Panama City to Boquete: Ladies don't sweat, they glow!

---

Another sleepless night in an airless room of 30degrees with a broken fan and a plastic mattress - the joys of hostels! Great if you are a jockey trying to drop every last lb before a race, but not conducive for my sleep when I have strong preferences for cold rooms. So I took myself off for a stroll, which meant more 'glowing' and overheating - you can't do anything in this stifling heat without glowing!

Taylor was due to come to Boquete with me this morning, but he had his money stolen from the club last night, the third possession of his being that has been stolen in the local clubs on consecutive nights (the first being shoes and then his bank card). So I head off to the bus station by myself - which fortunately wasn't as complicated as the previous day to get to Colon. I quickly learn that the kind ticket lady has put me in seat #1, which is on the top at the front of this double decker coach. Anyone who has ridden a bus in London with me will know my love for the top front seats, so you can imagine how I couldn't contain my excitement of an 8hr bus ride through Panama in this prime position!!!

The bus ride itself was a long, glorious affair on the whole, through sun, rain and an electrical storm along the Pan American Highway which heads north west towards Costa Rice through the rainforest. I even came across a novel way to transporting horses on the back of a pickup truck - very different to how we do it at home! Alas, it did make me incredibly sad in a number of ways, mainly the stark realisation of the deforestation that has occurred for agriculture and resource extraction, alongside the very evident road widening scheme, which is a huge environmental scar. But what makes it worse is that most of the cattle I saw were skinny and mangey looking - are we really clearing one of our most natural and diverse resources for these cattle herds and to facilitate greater logging practices, purely because our world can't contain our consumption practices? How long can we continue destroying these precious and finite resources on our planet to satisfy our consumer desires before the Revenge of Gaia? This imbalance of consumer demand / corporate greed vs Mother Nature is sure to hit tipping point, and I can't help but think that when it does it'll be Mother Nature who wins. She's pretty robust and has been around for far longer than we have....

I arrive in Boquete in the evening - it's a delightful rural town at the foot of a volcano. I instantly feel more relaxed in this friendly town in comparison to Panama City, and I can't wait to spend the next few days here exploring the coffee plantations, hiking the volcano and visiting the abundance of waterfalls and hot springs. It's much cooler here too, so sleep on non-plastic mattresses is on the agenda. I have already come to learn that at 5am, the dawn chorus is something special too - no alarm clocks needed here!!

---