Panama
Gamboa
A rainforest town where ocean-going ships glide silently between the trees.
Toucans patrol the treeline here, all outsized bill and glide, while below them, in near silence, a container ship slides past the town on its passage between two oceans. Gamboa sits where deep rainforest meets the Panama Canal, and the two share one frame everywhere you look.
Gamboa grew up as an American Canal Zone settlement where the Chagres River meets the canal, and Smithsonian researchers still work from the town, giving it the air of a field station with a marina. An aerial tram climbs through the canopy to an observation tower where the whole improbable geography arranges itself: GatĂșn Lake one way, and huge container ships threading a jungle waterway the other. On the forest side, the Rainforest Discovery Center's 32-metre tower lifts you above the treetops while hummingbirds swarm the feeders by the visitor centre and howler monkeys call close to the trail. Boats run from the marina to Monkey Island, where mantled howlers, white-faced capuchins, Geoffroy's tamarins and owl monkeys live over the water, with crocodiles, sloths and toucans along the banks.
Family
The tram does the climbing, the tower does the reveal, and the Monkey Island boat delivers four species of monkey without a single long hike.
Couple
Wake to howler monkeys, drift GatĂșn Lake by boat, and take a terrace table above the Chagres as ships slip past at dusk.
Solo
The Discovery Center tower at first light is world-class birding at its most effortless, with the research-town atmosphere to match.
Friends
Stack a lake boat, the canopy tram and a night walk into one weekend, then compare wildlife lists over cold beers at the marina.
- Ocean-going ships pass the town at garden level, threading the canal's forested reach between two oceans.
- An aerial tram rises through the canopy to an observation tower with the canal and GatĂșn Lake spread below.
- The Rainforest Discovery Center's 32-metre tower stands above the canopy, with hummingbirds swarming the feeders below.
- Boat trips reach Monkey Island, home to mantled howlers, white-faced capuchins, Geoffroy's tamarins and owl monkeys.
El CorotĂș in the resort's main building leads with its signature Ceviche CorotĂș.
The same kitchen's PlĂĄtano Corvina answers it: corvina and plantain, two Panamanian staples on one plate.
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Tarangire National Park
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Tsavo National Park
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Red elephants ghost through rust-coloured scrubland where man-eating lions once stopped the railway.
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Over a million wildebeest thunder across crocodile-thick rivers in Earth's greatest land migration.
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Over-water bungalows on a Caribbean archipelago where sloths drift through mangrove canopies.
Isla Bastimentos
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One island, no roads, and a poison frog that changes colour from coast to coast.
Lago GatĂșn
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Freighters thread islands of howler monkeys across what was once the world's largest man-made lake.
El Valle de AntĂłn
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A whole town spreads across the floor of an extinct volcano's crater.