We love traveling around Panama and we’re always experimenting and trying out new things to do in our country. Through this blog we’d like to share our Panama adventures with all of those Panama travel enthusiasts.
What type of experiences will we be sharing? Basically we’ll be sharing all of those things we do BEFORE adding a new product or service to our website. Before offering a tour to the public, we do it ourselves and make sure it has the top notch quality we’re looking for. Before promoting a new destination, we spend a lot of time getting to know it really well. Before adding a hotel to our lodging options, we stay at it and get to know the hotel owners and managers quite well. And we don’t promote every tour, hotel and destination out there: we only promote those who share our vision about Panama’s tourism. With this blog we intend to share these and other of our Panama experiences.
Explora Ya is currently in its infancy. Just in last June we opened the offices of our first branch in Boquete. We could say that Explora Ya is sort of a spin-off of Habla Ya Spanish School. Habla Ya has been arranging Spanish learning vacations in Panama since 2005. In order to keep its students entertained after classes and during the weekends, not only was Habla Ya offering Boquete’s largest amount of tour options for its own customers, but many other travelers and tourists, who where not studying Spanish started to book their tours through Habla Ya’s website or by just walking into Habla Ya’s office once in Boquete. Habla Ya’s popularity arranging Eco-Adventure vacations is such that it even got featured in a recent article in the Washington Post.
Explora Ya’s Branch in Boquete
Everything reached a point at which Habla Ya realized it wasn’t the best decision to keep attending to customers who wanted to travel around Panama but didn’t want to learn Spanish (as it would start deviating from it’s own mission), and thus the need to create a separate entity, with its own staff, identity and office space became evident. This is how Explora Ya was born.
So in reality Explora Ya has been in a gestational period for the last 4 years or so and in someway had already been operating many of its own tours for the most of that time (our first ever camping expedition to the Volcan Baru took place in October of 2006).
We are currently gluing together all of the offerings that we have for the province of Chiriqui and hoping that we’ll be able to have the all of them published on this website by the end of the year. Boquete will not be our only destination in Chiriqui but we will also be offering tours and hotels in Punta Burica, Volcan, Cerro Punta, Caldera, Chorcha, Gualaca, Chiriqui’s coast and obviously in the Chiriqui Gulf. In the meantime you can check out many of our tour offerings through Habla Ya’s website and have a look at what we’re up to through Explora Ya’s Facebook Profile.
Carlos and Julio, Explora Ya’s Co-Founders with Habla Ya Student Courtney. Volcano Trip October 2006
As of now, our strongest expertise about Panama encompasses the provinces of Chiriqui, Veraguas, Herrera, Los Santos and Bocas del Toro. At some point during 2011 we hope to have a much more updated website to include these destinations (as things go, it might take until 2012!) and also intend to open our second Explora Ya branch in Bocas del Toro next year. I have been living in Bocas del Toro for the last 5 months and because of this many of our first blog posts will be about Bocas del Toro.
Julio with his son Rafael at Bluff Beach, Isla Colon, Bocas del Toro
So we hope this blog is useful for those traveling to Panama and helps you plan a “REAL” Panama vacation which includes only the best of the best of what Panama has to offer!
