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From Panama City, we flew to David (second largest city in Panama) and drove around 45 min. to Boquete. Boquete is a relatively small town (6,200 people according to Wikipedia) in the mountains near the border with Costa Rica. It is growing really quickly due to a large influx of American and Canadian retirees. We saw a lot of gringos around town and were amazed at all of the billboards in English and signs advertising land and houses for sale.
We stayed at Isla Verde, a beautiful resort just a couple of blocks from town. We were almost giddy when we got there because it was so gorgeous, especially after the rough introduction to Panama we'd gotten in Panama City. We got settled and were hanging out for a little while before going to get some lunch. Jason started acting funny and before I knew what was going on, he was down on one knee, asking me to marry him. I said yes, of course! And then we walked into town for a celebratory beer over lunch. Perfect!
The next day we hiked a few hours of the Quetzal Trail. It's one of the better known hikes in Panama,
so we were amazed to only run into one group of tourists and one local man in about four or five hours of hiking. Before we started hiking, we'd talked to the guy at the ranger station for awhile, and he told us what a quetzal sounds like. About an hour into the hike, we heard the sound and actually saw the quetzal flying over the trail. We didn't get any pictures, but it was pretty cool.
That day was St Patricks Day, so we spent the evening at a gringo-owned bar drinking Guinness (from a can) and eating Irish stew and soda bread while some local expats sang Danny Boy. It was kind of disorienting, but we had a good time.
The other fun thing we did was a tour of Cafe Ruiz, one of the big coffee producers in Panama. Our guide Carlos told us all about the coffee-making process and forever turned us off of Folgers, which he calls Floaters because they buy all of the coffee beans that float in water (good coffee beans sink). It was fun and we bought lots of coffee to bring back.
After a few fun days in
Boquete, we reluctantly left our beautiful resort and got on a plane to Bocas del Toro, an island chain on the Caribbean.
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