Quick Summary: About Us and Where We Went

It helps to know who, in general, the recommenations and commentary are coming from, so I thought I would start by letting you know our demographic, and in general the types of people we ran across and chatted with while traveling.

At the time of travel (March, 2009), we were a mid-thirties couple from the Western United States / Canada. The English-speaking tourists we ran into were mostly couples in their late 20's to early 40's from the United States and Germany. The commonwealth countries seemed to be under-represented on the tourist beat. We also chatted with some younger backpackers on a few occasions, but since we stayed in hotels rather than hostels, we didn't get the full feel for how busy the backpacker scene was. In terms of locals, the Panamaniams made up the bulk of the populatin (a diverse group in their own right), but there were also many retiree Ex-Pats from the United States and Britain. Most from the United States seemed to be from the South East, or they were actually Panamanians with dual citizenship who had grown up in the Canal Zone during U.S. occupation.

Since we had read (and later confirmed accurate) that the mainland beaches are less than stellar in Panama, we opted to do a city / mountain type vacation. If you like beaches, there are many gorgeous islands just off the coast of the mainland that come highly recommended for their beautiful beaches, I will touch on these in another post based on the feedback I got from other travelers. If you really want a dense jungle experience, consider adding the Darien region to your vacation.

Our trip was during the dry season. I kept reading that the dry season is really the "less wet" season, but we didn't find this to be true. In the entire two weeks, we came across just a couple of brief sprinkles, but no real rain. This was surprising since a good portion of the trip was in the mountains. However, for those who went to Bocas del Toro, it was definitely much more wet there, as to be expected. Of course, we purposely picked the drier side of Panama for our entire vacation. Though we love Caribbean beaches, we wanted to avoid the very high humidity and high level of mosquitos that accompany them in Panama. We were glad we did, though we would have added a Pacific island to our trip were we to plan it over again. More on that later though.

Our Itinerary (2 weeks total):
Days 1-2 - Arrival in Panama City, stayed in the Canal Zone (Cerro Ancon)
Days 2-6 - Boquete
Days 6-8 - Cerro Punta
Days 8-11- El Valle de Anton
Days 11-15- Panama City

See the labels at left to read about our experiences in each town.