Coconuts and goatboats!

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After Puerto Viejo, we headed down to the next country south called Panama. We waited in the immagration line in the boiling sun for over an hour we were piled onto a mini bus and taken to a river boat. Here we were told though that the boat was full and there were no more till late that afternoon. Somehow within a few minuites we were in another car which took us over a mountain full of banana plantations and finally made it on another boat to the islands off Bocas Del Torro. Bocas Del torro is a group of islands of the caribbean coast. A small boy Migel who was 11 years old saw us looking a little confused on the main island ended up organising in about 2 seconds for a boat to take us over to another island called Bastmentos. Migel was really cute and quite the little ograniser. He jumped on the boat with us and pointed all the intresting things out along the way. It is really amazing how young the kids start trying to earn money over here.

We stayed on Bastimentos for three days, in a little cabin that over looked the water. The town was quite different to any we had experienced. There was only one footpath through the little village of a few hundred people and no road or cars at all. The footpath was lined kids playing cards, marbles and baseball and with little houses with caribbean music blaring from each house creating the atmosphere. Ben made some friends with some local kids who took him fishing off the restaurant wharf.

We hired a kayak and paddled around part of the island. It was fairly shallow reef most of the way which was good for spotting wildlife. We saw a cool white spotted stingray and lots of big red starfish. Most of the island is uninhabited and we found lots of little secluded bays and beaches to explore with the kayak. We even found little waves to catch where we were very close to rolling off onto the reef. It was great fun but Ben never would never admit to enjoying the goat boating experience! For lunch that day we managed to get a coconut down and smash it apart and enjoy the milk and the coconut itself!!..

The next day we ventured over to the other side of the island to the surf beach.. We had to trek though the muddy jungle to get there and when we made it, it started to pour! The beach looked like it would be very beautiful in nice weather. However we still managed to make a fun day out of it building a shelter out of palm leaves to hide from the rain. It cleared up later on for a bit and we mucked around in the water before we had to retreat back to our palm leaf shelter as a storm set in. We headed back though the jungle which had now become almost swamp! It was so hard to not fall over slipping and sliding all over the place.

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