Somewhere off the Panamanian coast, straddled in middle of muggy mangrove, our lone catamaran sailboat rocked calmly at bay. All around us, the croak and call of the rana, the jungle frog, echoed like the wail of some tortured, ancient spirit in the tepid air.

I was crewing on a sailboat in Panama. Our crew of three—the captain, another deckhand, and I—were working our way towards some islands off the Caribbean coast on our way down to the Panama Canal. Considering my previous experiences learning to sail on this trip in Panama, I should have probably stuck to land, but here I was again, out on the water.

A summer thunderstorm had pushed us towards the coast late that previous night, to the small village of Tobobe. We were spared much of the storm’s wrath, but decided to spend the day anchored offshore before attempting the journey again the next day. All around us, the hot tropical air weighed heavy and thick, if only to serve as a reminder of last night’s tempest.

The little village was so remote that there were no roads connecting it to the rest of the mainland. The surrounding jungle was too thick and harsh that passing through on foot was near impossible. Instead, the few hundred residents of Tobobe use cayucos—small canoes carved from the trunk of a single tree—to get around. Children as young as five or six were out rowing by themselves, racing each other and catching fish with ease.

I stood out on the front deck, admiring the scene of canoes against the backdrop of colorful stilted houses, when my heart nearly leaped out of my body:

Upon second glance, I was incorrect. There was a boy on his boat. Sure enough, a kid of about fifteen was sitting in one of the deck chairs next to the cabin.

Startled, the captain scrambled frantically up the ladder from his quarters. Evidently, this wasn’t something that happened on a regular basis. “It’s like having a random person walk into your living room!” the captain exclaimed as he hurried over to talk to the kid and access the situation. The kid, on the other hand, just sat there scrolling on his phone, perfectly content on our catamaran.

Suddenly another person, this time an older gentleman, popped over the railing. He greeted us with a friendly wave and just walked around the deck, curiously surveying the boat. The other deckhand Kara and I just watched in surprise as he strutted across the ship with a breezy nonchalance.

Bewildered, we offered the two of them coffee and tea. Our two surprise guests happily accepted and we all sat down for a late morning chat. It was oddly mundane, sipping warm drinks and making small talk about families and jobs and the weather. Never mind these two just hopped on a stranger’s boat out at sea.

After about twenty minutes of more polite, albeit awkward, coffee chit-chat, our unexpected guests decided to disembark our alien ship and headed off in their boats. As the captain and I walked towards the stern to bid them farewell, we stopped dead in our tracks.

The ship was surrounded by cayucos. Twenty, maybe twenty-five boats surrounded the catamaran on all sides. We were swarmed. Clutching nervously on the ship’s railing in one hand, the captain waved to the crowd with the other. “Umm…Hola?”

There was no response. He tried again, “Nice weather we’re having, huh?” Nothing. They didn’t want to talk, they didn’t even acknowledge if they understood him. They just stared at us with wide eyes like we were some alien life force beamed down from the heavens right before their eyes.

My gut churned with discomfort at just how colonial the whole thing felt. It was as if we had just stepped into a time machine to the 1500’s. The optics didn’t help: Two Canadians and an American plopped in the middle of the Central American jungle. A bunch of ‘Natives’ staring up at them in their large, futuristic sailboat that dwarfed any other vessel in sight. The thought made me sick.

Some kids passing by in their cayucos pointed and called over teasingly to the captain, “Cristobal Colombo! Cristobal Colombo!” And with his long, curly blonde hair I could see the resemblance. They weren’t that far off.

Out in the far distance, we saw another boat emerge from the mangrove, this one powered by a small motor. As the boat neared, the figure of a man came clearer into view. Some other sailors we had met on our journey told us about this guy—his name was Juan and he owned a farm nearby. He liked to give tours of his farm to the few travelers that passed through Tobobe on their journey around the Caribbean.

Juan greeted us warmly as he approached our boat. Maybe in his late thirties, he had a friendly smile and wore this felt wide-brimmed hat. It was unmistakably a women’s hat from Zara.

“I like your hat,” I said to him in Spanish. He gave a sheepish smile and a polite “thank you,” though judging by his flushed cheeks I could tell he relished the compliment. “Where did you get it?” I asked. I was genuinely wondering. How on Earth does one encounter a hat like that all the way out here?

Life in Tabobe revolved around fishing and small-scale agriculture. The men would harvest bananas and yuca to sell in larger coastal towns. In the cayucos, it would take nearly a whole day to row themselves out, battling the waves of the open ocean as they made their way to town. Motored water taxis made the journey much faster and more comfortable, dwarfing the time it took to get to the outside world.

After Juan invited us on a tour of his farm, we followed him in our dinghy to the edge of the deep mangrove. “You’ll have to tie up your boat here, it’s too big to get through,” he tell us.

The three of us clambered one-by-one into Juan’s canoe, careful not to tip it over with our shifting weight. Expertly, our guide maneuvered his tiny cayuco towards land. The branches of the gnarled mangrove looked like a sea of pythons the way they twisted out and around above our heads.

Juan’s land felt less like a farm than a deep, wild jungle. As we trudged through mud and vines, giant trees adorned with Jurassic monstera vines towered above us. Our knee-high rubber boots sunk into the grasp of the muddy jungle floor, watered by the tropical thunderstorms of the evening prior. With a squelch, we tracked through the deep, damp earth along the path our guide cleared with a swift flick of his machete.

We traversed over hills and ravines as Juan chatted passionately about his family and his crops on the farm. The yuca and the breadfruit. The tasty tropical oranges and the passionfruit vines furled around rusty wired fences. He tells us he’s worked this muddy land his whole life. Before him, his father did the same and his father before that. He showed us where his ancestors were buried, marked ceremoniously with Ti plants.

He spoke of the income he earns from the farm. Bringing tourists, even the few and far between, makes him more money than selling his produce in town. That income means that he can earn enough to send his fifteen-year-old daughter to school in Panama City. It means he can buy new materials for his house to better withstand the salty, tropical weather.

Back many years ago, he told us, physical money didn’t matter much here. The farm provided for his family and he could trade other people in town for what he needed. There wasn’t much need for a formal currency-based economy.

Now now there was commerce, city educations, fuel for motor boats, Zara hats to buy. This all slowly changed life in the village. To adapt, Juan began to give tours of his farm. Beyond the simple fact of earning a living, he loved sharing the stories of his land with foreign visitors.

Upon our departure, we bought some of his wife’s homemade coconut bread, and bushels of his produce from the farm. Even though the idea of eating fried yuca after living on a sailboat for weeks in the thick Caribbean humidity didn’t sound entirely refreshing, we promised Juan we’d tried his recipe.

It seems that tourism’s touched the far-flung reaches of the Earth, nowhere is left unscathed. Somehow, travelers have crept into every corner of the globe. It’s as if there’s no stone left unturned, no place left “undiscovered” even in the most remote locations. Though who’s to claim what’s “undiscovered” exactly, will always be a question of power.

Tourism wasn’t the driving force changing the landscape of Tobobe. The foreign sailboats that managed to dock nearby were few and far between. It wasn’t the reason that the village was changing or becoming more connected to the outside world. The global economy would seep in one way or another. Commerce, cash. The pull of the big city. Tourism was just a small part of it.

Travel was both a symptom and a solution to this globalizing planet. It gave folks a chance to adapt to changing needs in a shifting world. How it might one day shape the most far-reaching corners of the globe, well, only time might offer its wisdom.

Buy me a coffee

Share

It’s a tiny speck of land in the Caribbean; a small tropical island where jungles of tangled mangrove meet the sea.

Here, the houses are bright and colorful and jut out over the water on stilts. Life is quiet and quaint.

At face value, it’s paradise.

After my last volunteering experience in Panama went awry, I was looking for a place to hide out and relax for a while. I arranged a stay with a small guesthouse on the island where I’d help out with housekeeping and greeting visitors.

When I arrived at the guesthouse, I was surprised to find that I was the only one there. It was just me and the groundskeeper on the sprawling jungle property: the house hadn’t seen any guests in months. Besides a handful of other tourists here and there, there were no other visitors on the island.

It was a ghost town.

In June of 2025, the multinational banana-producing giant Chiquita shut down their operations in Panama.

This triggered mass protests across the region from people who suddenly lost their livelihoods. In retaliation to the unrest, the Panamanian government cut the Bocas del Toro region off from the rest of Panama with road blocks and blockades. For weeks, the islands had no connection with the outside word; no electricity, no food or medicine. They were effectively left on their own.

The islands of the Bocas del Toro archipelago, however, rely on tourism as their only source of income. Everything here caters to tourism dollars, from the lone fish restaurants serving up ceviche and fried plantains to the mom-and-pop guest houses and boat tour companies.

At the guesthouse, the groundkeeper Jorge spends the sun-soaked afternoons rocking away in a hammock, telling me stories about the island.

He promises me next week, they’ll be there. The guests will arrive soon, it’s just quiet season, that’s all. The visitors will blow in with the changing winds, the passing seasons. Maybe the coming rains will bring them our way.

But this heat has become unbearable.

On the island, everyone seems on the precipice. The lack of tourists hangs in the air like a bead of sweat that just won’t break.

The island’s sole road is lined with empty guesthouses. As the summer drones on, Bastimientos has become all but island in waiting, clinging on to hope for some economic respite.

With nowhere left to turn, some residents have gotten increasingly desperate.

My host warned me not to venture to the beaches alone, as armed robbers have been known to lurk in the jungle and wait for unsuspecting travelers. Just last week, Jorge tells me, a rogue gunman burst into the guesthouse demanding money from the guests.

Fortunately, no one was there at the time.

As the tourism situation grew more strained, I couldn’t help but wonder:

What happens to the guesthouse owner? The one who sweeps the floor for the guests that seemingly never arrive. What about the woman frying empanadas on the street corner to support her family?

What happens to them, then, when the tourists never come?

When we set up our entire economies around tourism, or any singular industry for that matter, we leave ourselves vulnerable to collapse when they fail.

All it takes is one catastrophic event or disaster for it to all come crashing down. As we’ve seen with the Pandemic, global travel can come to a screeching halt seemingly overnight.

Sustainable tourism (if that even exists) can never be the sole sustenance for a community. It can never take over a way of life or become people’s only economic lifeline.

Many of the islands we love to vacation in will be the first ones impacted by climate change. Just this year, we’ve seen Hurricane Melissa devastate communities across the Caribbean, many that rely on tourism for their way of life.

What happens when it takes too long for an island to rebuild after disaster? What happens when rebuilding becomes impossible?

Will we just rush off to the next one? What happens to those left behind, the ones left to deal with its aftermath?

What will be left then?

Share

Buy me a coffee

Don’t you know this world isn’t made for you?

Of course, I take their concerns with a grain of salt. I know travel carries its inherent dangers, but if I listened to every person who told me that travel was too dangerous for a woman, I’d never leave my house.

I’ve been solo traveling off and on since I was 19, and one of the ways I’ve made it viable for myself is through work exchanges. I’ve used sites like Workaway and Worldpackers to find volunteer placements abroad and have had generally positive experiences over the years. (I do have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the ethics of these platforms, but honestly you should check out ’s article where she does an amazing job at nailing these points).

For those not familiar with the concept of these work exchange sites, hosts from all over the world can use these platforms to connect with and host volunteers who work for a certain number of hours in exchange for food and accommodation. These exchanges often attract young backpacker types or those traveling with super tight budgets, (of which I’ve previously been both), and are also meant to offer participants some sort of cultural exchange or skill share.

All of my previous experiences with work exchanges until this point had been positive, so when I decided I wanted to learn how to sail I found a Workaway host at a sailing school in Panama.

I’m not oblivious to the dangers that traveling alone can entail for women or anyone for that matter; I’d done my best to research and prepare as much as I could beforehand. I found a host with a five-star rating and an exchange where I would be living in my own separate apartment and working in a sailing school setting around other sailors and students. As far as work placements went, this one sounded ideal.

Subscribe now

On the day I arrived, I touched down in Panama after a beautiful and only slightly-harrowing ride in a single engine plane over a gorgeous tropical archipelago. The islands seemed straight out of a Caribbean postcard: colorful houses propped up by wooden pillars jutted out over a crystalline blue sea. As I exited the plane on the humid island runway, I was greeted by a waft of salty air and the friendly, laid-back demeanor of my Workaway host who had showed up in classic island fashion: no shoes, just a bicycle. He was in his early fourties and is one of the junior partners of the sailing school.

I should have known the vibes seemed off when the the first question he asked me was how old I was. “I just turned 27 last week,” I replied. “Ha. I’m 15 years older than you, isn’t that funny?”

I did an awkward laugh and brushed it off, just hoping he meant nothing by it.

(Side note: of course he did.)

We started walking and chatting a bit more and then he hailed us a taxi. This really confused me as according to Google maps, the sailing school should only be a 2 minute walk from the airport. I asked him if we could stop by a supermarket first as I still need to get a SIM card for my phone. He just waved me off and says we’ll do that later.

In the taxi, I began asking questions like where are we going, and shouldn’t we be heading to the sailing school and he just made vague excuses as to why the sailing school isn't suitable. He told me not to worry, the place he’s taking me to is a “much better place” for me to stay.

We pulled up to a beautiful two-story house right on the ocean, tucked away in a remote part of the coastline. It’s the only place around for miles, save a tiny beach bar next door. He brought me upstairs and showed me around the place which was beautifully furnished and cozy.

“You’ll stay in here, and I’ll be in this room.”

My stomach dropped. He never mentioned that he would be living in the same house as me. Let alone just the two of us in this remote house far away from anything else.

Of course I was uncomfortable but my brain tried to rationalize the situation. Mentally, I talked myself down out of spiraling. Maybe he wasn’t being creepy, and this this was all some sort of misunderstanding. Perhaps I was reading this all wrong and got things confused because of the language barrier.

He then brought me to my bedroom so I could put my things down. I peaked my head into the closet only to find it’s full of little girl clothes. Dolls, dresses, and toys line the shelves.

“Whose house is this?” I asked.

“I’m housesitting,” he responded.

“For who? For a family? What family??”

“My boss, my boss. Don’t worry.” I was immediately more confused because I was supposed to be meeting “his boss” (the other captain) at the sailing school. Why was I here alone with this man in someone else’s house? Was the other captain even in Panama?

Again, my alarm bells were firing. I had no idea what to do. If I said something at this point, I risk offending him. What if he thinks that I think he’s a predator? What would he do then?

He then told me he was going to take his bike into town for the afternoon and wouldn’t be back until the evening. I asked him how I could get to town as I need to get to a supermarket and get a SIM card for my phone. He told me it’s about 2 hours walking and no, there is no other bike. Great.

Even with my host gone from the house, my body still felt tense and uneasy. I couldn’t relax, and was constantly thinking about him coming home. I tried to push down my feelings and told myself to give it one night. Maybe I give him a chance and meet the other captains tomorrow who can explain everything and clear up all of the confusion. I just needed to Stop. Being. Dramatic.

Come nightfall, I still felt so incredibly on edge. I began to get ready for bed and started preparing my room for the evening. I went to try the door to make sure the lock was latched when the whole doorknob just came off in my hand.

Shit.

I now had no way to latch the door closed. Even worse, I knew that he knew about the broken doorknob because he had been staying in this house for a while. My mind was racing at the thought of this man in the room next door with no way to lock the door. At this point, I’m was trying to jam the door closed with a spare curtain rod I found just to make sure he couldn’t open in from the other side.

It was nearly midnight. My mind was running at about a million miles an hour. I was all alone with this strange man in this house in the middle of nowhere, now with a broken bedroom door. My thoughts spiraled. I wondered if I screamed, would anyone even hear me?

I’ve got to get out of here.

I quickly packed up my bags and ran over to the tiny beach bar next door undetected. I had no idea where this guy was, and kept looking over my shoulder hoping he wouldn’t see me leave. Fortunately a young woman was working at the bar serving a couple of stray bargoers. She seemed taken back by me standing there in my pajamas with all of my bags, but she immediately recognized the look of panic in my eyes when I told her, “I need to get out of here.”

She phoned a hostel in town to make sure they had space for me and graciously called me a taxi. I stood there waiting anxiously as the beach bar, hoping the taxi would arrive soon.

Suddenly, the man appears behind me.

He had this look of blind, white rage behind his eyes. The piercing kind that freezes you in your tracks. I knew that look, my body knew that look. This guy was bad news.

He started yelling at me, “You’re SCARED? Why are you SCARED??? “ I tried to stammer out some response but I was flustered and nothing seemed to come out. He continued yelling as I just stood there frozen, unable to move.

Fortunately, this was all in front of the few people at the beach bar. He was still there when the taxi finally arrived to pick me up. The bartender watched over me as I hurried in the cab. She stayed to make sure I left safely and even spoke with the driver on my behalf—I am so immensely grateful for her and her kindness that evening.

I arrived at my hostel sometime after midnight completely disheveled, still in my pajamas, but feeling relieved. Once my body finally had the chance to rest and release the tension I didn’t even realize I was holding, I completely broke down.

…

In some ways I was most angry at myself for even attempting to give my host the benefit of the doubt and acting exactly how our patriarchal society had raised me to be—complicit, docile, polite. I was so worried about not offending the guy that I kept quieting the alarm bells that were blaring in my head. I told myself my fear and discomfort was my problem, not his.

To be a woman is to be taught how to doubt. It is to be conditioned to silence our intuition and put the comfort of others above our own safety. We’re taught to not take up space. We’re told to not make a scene. Smile to men. Say yes, please, thank you for sparing me this time.

That voice is not our own. It’s been in our ears since birth. It’s the product of layers and layers of social conditioning that uphold a world where men are not held accountable for their actions. By dismissing our own needs and gut instincts to protect the feelings of men, we enable this predatory pattern to continue.

…

Weeks later, I ended up posting in a sailing Facebook group and loosely referenced my experience without any of the details. A woman reached out to me to say she had a bad experience with this same guy. It was much worse than mine. Another woman before her had a similar story. My gut instinct was right all along: he was a predator.

The women were too afraid of the repercussions of reporting him or leaving a negative review so they didn’t do or say anything.

For context, Workaway hides negative reviews of hosts. Hosts can also respond to reviews and retaliate against volunteers by leaving them equally bad reviews that could hinder their ability for getting other work placements in the future.

We ended up reporting him to Workaway, however I found out later that he had been previously reported in the past. When he had his account taken down, he simply just made a new Workaway host profile. Workaway doesn’t require IDs or background checks on hosts, so in theory anyone could keep making new profiles in perpetuity.

…

While platforms like Workaway enable and protect abusers, this same system is perpetuated when people claim that travel is inherently dangerous for women. With each passing comment that the world is simply “too unsafe” for women to comfortably exist in, we uphold a system that allows the poor behavior of men to go unchecked. It gives perpetrators free reign to act poorly because we claim it’s a woman’s fault for putting herself in a position where she could potentially be harmed.

If we even gave half of the energy we spend telling women that travel is unsafe towards calling out men for their predatory behavior, we would be living in a whole other world entirely. We will only come to know a safer world when we finally hold men accountable for their actions.

As for me, I’m done supporting Workaway because of how poorly they handled the situation. I will, however, keep solo traveling and trusting my gut instincts as I keep exploring and learning about the world.

Cover image credit: Vitaly Mazur on Unsplash

Share

Buy Me a Coffee

The main crowds of summer have slowly dispersed.

This is off-season.

Like all other forces of nature, we travelers come and go with the seasons.

We migrate, we flock, we swarm.

And soon as we touch down in a new destination, we make ourselves known. We arrive in droves and in masses. Some liken it to a tidal wave, others an avalanche or monsoon.

Just as there’s a Summer and Autumn, a season of cherry blossoms, and the season of harvest,

There’s the Season of the Tourist.

I find myself wandering Dubrovnik after tourist high season has come to a close, yet life within the ancient walls remain bustling and busy. While we come and go with seasons, it seems as if our timeframes keep expanding—we continuously seem to linger longer.

Dubrovnik has seen massive spikes in tourism over the last years. In 2023, Dubrovnik had 4.5 million overnight stays, an 11% increase compared to 2022 numbers. Tourists outnumber Dubrovnik locals by a staggering 27-to-one.

The cobbled streets of Dubrovnik have encountered the wandering footsteps of travelers for centuries, but when did the city become so transformed by their presence?

Here, a daily occurrence: streams of cruise ship patrons filter in and out of the city’s ancient walls. In peak season, the city sees over 10,000 cruise patrons a day.

They’re loaded up in buses, shuttled in and out. Herded like sheep, they’re whisked off to their next destination at a whirlwind speed. These visitors never spend more than a few hours in one place. These modes of transport have made travel so much more accessible, but oftentimes these visitors can only ever scratch the surface of a place. Destinations soon become boxes to check, and we’re on to the next one more quickly than ever before.

Do we travel to experience anymore? Or is it to take the same pictures? Are we driven for the aesthetics of the places we see superficially, or do we still yearn to dig beneath its surface?

I often think about how the internet and social media have changed our perspectives on travel. We have list for the “Top Ten Things to Do in X”, ‘“Top 100 Places to See Before You Die”, “The Top Most Instagrammable Spots in X, Y, Z”…

They all seem to tell us where to go, what to see, and what to experience. Have we made the act of travel so replicable that we no longer truly engage with new spaces?

I wonder to myself how much of the travel we experience is novel. How much has it become a manufactured experience that can be repeated again and again? We often like to think of ourselves as the protagonists of life—that all of our experiences are unique and significant in some way—but sometimes I wonder how much of my own travels are molded by this conditioning.

Media drives our interest in far-off places and shapes the fantasies we create around travel.

Tourism in Dubrovnik boomed following the city’s role as the filming location for the mega-popular HBO series Game of Thrones. Each year, hundreds of thousands of visitors descend on the city to relish in the sights they were enamored with on their television screens.

Further down its winding streets, the city slowly becomes a caricature of itself. Game of Thrones themed restaurants, tours, costume shops…the list goes on.

At what point does a place simply become a backdrop: a site to gaze at or photograph, but not one that is fully lived-in? At what point does the value of its outward aesthetics surpass the community and life within its walls?

Strolling these ancient streets of Dubrovnik, I wonder who this space is really for.

Most locals have been priced out of Old Town Dubrovnik; they compete for space with short term vacation rentals and have largely been pushed outside of the ancient city. There is hardly a feel for any Croatian culture inside the old city—the shops and restaurants mainly cater to the tourist crowd.

And yet, contained with the city walls, we create moments of joy.

Couples embrace while overlooking the sparking salty sea. Families delight in gelato in the early Autumn heat. The busy, bright chatter of languages swirl in the air and fill the streets with noise and life.

Travel has shrunk the world—it’s wrinkled the distance between us as people. It has shortened the roads that divide us and the ‘other’, and defied the unmoving reality of geography. Despite its drawbacks, travel is first and foremost a force of connection. We do it because we love to connect to people and places; it brings joy.

Share

Buy me a coffee