Panama – Boquete

After a very relaxing week spent on the beaches of Santa Catalina we headed back up onto the Gringo trail, inland to the beautiful town of Boquete. We were lucky enough to share a mini van with some lovely people – a Dutch couple and an English/Aussie couple who we spent some time with in Santa Catalina. Instead of an 8 hour, 4x bus journey, our mini van took a cool and very entertaining 4 hour journey from door to door – Result.

Boquete is a small expat town, which means that over the past 15 years American/German expats have congregated and helped build up lovely accommodations, restaurants and opened other niche stores to live in the small community. The town is best know for the surrounding area’s beautiful natural reserves, filled with good hiking, volcanoes and waterfalls.
We very quickly realized why the waterfalls were so prevelant because with all green mountainous areas, it rained a lot…
The first day it rained so much that we decided not to go adventuring and hopefully wait out the rain for a day or so, and instead we would continue our card game of Rudman Rummey – Champion of the Multi-Verse! Unlike our traveling friends who walked 16km for 6 hours in torrential rain.

Luckily for us it almost rained itself out and the following day it had cleared significantly, so we made the walk up to the waterfalls which was particularly beautiful with all the rain from the previous day, muddy and dramatic but fun. A large tree had also fallen down onto one of the metal walkways the day before, crushing the stairs and adding a bit of adventure to our day.

The highlight for me however was being shown pictures by our taxi driver on the way to the walks starting point, of the ghost of a woman’s spirit that haunts the forest and an old Mansion along the river. So for the 5 hours we were constantly on the lookout for the women’s ghost so that I too could try catch it on camera and thus becoming ridiculously rich and famous… Alas we never spotted the women, however we did find the haunted house which looked just like the pictures we’d been shown. It all added a bit of drama and excitement to a very beautiful and sunny day.

For the rest of the time we were enjoying the company of our new friends with dinner and drinks never far from our thoughts.
To sum it up, we had  lovely stay at a German run hostel. Ate and drank at the local watering hole which had the most exquisite whole smoked chicken (amazing). Cute town with lovely walks, good coffee shops and lots of international expats.

Enjoy the Pics