Fifty feet up in the plumeria-scented air, after I climbed a spiral staircase of twisted branches, an oversized egg-shaped door pivoted open like some magic mushroom and I scooted into my jungle-encircled treehouse, partly built with 500-year-old petrified wood excavated from the Panama Canal.
SOS. I was marooned in Panama’s Caribbean on tiny, remote, private Frangipani Island, which, get this, boasts the world’s first aerial beach on stilts. Owned by a humorous Michigan man, the lush island — there’s 88 acres of protected mangroves — is solely occupied by the Nayara Bocas del Toro eco-retreat, a small, low-key luxury hideaway where I imagine America’s Most Wanted could forever go undetected. Along with four fanciful treehouses, the adults-only Nayara features the 100-year-old palapa Elephant House restaurant, gingerly shipped 11,000 miles from Bali, and 16 overwater villas meticulously crafted in Bali and also transported to this little Central American oasis.
Excuse me, it’s time to soak in my treehouse’s outdoor Javanese hand-hammered copper bathtub.
However, adventures awaited. I’ll soon fill you in on the rescued howler monkey who plopped in my lap for her gummy vitamin on nearby Monkey Island and her primate pal who peed on me. I also boated to a welcoming Indigenous “chocolate village” where all 600 inhabitants are related.
It’s not even a dot on the map, but journeying to tropical Frangipani seemed like a breeze. From Los Angeles, I flew about 6 1/2 hours on Panama’s national carrier Copa Airlines to Panama City and, wanting a couple days there, checked into the elegant, history-oozing Sofitel Legend Casco Viejo in a UNESCO World Heritage district. The hotel itself is a story, once bombed by U.S. forces searching for murderous dictator Manuel Noriega.
After departing the Sofitel, I took a 45-minute Air Panama flight on a rare Fokker 50 turboprop to Isla Colon, the main island in the extensive Bocas del Toro archipelago sprinkled with hundreds of unpopulated islets. While passengers lingered for their luggage, Calypso Joe, a local singer wearing a neon orange ground crew vest, exuberantly strummed the guitar and belted out Bob Marley lyrics (“Don’t worry about a thing…”). Across from Joe, a government poster showed a handcuffed wrist and warned, “Money laundering is punishable by law.”
A Nayara driver picked me up in a shiny black SUV, passed a bright yellow billboard exclaiming “Welcome to Paradise!” on a gravelly road, and delivered me to a tidy, exclusive boat dock minutes away in Bocas Town, the provincial capital.
In the early 20th century, Bocas Town flourished as the hub of the Chiquita banana empire; the glory days are gone and the century-old colorful waterfront structures are now hotels, hostels, restaurants and bars. Jimmy Buffet chilled out in Bocas Town years ago. Although popular with intrepid travelers, the area is not mass-touristed compared to bordering Costa Rica. Backpackers wandered Bocas Town streets, and partiers sailed off for Filthy Friday, a weekly, raucous, island-hopping booze crawl.
On Nayara’s dock, I boarded the resort’s private motorboat piloted by captain Elket; he so kindly poured me a flute of Prosecco for the invigorating 20-minute sea taxi to Fantasy, er, Frangipani Island. The solar-powered haven is the brainchild of Dan Behm, who upon retiring as a successful tech executive in Grand Rapids, Michigan, embarked on a new venture. “I am a regular guy. I bought an island,” he wrote in a 2018 blog post. He described himself then as “a 58-year-old bald guy who is known for being both absent-minded and wildly optimistic.”
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Behm’s 97-acre mangrove-forested purchase contained nine acres of dry land and he, quite unusually, enlisted Balinese woodworkers to concoct a unique resort. Halfway around the globe in Bali, as is their custom, artisans started each morning with a spiritual ceremony and set about creating 16 overwater villas, spending 1,100 hours on intricate teak carvings for each suite. Like a Lego toy city, the blessed thatched-roof bungalows — furnishings and all — were totally built in Bali, disassembled, shipped to Panama in containers, and reassembled on Behm’s island for the resort’s 2021 opening. Last year, Nayara debuted treehouses (kinda Swiss Family Robinson sans family), designed by a Bali firm but constructed on Frangipani (loved my sky-high al fresco living room with the bamboo-camoflagued john!).
I also stayed in a serene overwater villa outfitted with a sea-straddling freshwater plunge pool and a glass floor panel indoors to observe marine creatures. I didn’t see much but my relaxed brain mutated into a jellyfish.
Fortunately, in the morning, congenial captain Elket pulled up and I descended my snorkeling ladder to his boat. Forty minutes later, I sat on the ground in a wood hut and offered a slice of banana to hairy Gigi, a rescued, 3-year-old mantled howler monkey who fiercely squeezed her sharp-nailed mitts around mine and pecked my bare finger with her incisor teeth. OK, so I gasped.
“Don’t worry, she nips like a puppy,” Monkey Island owner/rescuer Francine Roy assured. Gigi, incidentally, is the size of a medium dog.
Quebec-born, upbeat and extremely passionate, Francine cares for 16 rescued primates on her private island; most were neglected or abused pets seized by authorities and brought to her.
“One of my capuchins, Toutie, has been with me for 15 years,” Francine said, chuckling with delight. “I call her my happy hour monkey. I’ll go over to feed the monkeys on the other side of the island, and she’ll jump in my kayak. I drink my rum and Coke and she eats the peanuts I brought her in a cup while we cruise around.”
I hand-fed Gigi and another roaming howler fresh basil and kale before “Mademoiselle” (as Francine addresses Gigi) hopped in my lap for her daily gummy children’s vitamins. Meanwhile, Francine fetched Mao, a puny Geoffroy’s tamarin sporting a white mohawk tuft and weirdly resembling Baby Yoda. Mao, explained Francine, couldn’t walk when he arrived, but after two years of exercising and massaging him and some CBD, he’s now a mobile monkey miracle. Francine gently put Mao in my outstretched palms, but the poor critter screeched and then urinated on me. Of course, I didn’t follow my instinct to drop him, especially after all he’s been through.
Another day, on San Cristobal Island, I visited a Ngobe Indigenous village of cacao farmers in a rustic, secluded community of 600 residents. “My great-great grandfather came here and had 10 wives so we are all related,” Juan Lucas told me. “I have to go to another island to find a woman to marry.”
Juan hadn’t expected me coming, but he happily escorted me to his family’s chocolate farm and then his dad, Sergio, led me on a steep hike, past a strawberry poison dart frog, to pick a hard-shelled cacao fruit in the jungle. Afterward, Juan’s aunts, clad in traditional long nagua dresses, roasted cacao beans, pulverized the inner seeds with a rock, and brewed “tea chocolate” which is basically hot chocolate.
“The chocolate for us gives you more years in the world. It is sacred,” Juan said. “We drink tea chocolate 10 or 15 times a day. My great-grandmother is 115 and lives with us.”
Yet another morning, a Nayara boat ferried me to an enclave called Shark Hole and Ngobe tribeswomen demonstrated how to make chacara string bags from 8-foot-tall leaves of the barbed, native pita plant. The tricky part was when a weaver spun the fibers around her big toe.
Back in Nayara, I ambled to the white sand beach perched on stilts. There was no natural beach on Frangipani, so Behm fabricated a 90-foot-long elevated one over the sea, supposedly the planet’s first. The beach’s Tipsy Bar served an aptly-named bourbon Jellyfish cocktail to complement my state of being. I didn’t dare sit on one of the barstools — they were hanging swings on ropes.
My Gilligan castaway stint soon ended. Armed with cacao tea powder and chacara purses, I returned to the Sofitel, where my suite’s balcony also hovered over a body of water, only it was the Pacific.
As mentioned earlier, the grand Sofitel breathes history. A concierge daily gives guests an onsite tour that includes vintage photographs and a tiled mural detailing the landmark construction of the Panama Canal, finished in 1914. (Remember, my Nayara treehouse used timber from submerged old growth forests flooded during the canal’s development.) Dating back to 1917, the building was the elite hotspot Union Club, hosting such dignitaries as Queen Elizabeth II, Charles Lindbergh, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1969, it became a military officers’ club and 20 years later, the premises were bombed by American troops invading Panama to dispose of ruthless General Manuel Noriega, who hung out in these halls.
The restored hotel is located in charming Casco Viejo, a UNESCO-honored area that houses picturesque colonial plazas, Panama’s presidential palace, architecture reminiscent of New Orleans’ French Quarter, and historical curiosities. At St. Joseph Church, I fixated on the fabled Golden Altar. One story claims a friar, in the 17th century, threw the Baroque-style gilded altar into the ocean for safekeeping and fooled notorious pirate Henry Morgan who came to steal it. Another legend asserts priests painted the gold altar with black oil to look like worthless tar.
At night, I realized my trip to Panama had come full circle. In the Sofitel’s fine-dining Caleta restaurant, I ordered an all-chocolate dessert of mousse and sorbet, accented with crumbles and orange. Surprisingly, what arrived was a hard, melon-sized, intact, brown cacao pod on a white platter. My waiter handed me a brass hammer and with several forceful blows, I cracked the shell open — just like I had seen Ngobe villagers do at the chocolate farm in Bocas. And then, ensuring a long life, I devoured the luscious confection inside.
If you go
Nayara Bocas del Toro: All-inclusive. Check online for discounts, even though official 2025 nightly rates start at $1,335 for treehouses and $1,599 for overwater villas. A recent special priced treehouses at $870 and villas, $1,042; nayarabocasdeltoro.com.
Sofitel Legend Casco Viejo: Rooms from $381 but rates also dip at times, sofitel-legend-panama.com.
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