Advertisement
El Valle
Walking along the main street in El ValleWhat a relief to get out of the city! After 4 days in the heat and humidity of the coast, the cool mountain air of El Valle is a very welcome change.
We´re only 96km from Panama City but we could be in another world. El Valle is a bit like Shangri La: a beautiful, prosperous little village set among lush green mountains where everything seems to be just about perfect. It´s barely more than one main street with a few roads leading off either side. The neat, tidy houses are all painted bright colours and flowers of all sorts, especially bougainvillea, orchids and hibiscus, grow in abundance all around. All the houses have well-tended, flower-filled gardens so the whole place reminds me of an English village in high summer. It´s very quiet too (apart from the sound of lawn-mowers!), which is lovely after all the hustle and bustle of the city.
We´re staying in a sweet little hotel called Don Pepe´s, which is a very pleasant contrast with the Marparaiso. I´ve got a nice big, bad-smell-free room to myself and a clean bathroom with a hot shower - just about the ultimate luxury on this trip.
Unfortunately,
La India Dormida
A local girl falls in love with a boy but for some reason their love is doomed. She dies of grief and now lies for eternity in El Valle. Aaahh! despite all the prettiness, there isn´t much to actually do in El Valle - it´s more of a stopover to break up the long trip to Boquete near the border with Costa Rica. The main activity in the area is hiking, so to work up a nice appetite for lunch we walked up to the larger of the town´s two waterfalls (called somewhat optimistically, El Macho) and took a swim in the river. In the afternoon, Emmett and I headed off to look for the petroglyphs - no, me neither, I had to look it up - described in the Rough Guide. We had intended to walk but were offered a lift in the back of a truck being driven by a retired German sea capitain who now runs one of the towns fancier hotels (Los Capitaines, for anybody planning a trip to El Valle). He dropped us off and arranged for one of the local lads hanging about at the bottom of the path to show us the way. Well, I say ´lad´, in fact I think he was more mountain goat than child. It didn´t take too long to reach the petroglyphs, which I was very glad about
as they´re nothing particularly special. Apparently nobody is quite sure what they are, when they were made or by whom, but I´m pretty sure one of the symbols looked like a bike so I don´t think they´re that old!
The peace and quiet of El Valle in the daytime just gets more peaceful and more quiet at night. In fact it´s pretty much shut by 9pm so no partying on this particular Saturday. Still, we´ve got a long day and 3 bus rides ahead of us tomorrow so it´s probably just as well.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.232s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 7; qc: 45; dbt: 0.047s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Stevie B
non-member comment
Birds...
Hey Kat, Kot... Ket.... that's it Kit....!!! Love the pics keep em comin, sounds like your havin the time of your life... far better than being in Winchester I can assure you of that... It's my B'day in a few weeks time so obviously you will be coming back for that.... 8ish in Greens...!!!! Keep on havin fun and take care... Love S xxx