Theoretically, you need a good few days in Bocas del Toro, if not a few weeks. You’re meant to bum around and lie on beaches and do some snorkelling and drink cocktails and stuff. All good fun, but we didn’t have very long there, and anyway it was properly raining for much of the time. So we had to limit ourselves.
In fact, the boat ride out to Isla Colon, home to Bocas town, was beautiful. It’s an incredibly picturesque trip with the stunning green jungles of the islands framing the horizon. Lasts about half an hour, too, which just stops short of the time that you’d get well and truly sick of the puffy life jacket you have to wear. Odd, that, in this part of the world.
So we chose to go to the other side of the island, to Playa Drago. It was supposed to be quite quiet and chilled out and worth a visit, so off we went in a taxi over the bumpy but apparently much improved road through the jungle. When we arrived, we were surprised. The sand was white and lovely and fringed with palm trees and so on, but it wasn’t really a beach. More of a shore, if you see what I mean: about three feet of sand. There was nothing really much in the way of waves, either, so it was more like a huge lake than an ocean. In fact, Lake Nicaragua was more like the sea than this.
So we decided to walk along the shore and see if it widened out at any point. Well, it didn’t, but the walk was beautiful and peaceful, and before we knew it we were on Starfish Beach, so called because all of a sudden we found that our wading took us into an area where we were picking our way among hundreds of huge starfish in the water. The colours of these creatures were stunning, and the water was so incredibly clear that we got an amazing view of them. The photo, obviously, is taken through the water.
So we had a nice peaceful few hours on the sand, reading and snoozing and chilling. I think there are probably much better beaches around the islands, but if you’re in a hurry and want to stay on Isla Colon this is definitely worth seeing.
Sophie Carville
