Your Plan B

I was recently given a tour of the upscale gated community of Altos del Maria by a Panamanian friend and knowledgeable attorney. It took us about an hour, heading west, to reach the turn-off at the Pan-American Highway from Panama City, then another 30 minutes up the road to the subdivision. It is a beautiful drive with breathtaking views on a well maintained road.

Panama is the only place in the world where you can surf good waves in two oceans on the same day. Both the Caribbean and Pacific sides of Panama have year round good weather and it’s not a far drive to the various surf beaches to find the perfect wave.

Volcan is located in the Bugaba District in the Province of Chiriqui, at an altitude that varies between 4,000 to 5000 feet and boasts a comfortable year-round climate which ranges…

The plantain is a very popular food in Panama. It looks like a banana, but if you take a bite of a raw plantain you will know this is something different. Plantains are a member of the banana family and look very similar.

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.