well, if you haven’t been anywhere except the city, then perhaps it will be quite interesting)). We saw one dolphin (tail), one sloth (but not sure) and completely burned out on an empty beach
Did the combination tour, snorkling, dolphins bay, starfish, beach, sloth island, including lunch. If you like speedboattrip then you are at the right place. Whole trip was more on a boat then do and see anything. Bad snorkling (only goggles and no flippers) at the start he says 1 hour snorkling, was 30 minutes, some dolphins in dolphins bay. Quick visit, bad lunch, 5 minutes starfish, dropped on an Island with 100 other tourist, saw 1 sloth up in the tree.... if you wanna book a nice trip go somewhere else. I can not reply at the question of your captain. Wish I remembered his name. All he could do was stear the boat, sleep at the boat and eat his lunch. There were more fish at the restaurant then at the snorkling location.
After the guy told us to be there at 7:30 several times, we arrived exactly at that time. But there was nobody there fromlthe agency and the boat had a delay of 1h 15min!!! They even didn't give us tickets only a receipt and we hald to discuss with a lady from an other agency till she gave us all the information we needed. At our first spot in Almirante we had to wait for 1h again. On top of that the promissed that we had a private shuttle, which didn't took place either. We expected so much more for the 20$ we paid.
I booked Gambit tours for a round trip shuttle to bocas from Puerto Viejo. The company severely disappointed on both ways of the trip.... On the way there the line to get into Costa Rica was 2.5 hours. Definitely not their fault, but the guide taking us across the border tried to make us wait for another group of two people. He wouldn't answer our questions as to where these people were, and just kept saying to "relax, chill out." Eventually we discovered they weren't even to the border yet so we would have to wait for them to arrive, plus an additional 2.5 hours in line. This was after I was promised there would be a shuttle waiting for us on the Panama side of the border. We went ahead anyway, and the driver on the other side already had a full van, but squeezed us in anyway. There were 2 more people than seats at this point. He tried to make me sit on a non existent front middle seat without a seatbelt. I refused, and a child sat on his mom's lap and a girl sat on her boyfriend's lap. Made it there with no further issues . On the return trip, the same driver was driving very erratically, as most do, and we ended up getting in a car crash with the car nearly flipping over. Luckily no one was hurt, but it was definitely a close call. I called the company (in Costa Rica, where I bought the ticket) to complain about safety, and they were unconcerned as the accident happened in Panama and therefore not their problem, even though it is all the same company. Luckily this happened when everyone had a seat and a seatbelt or this could've been much worse. Overall, it is definitely not worth the budget option. Choose a company with safer drivers and one who sell a specific number of tickets to seats.
