Anna and I went off on our own by bus to a beach called Playa Langosta, on the Caribbean side. Gorgeous, full of local families, but also full of trash. The water was like in the pictures though ... warm and turquoise, with big fun waves. You always have to watch out for big stretches of coral rocks, but aside from that the swimming is sublime. From there, hopped back on the bus to go further, to Portobelo, which was a port town where all the gold left from in the Spanish colonial days. We saw ruins of old forts built in the 1600s, all right on the Caribbean.
The next day we took another bus even further along the coast, and then a boat to an island, Isla Grande. It's a small island with no cars or roads, just a sandy path around the perimeter. On the first day there we had the place basically to ourselves. Some people live there, there are lots of little houses along the path, but many of them are for rent or are weekend houses for people from the city. We stayed at Cabanas Super Jackson, which was clean and run by a really helpful woman named Olympia. Lots of seafood restauarants all serve the same foods. We went to this Jamaican bar painted in blotches of red, green and yellow with a big mural of Bob Marley. There are also a few resorts on the far side of the island. The next day, Saturday, many more people showed up. We spent both days on the beach, a little peninsula of sand jutting out into the sea toward the mainland. Incredible sunsets, gentle waves, warm water, and of course lots and lots of sun. We heard there was a path that would take us to the top of the island, so we asked at our hotel. A little local boy, maybe 9 years old, led us on a pretty intense hike around the whole island to the Bananas resort, where we found the path over the top -- which came out on the other side, right next door to the hotel. Ha.
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