Leaving Bocas Del Toro

I’m sad to be leaving Bocas Del Toro.
It would be great to spend more time at this little island paradise.
If we spent more time here, we’d love to get to know Claudio better (the owner of Hotel Angela), we would be meeting more people and shutting down the bar Toro Loco more frequently, Carrie would take Thai cooking lessons from the lady who owns the Thai restaurant above Starfleet SCUBA (where we never got to eat because we didn’t know they were only open for dinner and kept trying to go there for lunch – but it has an amazing reputation).
All of these would be part of the unique life we would experience on this tropical island that, while touristy, still seems to retain much of it’s local flavor and culture.
Bocas Del Toro will always be the place we got to do our first open water SCUBA, the place we met Kristyn and Dax, and the place where (nearly four weeks into traveling,) we finally started feeling like it was going to be alright to travel the world for a year or two.
I know mentally that there are nice places to be and that getting through the rough spots is part of the journey, but it was nice to have gotten through some rough spots and to arrive somewhere we felt like we really wanted to stay.

So why didn’t we just stay in Bocas Del Toro for a little while?
Some of the decisions that Carrie and I end up making (climbing Kilimanjaro being the biggest example) are based on small miscommunications. In other words, we are leaving Bocas Del Toro based on each of us being too nice.
These miscommunications are actually good miscomunications because they happen due to us trying to be courteous to the other person. Carrie called to book our flight for two days later (the 30th – today), and I took that to mean that she wanted to leave Bocas on the 30th, forgetting that we had had a conversation about rescheduling our flight and then deciding what we wanted to do. So I called the car rental company, and our friend we’re staying with outside of Panama City, and told them we’d be arriving on the 30th.
The phone conversation with the car rental company was a funny experience in itself – I actually had to talk with 5 different people just to rent a car – but I’ll tell that story some other time.
Had we not miscommunicated, I’d probably be writing this from an apartment overlooking the water, which we would have rented for at least a week, instead of from an airplane somewhere over Panama. Oh well.
Moral of the story, if you get to Bocas del Toro, and you can make it work, plan to stay some time extra. Even if you don’t like Bocas, there is plenty of Island to explore outside of Bocas, and several other islands that we never even made it to, but would like to in the future. Kristyn even told us about a caving experience that we HAD to do before leaving, but it was on Bastimento (a different island), and we missed the experience this time around.
So we’re sad to be leaving Bocas del Toro. It will be on our list of places we’d like to return to for SCUBA, relaxation, and possible to have an apartment, condo, or to go on vacation.
But we’re also excited to see the Panama Canal and visit our friend Dan outside Panama City in Playa Coronado.

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