Well, after an extended period of time it appears that by the end of the day today, the Kimball family will be permanent residents of Panama (Boty of course doesn't need any papers - she is Panamanian by birth). This has been a long and drawn out process. We have crossed two different administrations during this process. We started with one firm on one type of visa only to start over several years later with our current counsel with our original plan. The laws have changed many times over. Each time the law changed it required us to provide incremental information. However, now we are at the precipice. We have been told that our application has been approved so we are on our way to the Immigration offices in Panama to get our permanent cards. It is a great day! Now we wait for the Viola's turn.

I am amazed that I need to write this post during the first week of March, but in all fairness to any interested parties it is necessary. What am I talking about? Well, for any of you who are considering a trip to Tranquilo Bay over the December holiday period, you need to take action. We are answering quite a few inquiries on a daily basis with regard to the holidays and the week before New Year's is down to just two cabanas. A trip down here is a great gift to both you and your family so if you are thinking about it - give us a call.

Well, we are working on returning to normal around here. We had a really great large group with us here for almost two weeks. They were early risers. Wanting to get away from here at 6:00 am most mornings. They were offsite all day long. This meant that breakfast and lunch were sent on the road. They maximized every hour of sunlight available to them. This meant that they returned here to Tranquilo Bay at dark most days. We are especially grateful to our community here in Bocas. So many people pitched in to make it happen. Was it a lot of work? Yes. Was it a lot of fun? Yes. Would we do it again? In a heartbeat.

No photos to share at this point. We will do a whole series about the experience at a later date. It was wonderful for all of us – we melded together as a team. And this team worked really well together.

The past two weeks taught me that we are up for just about any challenge. Ask us if we can do it. If we can, we will let you know.

Jay drew Jan and Susan a map for their kayaking adventures. They thought it was so great that they took a picture of it in case it got ruined in the water on their adventures.

Here is one of the children from the Ngobe Bugle Comarca on Punta Valiente. What a precious young man.

Just one of the things our yellow lab team gets to do on a regular basis. Play in the field amongst all the trees and wildlife. Tough Life!

Bimini is the queen of our yellow labrador team here at Tranquilo Bay. She will be fourteen years old in September. So technically she isn’t a puppy anymore, but she is definitely a puppy at heart.

Luna is one tranquilo dog. Natalia got down on her level to snap this photo. Priceless!

The tail end of a puppy training session. They are doing so much better after a few weeks with Miss Gina! Yea.

Here is a grasshopper type insect that Ramon encountered at the Chocolate Farm. His coloration is very interesting.

Another photo of the precious green frog we find at the chocolate farm.

This is the same frog our guest was capturing on his camera in the last post. These frogs and all of their different characteristics never cease to amaze me.

One of our recent guests getting a photo of a red frog. The frog itself is cut off here, but you can see it in his camera display. Pretty cool.

Another video - this one features some of our hiking adventures throughout Bocas del Toro, Panama and the next province over from us, Chiriqui. Our hikes vary in terrain and difficulty level based upon what you want to experience. We can take you on an easy walk around a beach or we can do a strenuous hike through some creeks and waterfalls as well as the levels in between. Take a look.

My brother emailed me last week to let me know that we had been included in an article in Continental’s in flight magazine. I went online to look it up today. I must say that it is truly a compliment to be included in with such a great group of hotels. Take a look at the article. We are the last hotel listed for Panama and the only one of our size!

Sitting Pretty in Central America

I just wanted to point out that we have updated several of the pages on the website to include videos where appropriate. The pages with videos currently include:

Accommodations

Beach Excursions

Beach Hiking

Diving & Snorkeling

Fishing

Kayaking

We are continuing to take video footage and will add more video to the site as we develop it. Have a great week!

Here is another one of the vidoes I put together which gives you an idea of what the boat ride out to Tranquilo Bay is like as well as giving you a feel for walking around our grounds and into one of our cabanas. It is so difficult to give you an accurate feel of the enormity of the jungle and what it is like to be inside it. It is an amazing experience. I will attempt to put it into words for you.

When you step into under the canopy of the jungle, the temperature immediately and noticeably drops. You feel a calm pass over you as if you took a deep breath and shook out your shoulders and there was no need to do either one. The green you see all around you - above, in front of, behind and below you. There is life all around you. Plants, animals, insects and bugs all coexist in this environment. We are all familiar with how difficult it is to calm a crying newborn baby - sometimes no matter what you do, you just cannot calm them down. The jungle does not fail. It can calm even the most disturbed baby just by welcoming the baby into its arms.

We live in the jungle. Some of our facility has been carved out of it, but the jungle is never far away. You can walk on one the pathways to get to the cabanas and you are in the middle of the jungle. You can go on one of our trails and you are in the jungle. However, one of the wonderful things about being here in Bocas del Toro, Panama is that we are also on an island in the middle of the Caribbean. So we have the crystal clear waters and beautiful beaches. Since we are in an archipelago we also face the mountains which house the volcano that made this amazing archipelago so many years ago. All of these things come together here at Tranquilo Bay. How very fortunate we are.

So, I am on a bit of a video kick these days. I have been working on getting some of our photos and video footage into short clips for people to get a feel for what it is like to spend some time with us here at Tranquilo Bay. We are also preparing for a once a year trade show for Latin American businesses so I also have a bit of a deadline to meet.

This video shows some of the aerial views of the places where we go snorkeling, the beaches nearby where we snorkel, and the sights underwater while you are snorkeling as well as a few folks actually snorkeling - imagine that! Take a look.

I was reading one of the blogs I check out on a regular basis and she had a link to a website called Wordle www.wordle.net. It makes really cool word clouds. I took the text off of our home page to see how it might end up represented in a word cloud. Here are a few of my favorites that it came up with...

It is so hard to get a good photo of these big birds in flight where you can actually make out the bird rather than just a dark spot in the sky. Here are a few good shots.

This moth is just beautiful. The false eyes on the wings are vibrant. Just another one of the inhabitants here in the jungle.

Mel and Rosemary were here with us for a week. They travel all around the world so we were honored that they spent one of their weeks here. They are still holding hands snorkeling after all these years!

In the June issue of Sport Diver there are a variety of articles on where to go expat.



Panama and specifically, Bocas del Toro, made it as one of the destinations - the Wild West. Check out the article here - http://www.sportdiver.com/article.jsp?ID=21392105. The reference to Panama is toward the end of the online article.

Here is one of the red frogs from on our trail. A graduate student from Michigan is studying our frogs and a variety of their characteristics here at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. She says they are prolific - she grabbed a group of males and females and has put them to stud service. She will return our frogs to us and the offspring will be studied for some time.