Coiba Island National Park & Granito de Oro, Panama
Life is good; very good when you are in the tropics and even better when you are snorkeling in the second largest coral reef in the Eastern Pacific. After cruising from the Bay of Panama, the Sea Voyager dropped anchor in front of Granito de Oro, a little white sand single palm tree island surrounded by rocky reef ecosystems. It gives the perfect stage for hundreds of different fish to parade beside, under and even over us. But more than this great opportunity to swim in this clear blue ocean water, we are amongst the few lucky people in the world that has the chance to visit a “World Human Heritage Site”, as declared by the UNESCO.
Coiba is the largest island in the Pacific of Central America that covers roughly 500000 acres, 80% are marine territory and the rest is lush tropical rainforest that has been preserved intact due to the former existence of a penal colony. Considered to have been the “Panamanian Alcatraz” from 1919 until 2004, it was finally declared a National Park.
This national park is part of a very important marine corridor that extends across the islands of Galápagos (Ecuador), Malpelo (Colombia), Gorgona (Colombia), Coiba (Panama) and Cocos (Costa Rica), protecting an area of 211 million hectares. This corridor protects an extensive fish life and many marine mammals like humpback and Bryde’s whales and several species of dolphins such as the bottlenose, spotted, common and spinner dolphins, pilot whales and orcas.
With such credentials snorkeling has to be good. We could watch bright colorful angelfish, strong-bite parrot fish, long-finned Moorish Idols, cute little porcupine fish, polka dot guineafowl puffers, and the list could continue to include some snake-eels and hawksbill turtles.
After being in this parallel underwater world, the galley prepared the most wonderful barbeque lunch for us: hamburgers, ribs, veggie skewers and vanilla sauce covered brownies… could it get better? After lunch we took a walk to a wooden pier that gave us the magical chance to see from above three spotted eagle rays which swam back and forth, flapping their wings and twisting around, almost like they were showing off for us… just for us. After several years doing this trip I can truly say, today was more then good life.
