Planning a trip to Panama City was a bit like doing a jigsaw; post pandemic, most tourist attractions are only open a few days a week and putting together an itinerary which incorporated everything I wanted to do was fiddly. Then I caught Covid and we had to change all our flights. The result –…

Today is the highlight of my trip and it doesn’t disappoint; we are doing a partial transit of the Panama Canal. It’s a southbound transit – in general, ships travel northbound through the locks north in the morning and south in the afternoon – so we are picked up by a minibus around midday. First,…

Today is our last day on Bocas del Toro – the question is how to fill it? Our flight isn’t until 5.45 pm, but the somewhat chaotic nature of public transport here means we don’t want to risk going too far and getting stuck. We decide to take a bus into town, and from there…

Last night was not great; the old man’s wriggling kept making the bed shake (not exactly what one has in mind vis a vis their husband making the earth move!) That, plus the noise from the a/c make sleep impossible. At 5.30 I get up, douse myself with insect repellent, fight my way through the…

We wake up at – who knows? My iPhone is struggling to work out where the f*** we are and keeps randomly swapping between Panamanian and Costa Rican time. My watch is Bluetoothed to my phone, so the only way of finding out the time is googling ‘What time is it in Panama’? No matter,…

Today we’re (kind of) back on track as we’re taking our original flight to Bocas del Toro; a group of Caribbean islands just off the Panamanian coast. We had originally planned to return from there to San José by a couple of bus rides to keep costs down. But as we have only spent one…

Panama Day 1 – Panama City 1st February 2022 Today, four days later than planned, we are finally leaving Costa Rica; our next destination – Panama City. I can remember learning about the building of the Panama Canal at school (a long time ago) so am very excited to be visiting this engineering Wonder of…