Our trip began in late January of 2013, with a flight from Newark to Panama City, where we met March and Steph. The next day, we took a ferry ride to Contadora Island, in the Archipelago de las Perlas (Pearl Islands), an archipelago of 103 islands about 40 miles offshore in the Gulf of Panama. The Panama City skyline was incredible to view from the ferry, as we navigated among the hundreds of tankers and container ships waiting to traverse the Panama Canal.
During our stay on Contadora Island, we hired a boat to take us snorkeling and exploring some of the nearby islands. This photo was taken on an uninhabited little island called Mogo Mogo, where one season of “Survivor” was filmed several years ago. We had the entire island and beach to ourselves.
After three days in the Pearl Islands, we flew back to the mainland on a puddle jumper and spent one more night in Panama City at a little B&B before flying to the city of David near the Costa Rican border, where we rented a car and headed north to the Volcan Baru region, an 11,000′ extinct volcano surrounded by rich farmland, coffee plantations and stunning scenery.
Volcan Baru lies along the cordillera, the mountain ridge that runs down the center of Panama and Costa Rica. We spent one night in the upscale village of Boquete (alt. ~3,900′), on the east side of the volcano, then traveled to another little guest house in the Cerro Punta area on the west side. This region is known as the breadbasket of Panama, where most of the produce and much of the livestock industry lives. This area is also home to 28 species of hummingbirds.
We took a wonderful (but very wet) hike through the tropical rain forest north of Cerro Punta, in the Amistad Park, a gigantic, roadless jungle that spans the Panama/Costa Rica border and stretches from the cordillera to the Caribbean.
To be continued…