Three of my kids have joined us in Panama for one week. I'm late late late at writing up a regular blog post, but that's largely because of getting to spend so much time with family. My husband and I came back from Boquete on Monday last week and puttered around, getting ready, and then on Friday, the kids came in.
It's been
go go go ever since. Here is just one of our adventures, a long-anticipated trip to Gatun Lake in Gamboa, where we got to visit islands full of monkeys. It was GREAT! It was super easy travel, and my kids are still raving.
We hired an all-in-one guide (they do their booking through a tour website called Viator).
The guide picked us up at our front door here in Panama City at 8:30, as promised, took us to Gamboa (detouring back and forth across the Centennial Bridge to get a good view of the San Pedro Miguel Locks) and then to our boat, where we boarded right away.
The boat ride to the islands was about 20 minutes, and then we went from island to island, seeing (and feeding as best we could) Titi monkeys and capuchins.
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| Reaching out to a mono titi. |
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| More reaching. |
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Offering a grape to a capuchin.
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| The grape is taken! |
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| Mono Titi licking banana off my daughter's hand. |
From underneath their party high up in the trees, we saw about 30 or 40 howler monkeys, who howled in unison when the boat pilots revved their engines.
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| Howler monkeys, 30 or 40 of them, up in the trees. |
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A capuchin monkey that was darned good at catching
peanuts my daughter threw its way. |
We saw one or two iguanas (one was pretending to be a hood ornament, and the other was propped up like it was preaching a sermon), and we saw grey blobs in the trees that the guide assured us were sloths.
There were a lot of other little boats like ours -- once, I counted 8 of us bumped up against an island together, wheedling the titis to come closer. Then back to port, past giant container ships and dredgers and cruise ships in the canal.
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| Seeing the ships from below is cool. |
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I loved the boat ride.
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We were back at our AirBnB by 12:30, with everyone still gabbing about how great it was.
Back in 2018, my host took me on a monkey island tour and then to see the nearby sloth sanctuary, butterfly tents, and orchid gardens. We didn't get to do any of those add-ons for this trip, which was the only down-side--but I don't think any of my kids minded at all. They didn't know what they'd missed (perhaps wishing they could have seen a sloth from closer up), and we weren't exhausted by the end like some of our other excursions.
This has been one of the few remaining items on my "to see and do in Panama" list, and it was great to share the experience with my family. I'm looking forward to sharing a few more experiences with these folks before they head back northward, and I'm also feeling satisfyingly fulfilled.
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