Following our sea turtle adventure in Parismina, we continued southward to Panama! After a long day of travel, we reached the border on our bus and spent close to an hour moving the group over the border into Panama. The border was literally an old train bridge with small wooden boards for people to walk over.
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The bridge we used to cross the border into Panama
Photo courtesy of Google |
Once we all got across the border (along with our bus), we drove for about 45 minutes to a port town in the Northeast corner of the country. As we were driving through the countryside, it was interesting to draw comparisons between Panama and Costa Rica. The mountains of Panama were not severely deforested like those of Costa Rica. I'm assuming it's because they don't have as much of a history with agriculture as Costa Rica. It was so much prettier to drive through the mountains of Panama - more trees to look at :)
Once we arrived at a small port town, which would be where we caught some boats over to the island where we would be staying. The name of the province we were in, which I forgot to mention earlier, is Bocas del Toro (mouth of the bull). We were staying on an island in the Archipelago de Bocas del Toro. We specifically stayed on Isla Colón.
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Archipiélago de Bocas del Toro. We stayed on Isla Colón (the big one on the left).
Photo courtesy of Google. |
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| Loading into the boats! |
It was a pretty long boat ride from the port to Isla Colón, but it was so beautiful. The wide open ocean, beautiful scenery to look at - absolutely breathtaking.
So our home for the 3 or 4 days we were there was a cute little beach house type place! It was super cute and it was so fun to have an entire house to ourselves. The house was about a ten-minute walk to the restaurant where most of our activities and meals took place.
Minus the first day (spent doing species reports), we spent just about our entire time in Panama snorkeling around the islands. We had some lectures (of course) on marine diversity and bats. While snorkeling, we saw so many fish and corals and it was really just amazing! I don't think any words could describe how great of an experience that was. I don't particularly enjoy swimming that much, but I had so much fun! One entire day was devoted to snorkeling. We had lunch at this really cute restaurant right over a small reef! It was super cool to just sit on the dock, eat lunch, and see all of the fish swim underneath you.
One afternoon, we took a boat ride out to "bird island," which is where birds nest offshore. There were hundreds of brown boobies and red-billed tropicbirds flying around. That island was so pretty and the birds were amazing!
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| Bird Island |
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| Red-billed Tropicbird |
The following day was our last in Panama, and so we spent the morning snorkeling some more, and then headed into town for lunch and the afternoon. The town is called Bocas del Toro, and is actually the capital of the province. It was a really cute town, with some really good restaurants, too! A few of us went out to a vegetarian place, which sold pizzas and sandwiches and all of that. I must say, their food was amazing! We spent the next hour or so doing some shopping in town before we were meeting the rest of the group to go to a bat cave! This was super cool, as the bat cave is actually a religious site as well as being important biologically for housing numerous species of bats.
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| Entrance to the bat cave |
There was a small stream that ran through the bat cave, however, there was one part of the bat cave got rather deep. For a handful of us, "deep" meant mid-waist. So some of us got a tad bit wet....
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