A trip to San Blas

This weekend I took a trip to the islands of San Blas. The San Blas islands are beautiful remote desert islands on the Caribbean side of Panama. Despite being ¨remote¨ the actual trip only took about 4 hours as Panama has recently built a road (an incredibly curvy road) to the islands. Before the only practical way to get to the islands was to the fly there. The islands are home to an indigenous people, the Kuna, who after a revolution in 1925 managed to achieve a fair amount of autonomy.

Getting there turned out to be filled with excitement as our 12 foot long motorboat had its outboard motor fall off, ran out of gas, and ran into a concrete dock dropping off a passenger on a different island! (one of the crazier boat trips I have been on … except for some sailing shenanigans). I feel kind of lucky that we weren´t stranded in between islands for hours. Luckily, motor was tied by ropes to the boat so when it fell off it didn´t sink and the driver and the guide were able to pull it back on to the boat before the engine flooded. We were similarly lucky that when we ran out of gas we were close enough to an island that someone was able to canoe out to us with a 2 liter bottle filled with gas.

The island itself was incredibly beautiful and picturesque. This was the first time I´d ever been to such a tropical beach and it lived up to my expectations.

http://www.wallpaperweb.org/wallpaper/nature/1440x1080/Los_Grillos_Islands_San_Blas_Archipelago_Panama.jpg

I found it incredibly relaxing. There was nothing to do but hangout on the beach all day, either in a hammock or in the sand (in the two days I read about 500 pages). The beach itself was relatively deserted with only a couple of people on it. Each day I took a side snorkeling trip and saw a sunken boat with some colorful fish and a bunch of giant starfish. The lodge was a little rustic, the floor was sand, but I was perfectly fine with that. For food I ate chicken, noodles, rice, crab, pineapple, coconut and lobster.

In sum it was a great trip.