Golfo de Chiriqui

This place was referred to as the gem of the Chiriqui region by our guidebook, so we had to give it a try.


From David, we got a bus to the turn-off to Horconcitos. We were waiting for a pickup taxi, along with several other people, when a woman in a bright yellow pickup stopped. It wasn't an actual taxi; the woman driving seemed to be there to give some fellow locals a lift. But she asked us if we wanted to pay $15 for the ride we needed. Our guidebook said the journey would cost $15-20, and the guidebook prices are always lower than the current prices. So we took her up on her offer. We hopped into the back with our backpacks and three other blokes, and we were off.


She thought we were mental - I suppose we were grinning rather maniacally...
All the other passengers got dropped off in nearby Horconcitos, where some guy put more petrol into the truck. We were disconcerted to see him suck on the tube to get the petrol flowing from a drum into the tank, but he seemed to know what he was doing. Our driver invited us to move into the cab of the truck, and she found it humorous (or perhaps amusingly stupid?) that we chose the open air in the back of the truck. We drove for a wee while along a gravel road, past open spaces and bemused cows. Then we arrived at the dock in Boca Chica, just 200 metres away from Isla Boca Brava.

We then negotiated with a 12-year-old lad to boat us to the island. He wanted $2 each, but we only had $3,85 in change. Luckily he took it! We wondered if he went rather slowly just to make the fare seem more reasonable. We pulled up to the dock for the only hotel on the island, and we were thrilled to see lots of little crabs at the water's edge. We liked the place already!

We walked up and up to the main building and found a room available. After some very refreshing ice cream, we rented a double kayak and set off for a few hours. We stopped at three beaches on nearby islands and were especially thrilled with the first one. There were millions of hermit crabs as well as regular crabs; as we neared them, the hermit crabs crawled into their shells, and the regular crabs scarpered into their sand holes. They were genius. Chris spotted a gorgeous, stripey iguana on the beach; he looked lazy but ran away quickly enough when we got close. Chris also spotted a lovey bird of prey; we're not sure what kind of bird it was, but it had lovely spots on its belly and underneath its wings. I was enjoying walking along the lovely, soft sand sans shoes until I noticed more and more worms in the wee rivulets of water we were walking through. Plus there were loads of little snails in there, spiders sneaking about, and some freaky-looking bugs crawling all over the rocks we passed. I was glad to get back to the kayak and put my shoes back on!


We then went to two other beaches. One seemed to have only the freaky-looking bugs and large snails, so we didn't stay long. The other had loads of gorgeous rocks of every colour. It also had loads of those freaky-looking bugs, so we didn't stay terribly long there either. We went back to the first beach and saw the spotty bird of prey hanging out on the sand. We let the waves take us up to the sand, and we stayed a wee while to see what the bird would get up to...not much. The stripey lizard was nowhere to be seen.


We got back to the hotel and were happy to rinse off all the sand and muck we'd accumulated, then we had a surprisingly nice dinner in the hotel restaurant. We ate on the top story with gorgeous views of the surrounding islands as the sun slowly set.