Isla Bastimentos - Part 1 ;)

So we are now on Isla Bastimentos at a nice little Airbnb run by a friendly Colombian lady and her English husband and their daughter.  The Airbnb has several little bungalow type cabins.  We're staying in the largest one in the upstairs space nicknamed "the attic."  Don't let the name fool you though; it is quite spacious in our upstairs spot.  We also have access to a shared kitchen (the stove is a tad annoying in that the the flame will blow out randomly when you're trying to cook).

Isla Bastimentos is one of the islands in the Bocas Del Toro province on the Caribbean side of Panama near the Costa Rica/Panama border.  We've been here for almost a week now. It is very very tropical here.  Chet kept laughing at me on the drive from San Jose because I kept taking pictures out the bus window.  I've never been in a tropical jungle before so it's still a novelty.   The jungle is crazy. So many critters and plants. There are red frogs here that emit a poison if eaten by a predator.  At night and during rainstorms, the red frogs start up a chorus of ribbiting.  There are all sorts of geckos and lizards here.  The geckos are funny; they make a sort of chirping/laughing sound at night.  And then there are so many types of birds adding to the cacophony of jungle noise.  There's some sort of mourning dove; then a bird similar to red-winged blackbirds except when it flies it looks like it has a little red cape instead of just small red patches; also little birds Wyatt calls Papaya birds; roosters and chickens; and a bird that looks like a toucan but doesn't have the giant beak...just a slender long beak instead.  Adding to all that noise is the comings and goings of motor boats to the island.  It has rained everyday we've been here, mostly just for an hour or two and then it clears up and gets really hot and humid.  Some nights it pours, creating a deafening noise against our tin roof.  I've gotten really good at sleeping with earplugs in.  ;)

Red frog on Isla Bastimentos. Photo courtesy of Wyatt Dooley.

We've done quite a bit in the week we've been here.  The first full day here we decided to check out the island we're staying on, get our bearings so to speak.  We had heard about a cocoa/coffee farm on the hill outside of town, so we made our way up there.  Very cool spot; they make amazing drinks there with freshly roasted cocoa and fresh coconut milk.  We saw a sign up there pointing to a trail for "Wizard Beach", which we were planning to make our next destination.  So...we followed the sign.  Ay ay ay!  By far, the muddiest hike I've ever been on.  It had rained that night before and that morning, so the trail was freshly saturated with water.  It took us a good half hour of slipping and sliding to get to the beach.  I think at some point all three of us had individually thought of turning back.  But, we persevered and made it to Playa Wizard.  We were all glad we made it too.  The beach is a beautiful, mostly deserted stretch of Caribbean beach, something you'd see in Pirates of the Caribbean.  Wyatt said it's cool surfing there, looking back at the shore with pure jungle reaching down to the sand.  We took a shorter path back into town.  By then, we had learned how to navigate the trail and made it back without too much mud getting everywhere.

Karen and Chet during the muddy hike.  Note the extremely muddy feet and that Karen doesn't know how to smile with her mouth shut.

Chet at Playa Wizard.

The next day we spent in Bocas town on Isla Colon, one of the nearby islands, in search of surfboards for the guys.  They didn't bring boards because it was prohibitively expensive to fly with them through United Airlines ($200 per board!!!).  For that price, they decided they could buy them down here.  Bocas was very hot and muggy as we hiked to literally every surf shop and hostel in town asking if anyone was leaving and wanted to sell a board.  On our jaunt about, we did a whole tour of the town, sweating profusely the entire time.  Boards for tall people were definitely a hard thing to find in this town (Chet and Wyatt are both over 6 feet tall).  After trudging back and forth between spots and negotiating deals, two boards and a board bag were finally purchased..and Karen's blood sugar level had dropped dangerously low.

The next couple days were spent lounging in hammocks, reading, and hanging out.  One day was particularly frustrating: we ran out of propane, my tablet needing to be reset, and the power went out.  We ran out of gas while in the middle of cooking potatoes for breakfast.  We were told the cleaning lady would come later and bring new gas.  And we waited and waited, finally realizing that more propane was not coming anytime soon (island time) most likely because it was Sunday.  We had stocked up on food, but we didn't really have any food that didn't need to be cooked first.  Starving and ready to eat anything in sight, we headed out to get food in town.  We were pointed to a spot called "Chavela's", run by a Swiss guy and his business partner (maybe girlfriend?) that only opened last week.  Ohmygoodness!!!  Such good food!  We had a recommendation to get the Jerk Chicken and to split it because they give you lots of food. Between the three of us for a total of $10, we split two plates of Jerk Chicken and were completely satisfied.  The Jerk Chicken is marinated and served next to a heaping mound of coconut rice, fried green plantains, tropical slaw, and a spicy tropical hot sauce.  We went back there for dinner last night and will probably return several more times in the next two weeks.  We eventually got gas the next afternoon.

Yesterday was fun.  Chet and I rented a double kayak ($2.50 per hour!) and paddled around the little bay area near where we are staying.  The place we rented a kayak only had one double kayak so Wyatt set out to rent a kayak somewhere else in town.  As Chet and I were paddling out (we were going to meet Wyatt on the water), we hear a shout from the dock and see Wyatt's tall skinny silhouette. Heading back to the dock, Wyatt told us his story.  "Dude, the other guy tried to burn me.  He said $10 for the day.  And I asked how about for an hour...and he thought about it and said $10."  We were only going out for an hour or two, so this was not a good deal, but would have been if we wanted to go all day.  Semi-disgruntled, he headed back to our place to hang out while Chet and I continued on with our voyage.

 The guy who rented us the kayak said that there was good kayaking across the way next to the other island, Isla Solarte, about a 20 minute paddle away.  We decided to point our bow that way and check it out.  After a 20 minute (almost exactly) struggle through the wind, boat wakes, and kinda choppy water, we made it.  I've never been kayaking on the sea and, I'm not going to lie, was a bit nervous with the swell in the water.  I was especially worried about getting swamped since the drain hole towards the back of the kayak didn't have a plug in it.  Once we made it to the other island, we found the water there was too rough for any snorkeling and we soon high tailed it out.  We decided to check out another reef that we had seen breaking from our place up on Isla Bastimentos.  (Surf lesson of the day: A reef break is where the water breaks into waves over a shallow reef and a beach break is where the waves break onto a beach).  There was a bunch of reef before the waves broke, so we hung out there, taking turns snorkeling and staying with the kayak. It was pretty awesome.  Chet said the reef is a bit bleached out because it is stressed, most likely due to the boats going to and fro right over it.  I've never been snorkeling before, so again I was a bit nervous, but it was sooo cool once you get in the water!  We saw a bunch of cool fish and coral and these big sponges that look like tall woven baskets just set on the reef.  Wyatt let us borrow his GoPro camera which is waterproof and takes really good pictures, hence the pictures below.  Hopefully we'll go do some other snorkeling soon; there's supposed to be some cool spots around.

Brain coral.

Cool little fish.

Basket-like sponge.

Video of snorkeling

Today Wyatt and I (Chet) went surfing at a spot called Carenaros. It is a rocky/reef break off of Isla Carenero, about a 5 minute boat ride ($4 each way) from Bastimentos. The surf was super fun. Left handers peeling in like a machine. We surfed for almost 5 hours! We stayed out so long partly because we had to wait for a boat to come by so we could get a ride back but also because we kept paddling out for one more. We surfed the outside break most of the time. It wasn't as clean but it was way less crowded. Towards the end of the session we moved to the inside and picked off a few killer ones. At that point I was slowing down considerably and (despite the 80+ degree water) was beginning to get cold. We finally flagged down a boat and got back to our place just as Karen was cooking lunch. perfect timing :).

Cheers!

Write again soon!
Love,
Karen and Chet