Since Bocas Del Toro is a collection of 9 unique islands, there are many beaches to visit.One of these popular “must see” beaches is nicknamed Starfish beach.

Walking around Bocas Town, there are a lot of water taxi drivers vying for your business and eager to take you anywhere you want to go. Starfish Beach was frequently used in the “pitch” to get you to select a particular driver, so we figured we’d better go check it out.

We picked a water taxi driver that promised to take us up to Starfish Beach, wait for us as long as we wanted, and then bring us back to Bocas Town for $30. It’s about a 30-40 minute drive one way, so it seemed like a pretty good deal to us.

Our boat was small and the ride was beautiful. We rode through turquoise waters and over numerous reefs, with the view of the mainland mountains in the distance. Mangroves, numerous sea and land birds and unique Caribbean architecture were all a part of the jour

When we arrived at the small bay that was the entrance to Starfish beach, it was beautiful as expected. This is a popular destination, so we were not surprised to find many people and a number of vendors, renting chairs and selling food and drinks at a variety of “beach shacks.”

We hopped off our boat into the perfectly calm and warm water and walked down the beach to find our spot. The kids immediately saw the yellow floating chairs that were available for rent and were excited about them. Erin and I gave them a little challenge and sent them on a mission to find the guy who rents them, find out how much they cost, and return with a full report. All three of them ran off together around the corner and, as a team, asked about the rentals (in Spanish) and came back to let us know it’d be $5 for two of the chairs. We sent them back down the beach with cash and they proudly returned dragging two chairs behind them.

Our afternoon was nice and mellow. The kids played on the chairs and swam in the clear water. Erin and I took a turn enjoying the chairs, and we all took a walk through the shallow water to see the starfish.

When we were finished with our day, we toted the chairs back to the stack of rentals, found our driver who had been waiting patiently for us and we headed back to town.

On the way home, I spotted our condo from out in the water. We were about a mile out of town, so I asked our driver if he could drop us off near there so we didn’t have to catch a taxi back to the condo. He agreed and found a random dock. We hopped out and walked across the peninsula to our condo. I’m not sure if we were walking on private property, or public, but it was cool to walk from the ocean to the condo and see some of the residents of Bocas Town going about their daily lives.