Why Panama
The country is an isthmus: you can have breakfast on the Pacific and swim in the Caribbean at midday. It is that geometry that brought the canal, whose Miraflores locks are watched from a platform and remain impressive a hundred years on.
The rest is worth as much: the San Blas archipelago administered by the Guna people, Bocas del Toro on the Caribbean coast, the coffee highlands of Boquete, and the Casco Viejo of Panama City, World Heritage listed, restored without being sanitised.
Getting around
Panama City has a modern metro and city buses, payable with a rechargeable card — no cash on board.
Domestic flights serve Bocas del Toro and the Darién. For San Blas, you leave by four-wheel drive at dawn from the capital, then by boat; it is long, bumpy, and there is no comfortable alternative.
The Darién, to the south, is not a road: the Pan-American Highway breaks off there, and the area is formally advised against.
Money
The US dollar is the everyday currency. ATMs dispense dollars, and cards work in the cities.
San Blas runs entirely on cash, with no ATM: you take all the cash needed for the stay, in small denominations. Tipping is ten per cent, often already added to the bill.
Before you go
The San Blas archipelago is an autonomous Guna territory, with its own rules and its own entry fees, to be paid in cash on each island. Photographs of people are asked for, and are sometimes charged: it is an explicit local rule, not a scam.
Currents are strong on the Pacific coast and at Bocas; visitor drownings there are the leading cause of accidents.
The dry season is also the season of the trade winds, which can cancel crossings to the islands for a day or two.