EA Editors

Frommer’s calls Coiba Island “one of the 500 places to see before they disappear”. The uninhabited Coiba National Park (Nacional Parque Coiba) is 80% ocean and contains the largest coral reef in the eastern Pacific. The park is made up of 38 islands 30 miles off the Pacific coast of Panama in the Chiriqui Bay, including Coiba Island, the largest island in Central America with 503 square kilometers (194 square miles).

“I had an incredibly enriching learning experience, but I also feared that we might be objectifying and exploiting the lives and history of the Embera people." This is some of the feedback that Anne Gordon de Barrigón received after she led a recent tour deep into the jungle to visit an indigenous Embera tribe. As the owner of a tour company in Panama, it's a question she must consider often.

Like many twenty-somethings of my generation, I fantasized about traveling the world, living abroad in exotic locations – fearing the concept of feeling tied down. Freedom is the ultimate commodity,…