Into Panama

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The early morning bus from Ciuded Neily was crowded and it was already hot when we were dropped at the Costa Rican side at around 8am. The whole process was rather chaotic and getting papers dealt with seemed rather random. We also had to wait some time in a bank queue to get our Costa Rican Colones changed into dollars before heading to the Panamanian side which seemed even more disorganised.

I tried to find the usual arrival forms that all countries seem to want but was only given a Customs form. Then we were approached by a guy with an official looking badge who said that we needed to pay a $1 tourist tax. We were rather suspicious as we believed we needed a tourist card which cost $5 and he said it wasn't this but we ended up paying our $1 each. A sign on the window of the entry office said that we should buy our tourist card before presenting our papers but when we asked the guy on the desk he said we didn't need one. He stamped our papers after only asking how long we would be there. We then had to back track to a bare room where unofficial looking men were randomly searching bags. After searching ours they didn't seem to want our completed forms and paid so little attention that we nearly got searched again.

Anyway, after lots of faffing we walked through and were pointed straight to a minibus heading to David, the nearest major town. This bus stopped for everybody who waved it down so took a little while but when we finally arrived into David there was a bus leaving for our final desination, Boquete, in a few minutes. We thought we´d seen the last of chicken buses (ex-US school buses) somewhere back in Nicaragua but here was one waiting for us. Luckily it was not nearly as full as they get in Guatemala and we were able to have a seat each - the only way Hugh can really fit in one!

The temperature dropped slightly as we went up into the hills and was just about reasonable when the bus dropped us in the main square of Boquete - a small town famous for its coffee. However, it is also now famous as a popular retirement area for Americans and the hills around are dotted with gated communities of ex-pats. This makes for a weird combination of very typical Latin American small town full of estate agents!

We had booked into a small apart-hotel and ended up with a lovely little chalet with living room/kitchen as well as a decent sized bedroom which was rather lovely. After lunch we took a (rather hot) walk up the road out of town to a small cafe which is part of one of the coffee processing plants and arranged a tour for the following morning. Next to the plant is a private garden that is open to the public and is full of brilliantly coloured flowers - the most we have seen for sometime and with beautiful views over the surrounding hills.

That evening we cooked up a huge veg curry and enjoyed our space - a pleasant change after the small town food we'd been stuck with for the last few days in Costa Rica.

The following morning we were picked up for the coffee tour which turned out to be really interesting. Ruiz Coffee Company have been in existence for many years and the original owner, Mr Ruiz, was just arriving at the plant when we got there. He is now 86 and all 4 of his children are working for the company including one in the US and one in Germany selling the product overseas.

They took us to one of the coffee farms which looks quite different from what you might expect. They grow their coffee in shade so the trees are rather randomly planted and interspersed with all sorts of other trees and bushes. The try to encourage lots of birds which eat the insects that they don't want and they use a range of organic fertiliser such as chicken droppings and the chaff from the coffee beans. Carlos, the guide, explained the whole process from picking (by hand) through washing, pre-drying, drying, peeling, then onto sorting by size, shape, colour and density (by a rather clever machine!) and to packing of the beans for export. They only roast and grind beans that remain in Panama and this happens at a different plant where we went for a final smell and taste test. Sadly this didn't include the geisha coffee (a mis-spelling of an Ethiopian word which is where it originates from) - the most expensive coffee in the world at around $500 a pound. There is obviously a market for this though as Ruiz are currently cultivating new trees of this variety for future production.

What was a little more concerning was what Carlos told us about the impact of the retirees house prices in the area which sounded not far off UK prices and way beyond the reach of most local people. He was lucky because his mother in law had sold him some land to build a house at below market price as otherwise he would've had to move away.

Still feeling a little feeble we had a quiet rest of the day and got up early the next morning with the intention of doing a longer walk. However, it turned out the map that we had was wrong and the bridge over the river behind our chalet didn't exist. The only bridge in town was being rebuilt so it wasn't possible to do the circular walk we had planned. As it was starting to rain we abandoned our plans and did some chores heading off for a restaurant up the hill out of town later in the morning for lunch. However, our luck just wasn't in as we were unable to find the restaurant and, when we couldn't climb uphill any further, aborted that idea as well and had a crepe in a cafe near town instead.

The following morning it was back on the chicken bus to return to David - a bumpy bouncy ride. At David we were pointed towards a long queue for tickets for the bus to Panama City which seemed very disorganised. We were only going part of the way and managed to get a ticket in time for the next bus. This was a proper coach with fearsome air conditioning but reasonably comfortable. In fact I was asleep when they shouted our stop (or should I say road junction in the middle of nowhere) and had to leap off rather quickly. From there we had to walk a little way down the connecting road to a bus stop where we were crammed into a minibus already pretty full of people going to Chitre, the main gateway town to the Azuero peninsula.

We had booked a room in a hotel whose website said that it had recently been refurbished and for which we'd found a couple of good reviews. I'm not sure which rooms they'd refurbished but it certainly wasn't ours although the air conditioning worked pretty well, which was an absolute necessity.

Chitre is more small town Panama but is a good base for exploring the area with a number of interesting places round about. Sadly it's not a gourmet capital though the hotel we were in was run by a family who were partly from Indonesia so we did have an attempt at Nasi Goreng a couple of times!

Over a couple of days we visited a nearby town which is famous for its ceramics (but actually wasn't very exciting), a nearby beach (well, series of mudflats) which was great for waterbirds and, the main event, the Feria de Azuero in nearby Villa de Los Santos. The Feria is a huge commercial event - I can only imagine it's a bit like the Yorkshire Show (though I've never been, H: it was a little bit like the Essex Show) with lots of commercial stands, a fair, music stages, cars, tractors and animal competitions. The cow judging was particularly interesting (!!) and there seemed to be a lot of interest in a rather strange way of riding horses which made the horses look like they were dancing on hot coals. We went back on the Saturday evening - probably a mistake as the traffic queued to get there, then we had to queue for tickets and then everything we tried to see was just finishing. However, it was astonishing to see the number of people there. Chitre is the largest town for miles with only around 45,000 people but there seemed to be at least that many at the fair. It was also very noticeable that we were almost the only foreigners around - quite different from in Boquete. In fact we caused quite a lot of interest moving around the area on local buses, not always completely successfully. One trip we got sent backwards and forwards from one side of the road to the other as we tried to work out which direction we needed to get the bus. On another trip we ended up back in the town, about 100m from our hotel, around half an hour after getting on the bus before it eventually took us to where we wanted to be.

The other event while we were there was that Los Santos beat Panama City in the finals of the baseball championships. Baseball is bigger than football here and there were parades of cars through the streets of Chitre late into the night, honking their horns, blowing whistles and large trucks with parties on the back and people banging drums - luckily our air conditioning was loud enough to drown out most of the noise!

Finally we left Chitre on the last bus of our trip through Central America. But more of that next time.....

Lots of love

S + H xx

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