Bocos Town

At last we arrived in the main town of Bocos del Toro which we refered to us "Bocos Town" but I'm not sure if that's the official name. Anyway, it was quite a large town and really not all that pleasant. Very crowded and touristy. And many aggressive salesmen who seem to appear at all times to attempt to convince you to take their taxi, boat, stay at their hotel, etc...
We, were, however, extremely happy to have made it after the long journey. We left Puerto Viejo at 8:30 in the morning and arrived at Bocos Town at 4:00 or so. That is a long day.
Bocos Town is very pretty when seen from the water, as in the picture below. There are many buildings built out over the water, similiar to Ambergris Cay in Belize, actually. Once you get off the boat, the first building you encounter is the local jail. Really. It is a huge yellow structure with barred windows. There are eyes looking out at you and men waving and catcalling from inside. It was a very sad and a little strange to be a group of tourists walking by these prisoners who stared at us so forlornly from behind their bars. Many men were reaching their hands out; some were reaching almost their entire arm out to try to get our attention. One cannot help but wonder why the main boat dock was built directly next to the prison.
Anyway... after walking past the prison we had a nice lunch at a very overpriced place (many places are overpriced in Bocos) and then attempted to find a hotel. Many of the hotels were already booked and out of room...despite this being the low tourist season. We ended up having to split our group up. I stayed in a hostel with Emma, Erica, Tim and Tricia. It was a fine hostel and quite a bargain at 5 dollars a night. The downside, however, was that there was no running water. There was in theory supposed to be water, but for some reason the city had shut it off. Many places in Bocos, apparently, do not use city water but instead use rain water catchments. This hostel had no rain water catchment so there was no water. So...no showers, no flush toilets, no sink to use.
All good news to folks who have been sitting in sweaty buses all day. So we collectively continued to stink.
And yet we were all having a great time. It's funny...even when things seem to be rough, when you're with a group of friends, you laugh about the craziness of it all. So we stank together and laughed together.
After setting up in the hostel, we went to a nearby beach, since Bocos Town itself does not have one. I don't remember the name of the beach but it was really dirty. Eww. Some of our group decide to take a swim, and then promptly ran SCREAMING out of the water when they saw a stingray. I personally was kind of amazed that there was anything living in the water, considering the dirtiness of the beach.
But don't worry...everything got a lot better the next day. Read the next entry for more! The picture here is another view of Bocos from the boat.