Bocas del Toro Province, Panama – David to Changuinola

by TomBel on May.21, 2009, under car trips, Panama, Travel Style & Interests

Panama has come to prominence as tourist destination only over the past few years. The Canal, the Kuna archipelago of San Blas, the Pacific Coast west of Panama City and the islands of Bocas del Toro lure the most overseas visitors. Much fewer arrivals sees the Chriqui Province in far western Panama and even less so the mainland part of the Bocas del Toro Province. Almost all that do make it to this part of Panama travel here to visit Boquete, a small pictoresque town nestled in an extinct crater of Vulcan Baru, Panama’s highest mountain, or pass through the Pacific side of Chiriqui province on their way to or from Costa Rica. Yet, there is more to this part of Panama and some of the least visited is the part that lies on its Caribbean side. It only takes about four hours to drive from David, Panama’s second largest city and Chiriqui’s capital, on the Pacific side to Changuinola on the Caribbean side, if one wants to drive right through, but why bother. Separated by Panama’s highest mountains, Chiriqui and Bocas del Toro provinces are home to spectacular rain forest and the scenery on this trans-provincial traverse is grand. The drive across the Cordillera Central that separates the northern and southern watersheds, drained by some of Panama’s longest rivers, offers great views and sweeping vistas of lush tropical greenery and a glimpse of lifestyle of the indigenous tribes. Once you climb some 40 miles up the Cordillera on the Chiriqui – Chiriqui Grande road, a fine views of the Golfo de Chiriqui opens up. Memorable is the descent through a lush cloud forest of the Bosque Protector Palo Seco, covering more than 160,000 hectares, set high in the Talamanca range, teeming in monkeys, sloth, armadillos and a great bird-life.

Bocas del Toro province

In Almirante, a jumping-off point for the Bocas del Toro archipelago, if the light is right, you may catch a glimpse of a picturesque canal settlement. So it may seem for a moment, but quickly the undeniable ambiance of board-and-tin hovels, a mixture of squalor and romace, though more of poverty-stricken Chiquita banana port town creeps in. Indeed most of what one can see around this township are banana trees and most residents are indeed in the banana business, for the most part poor folk who toil the endless stretches of banana plantations in the vicinity and in spots from here on to Changuinola.

Almirante, Bocas del Toro

Before one nears the one lane decrepit iron bridge across Rio Teribe and enters the uninspiring, one long-street town of Changuinola, one passes by a few of Nobe-Bugle settlements. Their simple houses on stilts and roofed with thatch lay scattered on the doorstep of a gorgeous virgin rain forest that stretches into the distant Parque Internacional La Amistad on the high slopes of the Talamanca and Central Mountain Ranges on one side and the simmering islands amidst turquoise blue waters of the Bocas del Toro on the other. While most tourists never make it up this way, the route is a pleasant one and offers three things to do – to continue on through the back door to enter Costa Rica, take a ferry to the Bocas, or, and this is perhaps the best reason for coming to this remote part of panama, and that is to visit the the Naso Indians, better known in Panama as the Teribe or Naso-Teribe.