PANAMA IN A NUTSHELL

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Due to a combination of my chronic malaise and infrequent wi-fi I now find myself about 4 weeks and 3 countries behind in my travel blog. This has led me to the inevitable conclusion of condensing a couple of weeks travel into one blog or risk just giving up completely (something which I would eventually regret). So, here we go!

We arrived in the city of David eagerly anticipating an extraordinary stay at the infamous Purple House hostel. Lonely planet gives this place an outrageously good review but I was seriously disappointed. Stuck out in the dreary suburbs the purple monstrosity stands out like an elephant in a chicken coop. The reason it received such high praise was the reason I hated this place with a passion; the owner. She lives in the hostel and treats the place like a military camp. There are so many rules and regulations, extras and conditions it feels like a prison. Far from being ‘friendly and informative’ I found her to be rude and temperamental. Please, if you ever find yourself in David go elsewhere!

Now I have that rant over ill get to the interesting stuff! From David we decided to attempt the Quetzal trail which was supposed to be an easy 20km trek downhill from Cerro Punto to the mountain village of Boquette. We started the trail with 3 others from Purple house. It turned out to be a horrible day of torment and sore limbs. The trail was wet and slippy and in places was impossible to follow leading to us scrambling down a rock face where everyone slid on their arse atleast once, some coming off much worse than others. I still have three large tears in the back of my pants as a reminder. On the plus side we did see some wild howler monkeys up in the canopy who greeted our presence by throwing branches down at our heads. It was nearly 8 hours later that we found ourselves trudging wearily along the extremely hilly road to Boquette. It was getting dark and we were atleast 8km of mountainous road from the village so it was with tremendous relieve that we flagged down a passing bus and finally got to town and into a bed.

Boquette is actually a very nice little town but we decided to press on the next day and head to the beach town of Santa Catalina for some sun and relaxation. After an 8 hour bus ride we arrived and booked into a nice hostel on the beach. Over the next 2 days the highlight turned out to be the excellent pizza we ate at Jamming pizzeria (NOTE: make sure you bring a flashlight because there are no street lights on the very muddy road to the pizza place, are feet were like mutant mud peoples feet by the time we got back to the hotel). Two solid days of torrential rain put waste to our plans of some sun bathing, we did witness some of the best thunder and lightening ive ever seen though! After that disappointment we headed north to the town of El Valle hidden in a huge extinct volcanic crater.

El Valle turned out to be a much more pleasant experience (didn’t rain once!) It’s a picturesque town surrounded by lush green mountains which used to form the craters edge millions of years ago. We had a nice short walk up to El Chorro Macho, a refreshing waterfall with a small pool at its base where you can cool off after the walk up to it. Watch out for the over-territorial little fishys in the pool though, they bite! There’s a Canadian restaurant on the main road through town which offers a nice change from chicken, rice and beans if you can afford it. Watch out for the crazy drunken American guy who lives in town, he can become tiresome very quickly, drunken ‘no-knees’ Johnny is the name we gave him, you’ll find out why if you meet him.

We had a flight to catch on the 22nd May from panama city so with 3 days to spare we headed off to the big smoke. We decided to stay in the old part of the city, Casco Viejo, turned out to be a nice place to stay. The main tourist draw here is obviously the famous canal, so on our 2nd day we hopped on a couple of buses to get out to the Miraflores Lock. We arrived around 4 pm which turned out to be half an hour late to visit the museum so we just had to settle for the view point. It was definitely worth seeing, we were lucky enough to see 2 big ships go through the canal, which was nice….

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Photos

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random
ill sort out more proper photos when i get to argentina!

BIG CANAL
etc