After spending an extra day in Bocas del Toro because of beautiful sunshine and a Spanish school BBQ, we took off Saturday morning for the mainland. The 4 hour bus ride wound through steep hills toward David, Panama's second largest city, where we met another 1.5 hour bus to Boquete. The funny thing about the Panamanian public system is not only does it use out of comission US school busses, they also operate like school busses picking up and dropping off people at 20 foot intervals. Altough you'll only pay $1.50, a 20km trip will take close to an hour and the bus will be 20 minutes late, but you learn to be flexible. Finally arriving, the beautiful mountain town set in a valley between green jungly hills greeted us with an absolute downpour. Luckily the hostal recommended by our Spanish professor from here was just a block away from the bus stop. Between cheap rooms, hot showers, a kitchen, a comfy living room, a hammock porch, and tons of useful info about the area, Mamallena lives up to everything a backpacker hostal should.
Yesterday we rented scooters with some new Isralie and German friends. Three guys driving and three girls riding on back, we rode up and around the hills of Boquete to get some spectacular views of the region.
The rolling hills covered are covered in thick trees overgrown by green vines and dotted with colorful tropical flowers.
The open spaces are used as farms, often onion farms and we could smell the sweet onions as we rode by.
Looking closer at the vegetation you start to notice that the hills are full of coffee plants, some in fenced farms and some in the open forest. Boquete is the main coffee growing region of the country. Riding through the countyside we got a better idea of how the locas live and work than we could see in town.
As it pours and thunders outside, we are thinking we made the right choice not to hike up Volcan Baru to camp tonight. It is supposed to be a spectacular view at sunrise of both the Pacific and Caribbean oceans, but the rainy season is not the time to be treking in Boquete. Instead we spent the day hiking to a hotsprings, and got seriously caught in a turrential tropical downpour. Luckily when the falling rain is a luke warm shower, it's not a bad experience. We happily arrived and slipped into the 42c steaming pools surrounded by natural rock and trees.
Tomorrow we are heading back to Panama City to reserve a place on a boat to Colombia!
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