After speaking to a few other travellers/holiday makers on Boca Brava we decided to change our plans and go to the nearby mountain town of Boquete. Boquete is rated as one of the best places to retire in the world due to its perfect climate and wonderful mountains and therefore it is full of Americans - just going to a bakery to people watch is an attraction on its own! We were given a lift some of the way to Boquete by a German couple, on their honeymoon, who h...

On the 8th August we crossed from Panama's North coast to its southern coast and to an undeveloped archipelago which included the island Boca Brava where we stayed. The location was beautiful and quiet and was very different to Bocas del Toro with its parties and mass tourism. When we set off we thought we might have to get a taxi part of the way but were relieved to find that local transport (2 boats and 4 buses) took us the whole way in a comfortable 7 hours. ...

Bocas del Toro was to be our first destination in Panama, our seventh and final country in Central America. After an uneventful bus journey to the border, we were greeted by a rather odd border crossing procedure. We were told by a man hanging around the migration office on the Costa Rica side that we needed to pay to leave and we needed to do this in a shop down the road. We didn't believe him as there was no mention of this in trusty Lonely Planet, and it...

From Tortuguero, we had a rather long day of travelling although the distance we travelled wasn't actually that far. We caught the boat back along the canal (no thunderstorm this time) then four buses to get us to Cahuita, further down the Caribbean coast. We met a family with a five year old boy doing the same journey and couldn't believe how well behaved he was considering we spent eight hours travelling! Fortunately when we arrived in Cahuita, our first choic...

After failing to see nesting turtles in El Salvador and Nicaragua we decided to head to a town called Tortuguero or 'Turtle Place'. We had to cross from the Pacific to the Caribbean Coast to get there so we spent a night in the capital, San José, on route. We hadn't heard anything good about the city so we weren't expecting much but were pleasantly surprised by the area around the University, which was where we were staying. The area had a lot of energy and we e...