Bocas Del Toro Burgers

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After leaving Tortuguero, we hopped a bus down to Puerto Viejo and spent a couple days here dodging drug dealers and other equally repulsive lowlifes such as bad smelling hippies hawking necklaces. We got out of there pretty quickly.

We crossed the border into Panama across a rickity old train bridge (pictured) which was fun. It reminded me of the illegal bridge crossing that must be done after rafting the upper Animas, but Ten High was not involved. Panama has been great! Nice people, cheap food, the best beer so far (Panama cerveza its called), and incredible islands.

We took a small boat out to the large island of Bocas Del Toro on the caribbean side of Panama. It is part of a large archipeligo of beautiful and remote islands. Liz and I set up shop in a fantastic little hospedaje that we thought was a great find. We found out at about 10 that night that it was across the street from the only open air nightclub in Bocas. When we mentioned it to the little guy who was cleaning our room, he said that if we are awoken by the music, we should just go across the street and dance until it stops. Smart little guy. We met a really great mormon couple from DC and spent some time with them while we were there. They were very funny but had a really strange habit of repeatedly kissing each other and baby talking while you were speaking to them. Then would ask you to repeat what you said. It was seriously something straight out of a Seinfeld episode (a la the episode were everyone uses silverware to eat candy bars, cookies, and everything else...Have you all gone mad???).

We took a boat tour of the islands the next day to snorkel a few different spots. Met more great folks on the tour from Holland and the UK. We stopped at Zapatilla island for a couple of hours of exploring and snorkelling. The island is completely desserted and has been used to film Survivor episodes. I dont know how they edited out the boat highway that runs next to the island, but I am guessing that would have killed all credibility. We saw a couple more reefs, got stung by some jellyfish, and called it a day.

After being exhausted from all the hard work of touring the day before we decided to spend our next day on the beach. We took a boat across to Bastimento Island and set out on a trek across the island to Red Frog Beach. It was a really beautiful hike and we came across another incredible beach called Wizard beach, that was empty. On the way to red frog we finally spotted a poison dart frog who was nice enough to stop and pose for the camera. It was 190 degrees and 400% humidity in the jungle, so as soon as we found the beach we hit the water. We have found in this early marital experiment that the inverse correlation between heat and Liz´s attitude is statistically significant. We are therefore leaving the tropics on a smoker to Ecuador asap. Our final carribean beach turned out to be the most beautiful. There are no roads to Red Frog so it was empty except for a bar (a guy with a cooler) and a volleyball net. It was a perfect place to swim and spend the afternoon. Little guys would offer to show you the red frogs that they had captured for payment. Our frog captor asked for dinero, but I declined on principal, so he settled for 3 galletas (cookies) instead. He seemed happier with cookies than he would have been with money.

We headed back to our hotel to catch a little bit of the Broncos game at the local bbq and football shack. That was fun. We made some new pals after meeting some local kids in the park with whom Liz compared scars. She won; none of them could beat a broken pinky story. She also had to explain to a group of kids that a little girl with purple lips was not diseased but that she had just eaten a popsicle. Crazy niños.

Thats it from Bocas...its off to Panama City to get ready to leave this continent and head for the mountains of Ecuador.

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Photos

Survivor Island
I guess an American Survivor as well as the Russian Survivor and maybe even the Latvian Survivor show were filmed here.

Somebody found a couple of friends
Some sort of Mastiff!

Dolphin Bay
Do you know ze dolphin? Does he call you at home? Do you have a dorsal fin!!??

Mmm...Panama beach
and Panama beer! How´s work?

The elusive poison dart frog
This one was of the orange variety. We were looking for red but only succeeded by giving a kid some cookies to see his.

Red Frog Beach
Best beach so far...we spent a long time here and burnt ourselves. If they served Painkiller´s like in the British Virgin Islands here this place would beat out the Soggy Dollar.

Pondering life
Believe it or not this is a great way to sort out your future plans

Comments

[CSM]

Skizards
Love those cookie-stealing lizards!!

[SheTorg]

\"I guess I have a lot of things to ponder.\"
So while you were pondering life under the leaf umbrella, did you two decide that there was more to it than being really, really ridiculously good looking? : )