With renewed confidence and sense of purpose, we leave Playa Chiquita with instructions to find Albrook Mall in Panama City, where we can book a trip with Explora tours. We find Albrook mall, a sprawling complex 3x as large as the malls we are used to and criss-cross it searching for this tour company which doesn't exist. We take a decision to just rush the frontier.

We find our way out there again, past Tocumen, heading for "Darien". We look for accommodations in Chepo and are sent on a mini-goose chase there which we soon abandon. Stocked up on water and talked to three different groups of people at the turn-off to the frontier. We see the same traffic coming at us with intake breathers mounted up above the cabs, leading me to believe we will fording rivers and what not on the way. We get the frontier in the afternoon and I approach the sand-bagged installation on foot, Mimi in tow.

We get acquainted with a sympathetic border official who we can communicate with and learn that it costs $20/head to cross and park the car, $5/head to get to the coast. We had been scouting pastures and what not on the way there, and I asked him if there was somewhere close we could pitch a tent. He led us up a hill where there were two homes and asked a Guna official if we could camp there and that was alright, so we camped there that evening and had our meal, with a promise to be "numero uno" on the morning. It got cool that evening, as we had gained some elevation to that point.

Still not knowing what to expect on the islands, we packed some lunch food and plenty of water and each took a backpack. We were prepared to spend the night, but not by camping. We drove the car over the checkpoint and parked it and the guys there told us to hang loose and they started looking for space for us in the oncoming trucks, which were pretty much exclusively transporting people to the coast. We soon had a ride and arrived at the coast, where we were greeted by some English speaking guys. I think they wanted over $300 for an overnight and $45/head for a day trip, including lunch. We went with that and eventually boarded a maybe 14 passenger motor boat for the rough ride out. This is a typical day trip where you visit a couple of spots and return. I think we visited 3 spots. One spot had a sunken ship with some growth on it, another spot had a decent area to snorkel. I'm sure that there are some very good snorkeling areas in San Blas, given that the over-run area was good. We have some underwater photos which I may get in after I delete some photos I already posted. This site has a 100 photo limit.

We had been warned to bring water and not eat any food there. We had a beer and a soft drink and ate the fish with some cabbage/tomato salad soaked in vinegar and I think the normal rice with beans. I figured it would come right back up on the boat, but neither of us were sick. I found an Italian man in a tent on a tiny island and learned from him that he was camping for $10/night. There were cabanas for $225 (probably where they would have put us) and I met a couple from Colorado who were splurging on one of those. It took about 15 minutes to walk around the island, so unless you were a newlywed, I'm not sure what you would do there for very long.

We also stopped at a shallow, sandy area in the middle of nowhere. The shallowest area was just above water at low tide and people were just hanging out there. We returned to the mainland in the late afternoon and waited at our truck for the rest of our party to get back, then we were taken back to the frontier, where we again climbed the hill and camped.