San Blas Islands

The road to San Blas — Guna Yala, properly — is part of the experience whether you want it to be or not. We left Panama City before dawn in a 4x4 that climbed into cloud forest and then dropped, with alarming steepness, toward the Caribbean side of the isthmus. By the time we reached the boat launch at Carti, we had crossed an entire mountain range in under two hours and arrived somewhere that felt like a different country entirely, because in the ways that matter, it is. Guna Yala is an autonomous indigenous comarca, self-governed by the Guna people under their own congress, and they decide who comes, where the lodges go, and how many of them there are.

The islands themselves border on absurd. Some are large enough for a village of a few hundred people; others are so small that a family occupies the entire thing — a dozen palm trees, one thatched hut, a wooden dock, and water that goes from pale green to navy within twenty meters. Our boatman cut the engine near an island I couldn’t have paced across in ninety seconds and told us this was lunch. We ate freshly grilled corvina off a banana leaf while Guna women worked molas nearby — the intricate reverse-appliqué textiles that are their signature art form, layers of cut and stitched cloth built up into geometric birds and spirits, sold nowhere else in the world in this exact form.

What stayed with me longer than the water — and the water is extraordinary, some of the clearest I’ve swum in anywhere — was the night we spent on an island with no electricity beyond a single generator that ran until nine. We slept in hammocks strung between posts, listened to Guna men talk in their own language around a fire, and woke to a sky so free of light pollution that the Milky Way looked like it had been spilled across it. A Guna cayuco, a dugout canoe carved from a single trunk, passed silently in the dark, someone paddling home from a neighboring island for reasons I never learned.

When to go: December through April is driest and calmest for boat crossings between islands. The rest of the year brings squalls that can strand you a day longer than planned — which, in San Blas, is rarely a hardship.