Our second week in Panama was in a town called Boquete. It’s a more relaxed place than Panama City, located in the hills with much cooler weather. In my opinion the perfect climate as it was mid 20s and sunny most of the time!
Our journey there was our first taste of public transport in Panama. We’d expected a six hour bus ride to a city called David, and then a change in David to a local bus for 35 minutes. It was a Sunday and there was some kind of event near the main road about an hour in, we ended up in a traffic jam for two hours. Having left Panama City at 8:30am, we finally arrived at the hostel 11 hours later!! The nice thing was that the bus stopped for a 30 minute break for everyone to take lunch and go to the toilet, a welcome break and not something we’d seen on previous long distance bus trips in South America.
The hostel in Boquete is owned by the Spanish school, which means we were the only group staying here. We had lots of space to relax, with hammocks, and a big garden and some yoga mats to stretch out on. We had a little private room with a shared shower and toilet just around the corner. The shower was one of those terrifying ones with bare wires just above the shower head and a plug in the wall!
We had a new teacher, and a new student Will in our class just for the week. He was also from the UK and, when chatting, we found out we work in the same industry and have lots of mutual connections on LinkedIn (not that I’ve been thinking about work too much!). Our teacher Heidy was nice and we got through a lot of topics this week. It was a bit disruptive having a new teacher again though, and there wasn’t a classroom with a board for us, it also felt like we didn’t get much time to practice speaking, so it was a slightly frustrating week and not the easiest way to learn.
Each week on the Spanish course we have one big activity included. In Boquete this was a zip-lining canopy tour. We were driven further up into the hills and arrived at a lovely resort (there was a fancy restaurant and some little cabins to stay it, it all looked very luxurious). We were fitted into harnesses and hard hats then given a briefing. The guides were so friendly and really good with nervous people like me! They all remembered our names despite doing this three times a day!
Once you get going on the first zip line there is no turning back! I was really shaky but did it and surprised myself by really enjoying it. The lines went through and above the trees, and you could see coffee and tea plantations. There are 12 lines covering 4.5km in total. The tour finished about an hour before our bus back, all timed so that you would go and buy a drink or lunch whilst you waited! We had an expensive cup of Geisha coffee ($7 for a small cup), it’s supposed to be one of the best in the world but Chris wasn’t entirely convinced it was worth the price! I had a delicious iced tea drink called Sexy Geisha Tea, oddly named but very nice.
We also had a cooking class this week. A Panamanian cook who we helped to prepare a dish called Mono (this is the word for monkey in Spanish so we were relieved to find out it wasn’t actually made from monkey!). The kitchen is too small for all of us, so a few helped to chop vegetables and others either watched the cooking or relaxed outside. A few of us squeezed into the kitchen and chatted with the cook in Spanish. She was telling us all sorts of crazy stories, and we kept having to check we’d got the words right as we thought we couldn’t possibly have understood her properly the stories were so random! The meal was nice, a stew with rice and beans which we ate from banana leaves.
On Wednesday evening we had another dance class, although this time it was a dance and exercise class and was very full on. It was an hour jumping around to Latin American music and learning some moves to different rhythms which was great fun.
On Wednesday night/Thursday morning we went for an epic hike up Volcán Baru which is the highest mountain in Panamá. We’re going to do a separate post on this as it was very impressive!
On Friday we had our last class of the week and then headed to some hot springs for the afternoon. We had the same taxi driver, Nico, who had picked us up from the volcán hike so we had more of a chat with him, he was telling us all about Panama history and culture so it was a bit of a Spanish lesson too.
The hot springs were a 2km walk from the main road, which we’d thought would be nice, but after the hike and on a more humid day we were all tired and sweaty by the time we arrived! We jumped straight into the cool river and relaxed there for a while. The hot springs are very rustic and informal, more like natural pools, they got hotter the further away from the river you went. We found one pool so hot we couldn’t stay in for long, although it was beautiful, surrounded by rocks and shaded by trees. We ended up back at the river. We decided we didn’t fancy the walk back and got Nico to collect us from the parking only 10 minutes walk from the hot springs. We timed it well as the afternoon rain started once we were safely in the car.
Back at the hostel, our final evening was a big BBQ with everyone. Chris prepared vegetables and a huge salad for everyone, then Nick cooked everything on the grill. We ate all together at the big table and had a playlist going which we were all adding to from our various music tastes, very eclectic! We learnt some new drinking games, no one was really drinking but we had fun finding out what is done in different countries.
So that was our week in Boquete, getting to know our group better with lots of exercise and adventure in probably the coolest climate we’ll come across on our travels this time. We missed out on seeing more of the town as we were staying so far out, but had a nice hostel to relax in between activities and classes.
Our next post will be on Volcán Baru, and then on to Bocas del Toro on the Caribbean coast.
