San Blas Islands, Capurgana & Panama

May 15th to June 13th

One of the ideas of my trip was to travel without planes, and the Panama/Colombia border is probably the most difficult to cross without a plane, indeed there is no road crossing (The panamerican highway has a 40km hole in it at this point). This region is called the Darien gap and it has literally no infrastructure, it’s just rainforest.
To get to Colombia, one of the only option is then to cross by boat. It happens that I actually know a company called San Blas Adventures that offers such a service, with motorboats, going through the San Blas Islands, an archipelago of 365 coral islands. I did the trip three years ago as a helper, with a friend that was a guide at the time.This tour is a little expensive compared to my usual budget, so I thought I would try to do it as a volunteer again. I contacted the company managers through this friend and they accepted my application as a volunteer under the condition that I did three trips (Panama to Colombia, then Colombia to Panama and again Panama to Colombia). They did me a big favour because their usual policy is that normally volunteers shall do at least 6 weeks.
So I was a helper on these three tris, each of four days and three nights, during which we spend most of the time on beautiful caribbean islands, getting tanned, snorkeling, playing volleyball (but with a bad shoulder -see last post- I didn’t risk it much) and drinking rhum. On the islands live indigenous people called the kuna, and the company works closely with them. We see them along the way and sleep in kuna accommodation (hammocks for the majority of it).
My tasks were: help cooking, carry bags and boxes of food, help during the border crossing (we have every guest’s passport stamped), go with a client to a local clinic for a switched ankle, between other things.
The tour starts from Panama city and arrives at Capurganá in Colombia. Between arriving from a tour and leaving for the next one, we have 5 days in these cities, so I had some time to visit them. I even stayed an extra week in Capurganá, I have friends there (on top of the members of the San Blas Adventures team, guides and helpers, with whom I had a blast) and was feeling good in this little colombian caribbean town.
I loved this experience, and met a lot of awesome people: guests of the tour, but also and mainly the guides and helpers teams with whom I worked and/or lived on the islands and in Panama city and Capurganá. I address them a big thank you, I hope to cross paths with them again. I left them to continue my trip down South America: I met with my cousin Sylvain in Cartagena on june 14th and we’ll visit a bit of this country that’s dear to my heart together. This text describing almost a month is difficult to intersect with pictures, so here are all the pictures together. Enjoy and keep in touch for the next post!