sails, changing the angle of tack in ways that were unfathomable to us landlubbers, but we could certainly feel the benefit as things suddenly got a lot more comfortable. He did this throughout the night as we headed northeast from Portobelo and into the Caribbean Sea, before turning east to go round the Panamanian mainland so we could drop down into the Gulf of San Blas, and most of the journey was overnight, with Jan and Holly taking it in turns to sail. I was worried that this – our first proper bit of ocean sailing – would set off my seasickness, but I’d been taking the tablets for at least a day before we hit the sea, and although I felt a bit uneasy, I felt OK. I was pretty stunned, particularly as the boat was leaning pretty heavily to starboard to catch the northerly breeze.

The others on board weren’t quite as comfortable – though they probably felt a bit better once they’d been sick, if my experience is anything to go by – and they elected to spend the night on deck, rather than go below, where the constant movement and the serious tilt are a major trigger for seasickness. Marco summed it up pretty well when he said he was feeling absolutely fine until he went downstairs to fetch his fleece and visit the head (the ship’s toilet), and that’s when it all turned; he suddenly started feeling ill and from that point on, the journey was pretty hard work. He hadn’t taken any pills – contrary to the explicit advice of the captain – and just assumed that he’d be fine, but that isn’t how sailing works; instead, he spent the whole night either on deck or snatching snippets of sleep on the sofa just below deck. Reto and Cordelia were similarly affected and looked pale and unhappy, and out of the passengers, only Stephan and Peta seemed totally unconcerned by the boat’s movement.

I was worried about going below deck, but in the end it was fine. As we yawned our way towards our cabin, I simply got down into our cosy double bed as quickly as I could, and lay down, trying not to think about things too much. After a short burst of feeling a bit weird, Peta just got on with it and soon discovered that she’s completely fine on board a sailing yacht, and before long we’d fallen asleep, lulled by the gentle rolling of the boat in the ocean waves, and suddenly it was morning, and we were anchored just off El Porvenir, with the first passage under our belts.

‘Ugh, that was a rough passage,’ said Cordelia as we blinked our way into the morning light above deck.

‘Blimey, that wasn’t rough, love,’ I thought, though I kept it to myself. Perhaps, after all my paranoia, I wasn’t going to be the one suffering on this voyage; I’d been mentally preparing for a nightmare of hard tacking and severe ocean swells, but I thought it all looked rather pleasant out there as we tucked into breakfast and listened to Jan telling us about the plan for the day. Our mission: to sail to the Cayos Holandeses, the northernmost point of the San Blas archipelago, where paradise would really start.

San Blas (Cayos Holandeses)

Written: 20 March 2014

El Porvenir might be the capital of the San Blas archipelago, but it’s not exactly the most beautiful place in the world; the island is home to an airstrip, a museum, an immigration office and a handful of buildings, and just next door is another island that is so crammed full of houses that they practically spill off the edges and into the ocean. It certainly isn’t one of the idyllic islands that the San Blas is famous for, so although we’d gone to sleep in the ocean swell and had woken up anchored in the San Blas archipelago, as Jan had promised we would, we weren’t in paradise quite yet.

It took four hours of gentle sailing to reach Cayos Holandeses, passing a string of tiny islands on the way, each of them sprouting so many palm trees that from a distance they looked for all the world like upturned scrubbing brushes floating on the waves. Some of them had little huts tucked away beneath the palm fronds, while others were completely deserted, but they were charming, and the only thing missing was sunshine and beautiful blue skies. Unfortunately the weather was rather overcast and a little grey, though this mercifully meant we were comfortable on deck, rather than being burned by the equatorial midday sun. The sailing, too, was easy, because the San Blas is far calmer than the open waters of the Caribbean Sea, as it’s sheltered from the ocean swell by all the islands and reefs that fill the Gulf of San Blas.

Even with overcast skies, the Cayos Holandeses are a slice of paradise. It is, however, not an undiscovered paradise, as we found when we pulled into Swimming Pool anchorage, where we’d hoped to drop anchor for a couple of days. This anchorage, which sits between the islands of Morodup and Banedup, is famous for having wonderfully clear water, and the local Kuna take great pride in keeping the islands tidy and litter-free; Morodup is known by yachties as Barbecue Island, as it’s a perfect spot for a barbie with its luscious golf-course grass, and sand that’s regularly swept clean by the locals. Unfortunately the anchorage was absolutely rammed with yachts when we arrived, and when Jan took The Black Dragonfly into the middle of the throng, he soon realised that it just wasn’t going to be safe to drop anchor this close to all these other boats. ‘We need another plan,’ he said as he swung around and headed back out the way we’d come; apparently at this time of year, quite a few yachts apply to go through the Panama Canal, but as boats are often given passage times a couple of weeks from their application date, quite a few of them decide to spend those weeks moored up in a paradise like Swimming Pool anchorage.

Luckily, just southwest of Morodup and Banedup, Jan found two more tiny little islands where he figured he could drop the anchor, and after some deft manoeuvring, The Black Dragonfly lay anchored in an idyllic sheltered spot, with no other yachts in sight. We had two pristine and totally uninhabited islands to explore, both of them within swimming distance (for strong swimmers like Marco and Stephan, anyway), and after we’d enjoyed a sumptuous tandoori chicken salad on deck, we piled into the dinghy and visited the southernmost island, which we walked around in a handful of minutes, snapping away at the perfect postcard pictures that seem to spring up at every corner when palm trees meet tropical beach.

Night Lights

That night, as we sat on deck after a hearty dinner of beef fajitas, enjoying a gin and tonic in the perfect isolation of our own private anchorage, the ocean put on a show that was completely unexpected. I first came across marine phosphorescence when I sailed the Pacific; sometimes, at night, the yacht’s wake would leave an eerie blue glow in the water, and you could generate a glow yourself by stirring up the water, perhaps by throwing a line into the sea, or by answering the call of nature over the side of the boat. It helped to pass the long hours on night watch, looking for phosphorescence, which is caused by blooms of billions of bioluminescent phytoplankton which produce light when they’re disturbed (which scientists think is a defence mechanism, as nobody wants to eat anything that glows).

But the phosphorescence that we saw over the side of the yacht on our first night in the San Blas was much more sophisticated than a simple glowing wake. In the water we could see alien lifeforms swimming in loops and arcs, leaving bright blue trails of light behind them in psychedelic patterns reminiscent of the spiral imprints left by ancient shells in fossil beds in the desert. They spun and curled beneath us like neon lights in a screensaver, but if we shone a torch on them, the lights disappeared and they looked like nothing more than small fish, flitting around in the torchlight. It seemed that the normal sea life round these parts was swimming through a cloud of bioluminescence, and all we were seeing was the glowing wake left by the darting passage of a fish, or the looping curves of an underwater worm corkscrewing through the shallows. At one time there must have been 40 or 50 glowing Catherine wheels of light around the boat, looking for all the world like stars reflecting in a busy sea, even though the sky was completely overcast. It was simply beautiful, and the display went on for a good hour before slipping gently back into the night.

Exploring the Holandeses

The next day we decided to explore our new neighbourhood, so Peta and I took the yellow plastic kayak that was strapped to the front deck of the yacht, and paddled round our northernmost neighbour. By this time the wind was picking up a bit and the skies were starting to darken, so the first trip against the wind and round the first corner was fairly choppy and involved a few light rain showers, but even in the rain there’s still something perfect about kayaking round a desert island, while the beautiful curves of a 50ft ketch home in and out of view, with palm trees and pristine beaches as their backdrop. We pulled up onto the end of the island and had a quick poke around our very own island paradise, before heading back to The Black Dragonfly to grab our snorkelling gear.

Almost all of the islands in the San Blas have their own underwater reef systems, and indeed it’s these reef systems that create the islands in the first place, as the reefs eventually grow large enough to start silting up with sand, until they eventually stick up above the waves where vegetation can take hold. The best way to explore an island’s reef system is to work out where the current is coming from, and to start swimming into the current; in this way, if you get tired, you can easily drift back to where you started, rather than being carried further and further away from safety. Luckily, this meant we could jump out of the yacht and swim straight over to the island to reach the perfect starting point for an exploration of the reef jutting out of the eastern shore; so Peta and I spent an enjoyable hour floating through the coral canyons, spotting plenty of fish and lots of different formations, from coral fans to brain coral to big stacks of yellow fins. Even though the light wasn’t perfect, it was very enjoyable.

That afternoon, after a lovely lunch of frittata with beetroot salad – I’m sorry to keep mentioning the food, but it really was exceptional – Jan took us in the dinghy to the southern island for a snorkelling trip, where there were plenty of fish just off the pristine beach at the western tip of the island. Our original plan had been to build a fire on that beach and have a bit of a beach party, but the clouds had gathered during the afternoon and they soon put a dampener on that idea, so after the snorkelling we all piled into the dinghy for an exploration of the channels and islands to the west of Swimming Pool anchorage. The islands are all slightly different in character and it’s hard not to keep on taking photographs at every turn. There was one palm tree, hanging over the water, which was particularly photogenic... and which, it turned out, was the perfect height for those so inclined to climb up and hang off upside down, though we settled for having our picture taken while standing underneath.

Further along the island was a group of yacht captains who’d popped over from Swimming Pool anchorage, which was just next door, and while we curled our toes in the sand and took in the view of all the anchored yachts turning in the breeze together, the captains started comparing boat sizes in the way that males the world over are genetically obliged to do. Luckily the rain had other ideas and it soon forced us all back into our respective dinghies, and before long we were back in our 50ft Formosa, enjoying a perfectly cooked meal of salmon fillets in sundried tomatoes, with pasta and fresh green asparagus spears.

But we couldn’t stay here forever, and the conversation soon drifted to the plans for tomorrow, which would involve a short hop south and east to Cayos Coco Banderos, the last stop before the ocean crossing to Colombia.

San Blas (Cayos Coco Banderos)

Written: 22 March 2014

I thought that the Cayos Holandeses were pretty beautiful, but the best was yet to come. Unfortunately, as day four of our trip dawned, the weather that had arrived the night before started to pick up even more (as Jan had warned us it would), and as we dropped anchor and headed south for a two-hour sail towards Cayos Coco Banderos, the seas began to swell. Switzerland is not known for its maritime expertise, so the 3m swell that greeted us was cause for whoops and yells from the rest of the passengers, but Jan and I looked each other in the eye and muttered, ‘Ha, this isn’t a big swell.’ Just in case, I kept my eyes on the horizon and told myself that I’ve been through far worse, which seemed to keep the seasickness at bay.

The increased swell was indicative of a change in the weather, and Jan tactfully pointed out that this didn’t bode terribly well for the ocean crossing to Colombia, which was slated for the following day. We turned east around the western Cayos Coco Banderos, passing to the south of these pretty islands, one of which is known as ‘one-palm island’ because – you guessed it – it’s a desert island with just one palm. The only problem is that in an attempt to stop one-palm island from being washed into the sea, the Kuna have planted a small collection of other palms on the island, so the solitary palm is solitary no more, and instead it has a row of midget palms beside it, like a proud father palm taking his brood for a morning stroll... into the wind, in this case.

We were originally going to drop anchor at the western Cayos Coco Banderos, but a few of us had mentioned that we were really interested in seeing some of the local Kuna people and buying some molas, the colourful textiles that they sell to passing sailors. Ever open to tailoring the trip to suit the passengers, Jan suggested that instead we continue on to the eastern Cayos Coco Banderos, where there’s an inhabited island where molas are on the menu.

What a great move that turned out to be; the eastern Cayos Coco Banderos are an absolute paradise, and they would soon turn into the undisputed highlight of the trip.

The Plate Incident

Jan dropped anchor in the middle of a cluster of three small, palm-fringed islands, one of which had a small thatched hut on it (though it would turn out that this was just a shelter, rather than a full-time Kuna house). There were a few other yachts sharing the shelter, but it wasn’t crowded, which was a relief after finding Swimming Pool anchorage so full. To the north was the inhabited Kuna island, with a handful of larger huts under the trees, and to the northwest was a tiny island with just two palm trees, which we promptly named ‘two-palm island’. It was an idyllic spot.

To get us in the mood for lunch we swam to the nearby island and back, but any pretensions I had of being a good swimmer went out of the window when Holly accidentally dropped a plate out of the galley window. Jan leapt into action, throwing on a mask and fins, and after taking a few deep breaths, he dived off the side and disappeared into the deep blue water. We waited, and waited, and waited, and eventually we heard a splash on the other side of the boat, and there was Jan, plate in hand. The depth gauge read 12.6m; there’s no way I could skin dive down to that depth, and on the way up he’d even had time to rescue a coin that had fallen out of his pocket on the way down. Jan is a fully qualified divemaster, so this kind of thing is pretty everyday to him; to a landlubber like me who has problems duck diving from the surface to a couple of metres down, it’s impressive stuff.

Soon after that we enjoyed the first of many visits by the local Kuna who lived on the island to the north. They sold us beer at a very reasonable US$15 for 24 cans, which went straight into the ice box, and they asked whether we could charge up their mobile phone, which Jan happily agreed to; it’s always good to keep in the good books of the locals when you sail through here so regularly. During our visit they would pop over every now and then to try to sell us fish and more beer, because apart from making and selling molas, bartering with visiting captains is their main source of income.

Two-palm Island

That afternoon, we were stranded on our very own desert island. Two-palm island is just 40 paces long and 32 paces wide, and with one large palm and a smaller, rather battered companion in the middle of the island and precious little else to see – except for the usual collection of flotsam and jetson that you find on absolutely every island in the world – it felt more like a clichéd comic-book desert island than reality. So Jan dropped us off there for an afternoon of snorkelling and relaxing, because we just couldn’t resist.

The current out here nearer to the ocean was pretty strong and Peta wasn’t up for a snorkel anyway, so she sat under the palm tree and read while the rest of us headed off to snorkel round the island. The visibility wasn’t as clear as it had been for the last few days, as the winds were picking up and the sky was bruising, but we spotted a large nurse shark sitting on the bottom, directly below us, and the coral was pretty interesting at the eastern tip of the island. But by far the most entertaining part was being able to photograph ourselves, alone on a tiny spit of sand in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, with water all around and waves never more than a stone’s throw in any direction. It was bizarre and splendid in its isolation, and the mouldering wreck of a large cargo boat on the nearby reef only helped to underline just how fragile I felt, perched on such a tiny dot on the map.

That night, Holly cooked us old clothes, and they tasted divine. Ropa vieja (‘old clothes’) is a traditional Cuban dish made from slow-cooked beef in a tomato-based sauce, and apparently it was what they gave the sailors when they came back from their sea voyages, with them all still dressed up in their old clothes (sailors the world over tend to have a fairly liberal attitude towards clean clothes, as I can attest). There are various other stories about how the dish got its name, but this felt like the most suitable one as we sat there under darkening skies, wondering what the ocean passage was going to be like.

Change of Plan

Luckily, Jan’s main aim on this trip was to make it comfortable and safe for the passengers, and he’d been keeping a close eye on the weather. He contacted his father in Norway to ask him to check out the weather forecast online, as the one Jan was using was by now a week old, and it turned out that the wind was going to pick up even more overnight; although it would calm down the following day, this would mean that the waves would be really bumpy for the ocean crossing, as it takes at least half a day for the waves to calm down once the wind has died. It wasn’t looking good for the open ocean crossing to Cartagena (which was always going to be the hard bit of this trip anyway).

So Jan announced that, instead, we’d have another day in the Cayos Coco Banderos, because this was a lovely anchorage and it made no sense to bash our way through an ocean swell if it was going to calm down the following day. This was great news; rough ocean passages are absolutely no fun at all, and I’d been trying to keep a lid on my feelings, but to be totally honest I was dreading a 40-hour crossing in high winds. But now we had another day to relax, and instead we’d be weighing anchor at 4pm the next day, effectively extending the trip to a seven-day, six-night excursion, with four full days in the San Blas Islands. What a bargain!

That night, as the winds blew outside and the rain squalled around us, we opted to while away the hours by watching one of Jan’s DVDs. There were some technical issues, as Jan’s TV had taken a hit on his Atlantic crossing, when the boat had been leaning hard to port and a wave had broken over the starboard side and into the cabin right where the TV sat. This had turned the bottom strip of the screen into a strange mess of colours and shapes, which looked for all the world like a Jackson Pollock-influenced channel ident, but it was when the bottom third of the screen suddenly went blank and refused to come back that we realised it was going to be a bit of a challenge watching Blood Diamond, the movie that a show of hands had democratically chosen. Still, we managed to piece the plot together from the top two-thirds of the movie, and as we watched Leonardo DiCaprio strut his South African stuff on the (very) small screen, I realised that this was the first film we’d watched in months – since leaving for this trip, in fact. It was a pleasure just to forget about travelling for a couple of hours and sink into Hollywood, if only for the novelty.

Another Day in Paradise

Our bonus day, day five, turned out to be the best of the lot. The winds calmed down, just as Jan had said they would, and the sun came out, so finally the islands came out in resplendent turquoise under blue skies, and we got the paradise photographs that we all wanted. We happily spent the morning snorkelling around the nearest island to our anchorage and exploring the deserted island to the west of us, and then in the afternoon we took the dinghy to the Kuna’s island to check out their molas.

Molas are hand-stitched textiles that are made up of multiple layers, with the layers cut back to create a three-dimensional effect. The subjects are mainly things that the Kuna see in their everyday life – birds, fish, aquatic scenes – or just pretty geometric patterns, and the colours they use are vibrant and joyous. As a memento of a visit to the San Blas, molas are pretty perfect, as they squish into a backpack easily, they’re hard to damage, and they look lovely when put into a frame and hung on the wall back home. I told Peta how many dollars we had to spend, and she spent every single one of them on three lovely molas and a pretty headband, all of them made in the same layered manner.

But even more interesting than the molas were the Kuna women who were selling them. The Kunas wear traditional dress – or, at least, the women do, as the men seem to be happy in the standard trouser-and-shirt uniform – and it’s a wonderful splash of colour and design. They wear hundreds of colourful bracelets on their shins that together look like multicoloured socks, and their skirts and blouses are vibrantly coloured, with molas worn on the front and back of their tops (mola literally means ‘blouse’ in the Kuna language). Add in colourful head scarves and more bracelets on the forearms, and the effect is distinct and invigorating, particularly when you add in their ready smiles.

All good things must come to an end, though, and after we’d explored the Kunas’ perfect paradise island and soaked up our last bit of San Blas sunshine, we returned to The Black Dragonfly to stow all our belongings and get ready for the ocean passage to Cartagena, some 200 nautical miles away in distant Colombia.

San Blas to Cartagena

Written: 24 March 2014

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I do not like ocean passages. Back in 1997, after crossing half the Pacific from New Zealand to the Gambier Islands, I wrote, ‘I don’t regret going. I’ll just never get on an ocean-going yacht again.’ And here I am, on an ocean-going yacht again. What the hell just happened?

Well, the appeal of a trip through the amazing San Blas islands just happened, and the fact is that this time round, I’m not a member of the crew, I’m a passenger. And I’m also drugged up to the gills on the maximum possible dose of seasickness tablets, which I didn’t take in French Polynesia, and I’m also fully aware that it’s when you go below deck that things can start to go wrong, so I’m staying up top as much as I can.

It went well, I have to say, and I didn’t expect to be writing that at the end of this particular journey. The seasickness tablets really worked, and although I still felt pretty uneasy through most of the trip – an ocean-going yacht is not a natural environment for me, however hard I try to think otherwise – I managed to get through it without once heaving over the side. Compared to the weeks of seasickness I endured on the Pacific, it’s been a holiday, and I still can’t quite believe that I escaped unharmed.

It helped that Peta found her sea legs quickly, because that meant at least one of us was able to cope with life on board. It’s always difficult at first, getting used to a yacht’s movements on the ocean, but by the end of the ocean passage she was happily moving about downstairs, without a hint of green about the gills. I had a feeling that she would cope well, as she’s always been fine when everyone else around her has been succumbing to la mal de mer, but you never know until you try it.

A huge factor was that Captain Jan did his best to keep the voyage as smooth as possible, and he did a great job, especially when you consider what the swell could have been. The wind comes from the northeast and we were heading east, so for this last leg across the ocean we were sailing into the wind and into the swell, which is far from the most comfortable approach, but the swell was less than it would have been a day ago, and we made good time. And Holly had prepared all the meals in advance, designing them to fit into bowls that we could eat easily on a heavily leaning yacht, and which could be easily digested and were gentle on the stomach. She even prepared plain rice for anyone who was feeling a bit rough; this turned out to be a great idea, and a surprisingly popular option with some of the more fragile passengers...

But even with this relatively easy sailing, it’s still a huge shock to find out just how difficult life on board the ocean can be. When people look at yachts and imagine the sailing life, they think of being moored in the marina at Monte Carlo, sipping champagne on deck, or dropping anchor amongst the turquoise delights of sheltered coral islands. Most yachties don’t even experience proper ocean crossings, but that’s where the real sailing is, and it’s impossible to imagine what it’s like: you really have to be there.

Take a beautiful yacht like The Black Dragonfly, with all its teak decking and picturesque rigging, and tilt it to one side by something like 30 or 40 degrees. Now take your tilted yacht in both hands and rock it from side to side while bouncing it up and down and tilting it backwards and forwards along the bow line. And now imagine being stuck inside this pretty little yacht for a full night, a full day and another full night, and you’re getting close to the experience of crossing the Caribbean Sea from San Blas to Colombia.

But it’s the sheer amount of effort involved that takes you by surprise. Take a simple task like going to the toilet, and it turns into an epic adventure that will leave your head reeling, and possibly your guts. Just walking down stairs and along a corridor is a lesson in balance that leaves you breathless; trying to sit on a toilet at a 30° angle is seriously hard, and then you find that your body doesn’t like doing its stuff at that angle... and there’s nothing you can do except wait, while the room spins around you and the force of the bow hitting the waves pushes you down into the seat before lifting you up like the crest of a roller-coaster. It leaves you completely drained, in more ways than one.

And what about going to bed? We slept in the aft cabin, where the double bed has the pillows right at the back of the boat and your feet pointing towards the bow, but when the boat is tilted over to starboard at such a steep angle, you can’t sleep like that or the person on the port side will simply crash down into the person on the starboard side. So you have to sleep with your head to port and your feet to starboard, effectively standing up to go to sleep as the world crashes around you. We tried to sleep like that, but we both independently discovered that the best way to cope is to give in to gravity, and each of us curled up at what had become the foot of the bed, in a scrunched up foetal position that took most of the sting out of the boat’s bouncing.

Stretch out this constant strain on your muscles over 40-odd hours, and it gets a bit wearing. It was astounding, then, that we both got a good night’s sleep on the first night, and an even better one on the second night when Jan sailed us into the lee of Isla Barú, some 190 nautical miles from the San Blas and just off the coast to the south of Cartagena. He dropped the anchor in the wee hours and we spent the rest of the night in deep sleep. In the end, we survived well.

The others weren’t so lucky. Cordelia was the first to lose it, pretty soon after we hit the ocean swell, and she sat at the back of the boat, being sick over the side, before going back downstairs where she stayed ever since, avoiding the whole issue by sleeping in her bunk. Marco also lost it over the side pretty early on, and spent the trip eating plain rice and lying on deck, his face wrapped up in a T-shirt to stop the sun from burning. Reto felt really queasy from the off and discovered that standing on the aft deck, holding on to the rear mast, was the best option; he refused to go downstairs, even to check on Cordelia, because he knew that if he went down there, he’d lose grip on his ability to keep food down (and it would turn out he was right). Indeed, the only person (apart from Peta) who coped well was Stephan, who was completely at ease, happily smoking, eating, reading books and generally going about things as if he was on land. Some people just have natural sea legs.

After the ocean passage, the final push up the coast, past the Islas del Rosario and into Cartagena through the Bocachica entrance, was child’s play in comparison. We had to avoid some huge vessels as we joined the shipping lane into port, and there were dolphins jumping in the bay as we sailed in, and tweeting birds landed on the spreaders to welcome us to land. The skyscrapers of the new part of Cartagena faded into view on the horizon, and it wasn’t long before we’d docked and jumped onto land, even though it would still be swaying in our heads for days to come.

And as we hopped off the deck and walked into Colombia, I turned and saw Jan and Holly hugging each other, their first proper Panamanian charter on The Black Dragonfly in the bag. You deserved that moment, guys, because you did an excellent job, and coming from me and my phobias of the sea, that’s praise indeed. It really was an excellent trip... one of the last real adventures, indeed.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 24 March 2014

In the end, we loved Panama. After our early exit from Costa Rica, we landed in the northwest without much of a plan and without any expectations, but Panama has turned out to be one long story of pleasant places, nice people, good food and, to top it off, a bona fide adventure on the high seas. What’s not to like?

True, the sights of Panama are rather more low key than, say, Guatemala or Nicaragua. Bocas del Toro is a pleasant spot, but we’ve visited much more beautiful Caribbean islands on this trip; Boquete is enjoyable, but there’s nothing particularly astonishing there; we didn’t fall for Pedasí in the way we’d hoped we would, but the area is certainly pretty enough to warrant a detour; and the Panama Canal, while utterly unique and a must-see, wasn’t quite as astounding as I’d thought it would be. Only the San Blas archipelago, with its strings of tiny palm-fringed islands, stood out for me as totally unique, and it’s arguably the least Panamanian sight on the list, as the Kuna are effectively an independent nation.

But that’s missing the point of Panama. It’s a mature and relatively well-developed country that’s easy to travel round, but it doesn’t suffer from the rip-off nature of Costa Rica, and this means that simply travelling round the country is a pleasure. You can easily find good food here, which is such a relief after the dreadful cuisine we’ve had to endure on most of our Central American journey, and Panama City was wonderfully cosmopolitan and a welcome sight for those of us who like modern cities. Panamanian public transport is modern (if you ignore the chicken buses that are being phased out) and is good value for money (if you ignore the taxi scammers in the capital), and the shape of the country means you don’t need to backtrack too much to take in the sights.

As a coda to our trip through Central America, Panama did the trick nicely. It’s not one of those countries that I’ll be raving about for years to come, but I’ve come away with some lovely memories, and that’s a darn sight more than I can say about some of the countries I’ve visited.

Further Reading

This story is continued in another of my books, In Search of the Lost City: Travels in Colombia (also available for free from www.moxon.net/ebooks). If you enjoyed this book, you might like to know that there’s a whole series of free books like this available from the same source, covering 25 countries and six continents:

- The Back of Beyond: Travels in Australia

- Into the Deep Blue Sea: Travels in Belize

- A Town Full of Nothing to Do: Travels in Burkina Faso

- In Search of the Lost City: Travels in Colombia

- Tainted by Tourism: Travels in Costa Rica

- A Funny Sort of Socialism: Travels in Cuba

- Snow on the Sun Loungers: Travels in Cyprus

- Love at First Sight: Travels in El Salvador

- Paradise Has Teeth: Travels in French Polynesia

- A Million Mosquitoes Can’t Be Wrong: Travels in the Gambia

- The Road to Jesus: Travels in Ghana

- Stuck on the Gringo Trail: Travels in Guatemala

- Many Ways to Change Your Mind: Travels in India

- Hello Paul, What’s Your Name? Travels in Indonesia

- The Muddy Confluence: Travels in Malaysia

- The Lapping of the Dunes: Travels in Mali

- A World-Class Dive: Travels in Mexico

- Snaking Patterns of Sand: Travels in Morocco

- Roof of the World: Travels in Nepal

- God’s Own Country: Travels in New Zealand

- Poverty and Paradise: Travels in Nicaragua

- Alone on Two-Palm Island: Travels in Panama

- The Head and the Heart: Travels in Senegal

- Serious Fun: Travels in Singapore

- Melted Meccano: Travels in Thailand

If you know someone who might like any of my books, please pass them on; I make no money from this, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading my books and recommending them to their friends. If you’ve enjoyed reading my writing (or even if you haven’t) I’d be delighted if you could sign my Guestbook at www.moxon.net/guestbook – after all, it’s the feedback that makes it all worthwhile. Happy travels!

THE END

Table of Contents

Preface

Bocas del Toro

Boquete

Just Passing Through

Pedasí

Panama City

The Taxi Scam

All Aboard The Black Dragonfly

Portobelo

Portobelo to San Blas

San Blas (Cayos Holandeses)

San Blas (Cayos Coco Banderos)

San Blas to Cartagena

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading

Table of Contents

Preface

Bocas del Toro

Boquete

Just Passing Through

Pedasí

Panama City

The Taxi Scam

All Aboard The Black Dragonfly

Portobelo

Portobelo to San Blas

San Blas (Cayos Holandeses)

San Blas (Cayos Coco Banderos)

San Blas to Cartagena

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading