Panama:
Boquete

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Dreams
of the River
The next day, we took an eight-hour bus ride, in what was
to be the only air-conditioned bus of the whole trip, across Panama
to David, where we switched to a school bus and headed up to the
small mountain town of Boquete. The tall man who sat next to me on
the bus showed me a newspaper article featuring his wife’s hostel
and tried to convince us to stay there. We were noncommittal and he
wasn’t pushy.
When we disembarked from the
bus at Boquete, a pretty woman told us about her hostel and we
agreed to look at it. She, of course, turned out to be the wife of
the man we had met on the bus. He had called her on his cell phone
and told her there were three tourists on the way, and she should
ambush us when the bus arrived. The hostel, called "Suenos del rio"
(dreams of the river) was indeed nice; it was set up as an apartment
with two bedrooms and a shared kitchen and lounging area. We were
sold for sure when we noticed the back patio overlooking a rushing
mountain stream.
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The
Mirador
The goal for our stay in the town was to climb the long-dormant
volcano that hovered above the city. Shanu asked our hostel lady
about it, and she said that it was seven hours up and five hours
down. Although a steep twelve-hour hike was tempting, we quickly
modified our plans and decided to just walk on the roads that wound
through the mountains. So the next morning, after a slightly
bizarre breakfast of bagels, chicken salad and coffee, we commenced
our walk.
The highland air was cool and
fresh, and we soon found ourselves at a fork in the road. A sign
indicated that straight ahead, there was a lookout point, so we
headed that way. We walked a long way, past coffee plantations and
resort style homes (one even had a Hummer in front), and finally
decided we must have gone much more than the 1.7 km the sign had
indicated. Shanu asked somebody where the mirador was and he
said we had passed it. So we turned around. We walked for a while
and she asked another person. He told us to keep going then turn
left at the fork in the road. He then showed us the black squirrel
that he kept in the little pouch at his side. We played with the
squirrel for a while, then went on our way. |

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For
Sale
We stopped at a grassy plot of land next to the mountain stream that
was marked “se vende”—for sale. We fantasized about owning
such a beautiful spot in the world while we picnicked on oranges,
granola bars and Pringles for lunch. I can see how it happens that
so many expats live in Central America. They were probably just
traveling through like us, saw a plot of land for sale and thought,
why not? Nobody sits in the U.S. and thinks, “Gee honey, why don’t
we move to a small mountain town in Panama? I’ll go to the Re/Max
website and see if there’s any land for sale next to a clear, cool
mountain stream.” No, it’s when you’re there in the flesh that the
place seduces you. |
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Chasing Waterfalls
We soon came to the fork in the road and went the other way—the way
the people said to go, the opposite of the sign. Along the way, we
kept asking people where the mirador was, and they would
gesture up the hill and say “veinte minutos”—twenty minutes.
The mirador turned out to be like a mirage in the desert--no
matter how much we trudged up the road, the mirador was
always veinte minutos away.
I call this phenomenon “chasing
waterfalls” after the time Zac and I spent one torturously hot day
in Vietnam riding bikes all over a village trying to find an alleged
waterfall. But chasing waterfalls or even miradores is not a
bad phenomenon. It too, is one of the joys of travel--a literal
enactment of the cliché that it’s not the destination that matters,
but the journey. While chasing the waterfall in Vietnam, we had the
pleasure of stumbling upon village life deep in a lush green valley
that we would never have seen otherwise. While chasing the
mirador in Boquete, we met the man with the black squirrel and
talked to many villagers. We still had many beautiful views from
unofficial lookout points and saw a little of life off the beaten
path. |

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Food
We eventually quit chasing waterfalls because water was falling from
the sky. We walked back to our hostel in the warm afternoon rain,
legs tired and feet sore. We dropped our backpacks off at the
hostel and set out again in search of a much deserved supper. Our
eating habits were pretty much the same throughout the trip: some
bakery goods for breakfast or just snacks if we were in a hurry,
granola bars and Pringles for lunch, and a good supper at a
restaurant. Our first night in Panama City we had eaten at an
expensive Indian restaurant, in honor of Shanu who wanted to indulge
in the pleasures of good food that couldn’t be had in her tiny
mountain town in Honduras. The second night we had a delicious
vegetarian pizza, but it was the third night now, and we were
hankering for a taste of the local fare.
Ironically, in towns it is
sometimes difficult to find restaurants serving local food. If the
people are going out to a restaurant, it is because they want to
have something that they don’t eat at home every day. Consequently,
many of the restaurants were Pizzerias or served comidas rapidas—fast
food such as hamburgers, hot dogs and sandwiches. Many of the
restaurants that do serve local food tend to be cafeteria style,
which generally lack ambience. We like places with at least some
atmosphere and good, cheap local food.
It took a while to find a
restaurant that fit those simple specifications, but we finally
found “Edgar Restaurant.” It was a small, hole-in-the-wall
restaurant that didn’t even have a printed menu. But we used our
survival skills we had developed in China when all menus were
unintelligible to us—we discretely looked at what the other people
were eating. It looked good. We sat at a small wooden table and
Shanu translated the choices offered by the waiter: chicken, beef,
or ham. Shanu and I ordered chicken, and Zac ordered ham. Within
minutes, we were sampling our first plates of Panamanian food, which
later turned out to be the same as the food in Costa Rica. The
typical plate consisted of a meat, usually well-flavored in some
sort of sauce; rice and beans, sometimes separate, sometimes mixed
together; cooked vegetables, sometimes French fries; salad which was
usually some shredded carrots and cabbage with a tomato wedge and
the occasional cucumber slice; and of course, fried plantain. This
dish was delicious and reliable throughout the whole trip. Zac and
Shanu typically washed it down with local beers while I focused on
the mango or watermelon juice. |




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