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A rather smooth bus- and a short boat ride brought us to Bocas Town, the main town of the Bocas del Toro archipelago, on Isla Colon. Here we wanted to spend some time to take our Spanish to the next level. We booked five days of Spanish lessons for the next week and another quick water taxi to get us to Isla Bastimentos, another island of the Bocas del Toro.Everything at Isla Bastimentos is a bit more Caribbean than Panamanian, the creole people, the mixed language, the Caribbean food, the very loud music, the speed of life in general. We stayed in a wooden house above the water, which was really perfect, relaxing and had a nice deck with chairs, loungers and a hammock, just the essentials for a nice weekend. Besides being lazy, spotting a dolphin in the bay, gazing at a passing tropical rain shower and reading our books at our beautiful cabana above the water, we easily spent a few days walking around and visiting a jungle lodge on the island. <br style="color: font-family: arial, helvetica, clean,
sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /> The jungle lodge was clearly a dream becoming reality for Henry and Margaret, the owners. We walked through the jungle, looking for tiny frogs, beautiful tropical flowers and cacao plants with their flowers and fruits. We got to taste the real, pure, cacao paste and we had a beautiful lunch at the lodge, while watching a sloth with baby slowly crawl down from a tree next to the lodge and back up. Bocas Town is the main town of the archipelago, with ships and small boats whizzing around the island, which after the small town of Bastimentos is much busier. There are a lot of places to drink or dine, to organise tours or diving, there is good wifi everywhere and it is also nice to be able to do some shopping (for food) and get our laundry done. Again we have a great place to stay, a spacious apartment with a balcony to live, do our homework, and just prepare some food on our own,
not needing to go out for diner every night. Here we suddenly realised that we already have been travelling for 50 days now and it feels good to spend some more time in one place.Every day we attended a few hours of Spanish lessons. We feel inspired and committed but also confused and frustrated by the difficulties of the different past tenses and grammar. It feels good to do this because we really want to spend much more time in Central- and South-America, being able to have proper conversations with the local people. We also had enough time in between to go diving, have lunch at the beach or even on one of the other islands close by and at the end of the week we rented bicycles and went to the beach. The diving was at first not very interesting but the second day we went to a remote site called Tiger Rock and this was much better. During the boat ride back we saw another sloth and a
few dolphins accompanied us for a bit, while we were speeding through the mangroves. Bocas is a very easy going place and we feel perfectly at home although after about 12 days on these islands it will be time to move on. On our way to Nicaragua (via Costa Rica)!
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