The Hills of Boquete

The Palacio Hostel from the street

Boquete like el Valle is no jewel of the Panamanian cultural heritage but it does have its own small town Panamanian charms. It does also have a very pleasant climate and provides a gateway to a variety of nature walks in the mountains and a variety of adventure tours.

Christine in the back garden

The garden and hall shrine at Palacio

When we arrived we had ideas of going further afield to the family run Marilos a little further from the noisy town centre, but confronted with pouring rain in the town square where we got off the bus and the Palacio a one storey shack ideal for my crutches (despite its wet slippery floors) standing right opposite and the classic backpackers from way back, we couldn't resist the flow and were given very courteously by Pancho the proprietor a twin room with private banos with hot shower for $20 a night.

Panorama of the hills above Boquete (click to enlarge)

When I checked out the adjoining new kind on the block competition across the square by name of Mammalina, they wanted $27.50, were full, and obviously oriented to slick adventure tour promotion.


Boquete is a great place to spend a quiet day recuperating from 8 hour bus rides and the rigors of trying to make transfers with a lot of luggage when one of us is walking on crutches.


There is a 24 hour supermarket only a block away, a panaderia up the street, a string of bars, the town is tranquil and there are a number of Amerindian women wearing distinctive traditional dresses of differing colours.

Negobe-Bugle people in their traditional dress

We walked down to the little craft market by the children's park and bought a little Negobe-Bugle bag for $4 and asked the woman permission for her photograph. It's just simple machine sewing work, but its characteristic of what they actually wear.

Stall we bought the bag from. The woman is wearing a traditional Negobe-Bugle dress.

The craft market

Like places like Palenque, it seems to rain here every day torrentially, just as the day is about to end, brought on by the days sea breezes bringing in ever more humid air from the tropical Pacific. Then the evening starts out misty as the skies clear a little as the cool of night begins.

We have spent the time trying to plot our journey across Costa Rica, which seems to be boiling down to getting up at 6 and catching the first bus we can down to David terminal and immediately buying a ticket on the 8.30 bus for the 8 hour ride to the Costa Rican capital San Jose, which we are trying to avoid because it seems to be full of talented thieves and have little of cultural value. So we may go to one of the smaller adjoining towns such as Cartago or Heredia for the night.

The central plaza park

Technically we run the same risk as entering Panama, that the Costa Rican immigration will demand a ticket out, but at least this would technically only require a bus ticket and we have found that TICA the bus company that runs to Managua only sells for cash and not by internet VISA so there really isn't much choice.

Scenes around the central plaza

The Mists of el Valle de Anton

The ridges of the volcano rim surrounding el Valle which is nestled right in the crater

We spent the last two days in el Valle de Anton, a charming little mountain town in the mists nestled right in the crater of an extinct volcano. It's a favorite place for people from Panama City to come for a cool weekend. The climate is almost temperate but frequently rainy or foggy because of the hot moist tropical air blowing across the mountain top.

Don Pepe's and the Residential el Valle are cheek by jowl

There are two predominant places to stay set next door to one another like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Don Pepes and Residential el Valle. Neither are cheap but Enrique Tiban of the Residential replied to my e-mail and was prepared to give us a mid-week 28% discount to the old Lonely Planet price of $35 when I sounded like we might give up the ghost, and he was very helpful throughout our stay.

Two panoramas from the top of Residential of the volcano rim surrounding us (click to enlarge)

el Valle is not a distinctive Panamanian town but it is charming in its climate and environment. There are a number of good nature walks and a lot of mountain wildlife. It's a really good place to recuperate from the heat and frenzy of Panama City within two and half hours ride along the Pan American and up the tortuous road that eventually spills over the volcano's rim and down a little into town.

It was also an opportunity for Christine to buy a couple of panels of traditional appliqué of the Kuna Yala native people from near Colon at the little craft market beside the fruit market up the street. This is a congregation point for several tribes from other parts of Panama to hawk their crafts to tourists from the city.




The woman above selling traditional appliqué is dressed in Kuna Yala style clothing including headscarf and the anklet beads although she could have had an appliqué blouse, but she drove such a hard bargain that we ended up buying from the hotel proprietor's shop at a discount.


The Kuna Yala are the most politically organized autonomous ethnic group in Panama, which may explain her attitude.


Before we could even get out to look however, there was a staccato series of fireworks explosions and a parade emerged for the Queen of el Valle complete with a weird mixed brass and woodwind band and drummers, and an extraordinary posse of small boys pulling ride-a-cock-horses along between their legs.



There was also a funreal at the bare but distinctive local church.



Another high point of the evening was taking a warm shower before Christine cut out my 14 stitches, some of which had become so deeply embedded in my skin and sewed together in double loops from one side tied at the other that they were a bit like a stuck pig, so she literally had to ship her way through my dermis to get them to separate, leaving a couple of superficial woulds but at least no more stitches!

Panama City is renowned for it 'red devils' old US school buses repainted with hellish apparitions of brush art.
The el Valle bus was a much more conservative white devil, but it still sported a murderous cowboy!

We were still trying to unwind ourselves from the Panamanian scam operated by the government and COPA the Panamanian airline in which we were forced to buy a useless $780 US flight out of Panama to be let in, only to have the huge hassles in the last blog unsuccessfully trying to get a refund from the airline offices in Panama City. By the evening we arrived I had ransacked their web site and found that we were entitled to a refund if we emailed them demanding a cancellation, which they guaranteed they would reply to within 24 hours. Of course this never happened. I spent the day checking our e-mails and sending follow-ups and sure enough - no reply.

So at sunset I purchased a $3 phone card from the supermarket and at 7 am I phoned them because I know few people clog their lines first thing in the morning and had this ridiculous 30 minute conversation with the card running out which finally resulted in them locating my e-mail and within 15 minutes of hanging up I had an e-mail confirmation that our refund was being processed - in two weeks time if we are lucky!!!

The ocean from the rim of the volcano

Further down the road

After finally getting some signs of relief from financial hijack, Enrique kindly stood outside and hailed us down a bus to the Pan-American and we wound our way back down from the mountain. When we hit the Pan American we set up with a sign for David and within 15 minutes were on an air-conditioned bus cruising rather slowly but comfortably north watching a Spanish version of a Bruce Willis action thriller in the corner of our eye.

The journey took about 6 hours, and as we drive the driver's behavior began to look a little odd. Why was he forcibly braking and keeping the bus to only 50 kph going down every hill? How many bus drivers go down hill much slower than they go up? Eventually someone came from the back of the bus and banged on the door and told the driver the engine was overheating. So we had a 20 minute wait by the side of the road, while they replaced the fan belts (that were presumably also powering the vacuum brakes) finally we took off at speed now minus the air-conditioning.

Stranded on the Pan-American while they replace the belt

Finally at about 4 pm they unceremoniously dropped us all off in the rain at some non-descript office that was not the bus terminal, so we had to hail a taxi to get to the bus for Boquete, which was only $1.25 for a four block ride dropping us right at the back of a yellow US school bus heading for Boquete where we are now ensconsed in the rain and fog in a quaint little backpackers called Palacio dialing out on a free wi-fi the owner claims he doesn't have, which must belong to a nearby shop because its only on during trading hours. More on Boquete tomorrow when the weather clears.

Riding into Boquete

The Metamorphosis of Old Panama

We had a hideous time starting from being woken at about 6am by loud conversations in the reception room right through the wall in the Hostel, Hospedaje Casco Viejo, far from being a quaint old world mansion of a hotel, was a bare bones backpackers catering to a stream of young people choosing to stay in the once sleazy ghetto rapidly being refashioned as a chic tourist trap.


Casco Viejo itself is a small spit of old Panama - a little peninsula poking like a genital organ into the sea facing the new city. It is the one relatively undestroyed remnant of old Panama, left aside when all the high rises sprouted that have made Panama City look like Miami fallen off the US.


We firstly went for a short walk to get drinks to rehydrate ourselves in the heat and later took a walk across the neighbourhood to the inner side facing the new city, past the churches dilapidated condemned and now reconstructing row houses, which nearly made us wilt into the sidewalk, although it was quite stunning scenery in the morning sunshine after a torrential thunder and lightning storm which we saw approaching from the plane and which struck the city in the night.

Panorama of the New City from Casco Viejo (click to enlarge)

We then tried to get a refund on the ticket COPA had forced us to buy in Cali firstly going through the freeways of the new city to the Sheraton were we were treated well by the hotel staff but found the advertised COPA office was little more than a cubicle for hotel residents and the woman spoke no English, then after phoning COPA and being told to to to their office in Via Espana near the Riane Continental we were treated to a rude and completely unhelpful response by the staff there who insisted that because COPA had forced us to make in internet booking we would have to cancel it by an apocryphal e-mail to reservas@copaair.com. Apparently all airlines get fined by countries like Panama if they let anyone fly in without an outward ticket and get caught so, they in turn refuse to budge unless you buy an onward ticket on the spot, so its a ruthless trap for the unwary.


After trying for an hour to get service to no avail we finally cut our losses and caught a third taxi to the huge noisy Allbrook terminal. Within a few minutes we had been touted on to a bus to el Valle and were charging out in a small air-conditioned bus with super loud boom box sub woofers, so we had to make the whole trip with ear plugs.


The bus journey was pretty good. We were both able to put our sick left legs up beside the driver as we had the two front seats. The road was a freeway along the Pan-Americana nevertheless with a series of bus stops where just about every intercity bus will stop to let off or pick up passengers. The highway crossed the canal and veered along the coast with off shaped rocky hills to one side, finally coming to the el Valle turn off and then winding ever upward towards a rolling hill line which is actually turns at the summit into the large crater of an extinct volcano inside which the town of el Valle de Anton sits, arriving just as the lightning struck at sundown.

Crossing the Darien Gap by Air

Flying out of Cali

We have made it to the Hospedaje Casco Viejo in old Panama City, but what a tortuous journey. Here we will try to decide what do do next on a swathe from flying to SF to recuperate and heading for the hill resort of Boquette near the Costa Rican border to do the same thing for a day or two.

Scenes from the Cauca Valley in the way from Popayan to Cali

It started out at about 9.30 with a taxi to the Popayan bus station. We immediately got touted onto one of those rough ride buses that go from city to city driving at high speed but stopping for every person that waves them down.


Along the way there are men and women in very unusual native costume - the Guambianos peoples - who like many other ethnic groups have a long history of being evicted from their fertile lands in the Cauca Valley and gradually pushed up into the mountains but retain their own language and maintain their own cultural identity.

We saw only men but the women's dress style is very similar to the men.

Part way along the route the bus stopped and lots of people brought up different kinds of foods to sell. The guy in the photo below posed comically waving and then we decided to buy some of his bread rings. But we had only 10,000 pesos so after debating the wisdom of handing $5 out the window he assured us he would give us correct change, then meticulously counted out 9 1000s only when we counted it out ourselves there were only 8. 50c down the drain, but the cheese bread was clean and tasty.


We arrived in Cali three hours later traversing up the eastern fringe of the city to the huge somewhat soulless, although quite safe, bus terminal in the north of the city and took the elevator up to the first floor where a tangled posse of diesel fuming airport collectives were touting to absolutely fill themselves to the gunnels before heading off to the airport for the grand sum of $2.

Scenes on the way into Cali

I pleaded with them that the steps were too high into the bus so they offered me the front seat, which meant climbing up a dickey step with my good foot like getting into an articulated truck. Walking with a day pack full of camera gear and the laptop is also a bit of a strain on crutches, but my leg fees okay tonight with no painkillers and no pain when I gently stand on both feet.


When we arrived, the airport building was like standing in the runway behind a revving plane. There was no air conditioning and no windows, so the echoing noise of all the people combined with the planes roaring take off made the whole thing a cachophony. After a lot of searching we found a cambio booth to cash up our last 57,000 pesos into $30 US and then went to check in.

When we did this they then said they couldn't fly us because we didn't have an onward ticket out of Panama. I pointed out that we had a round the world ticket with an open jaw between Quito and Mexico City and that we were planning to travel overland but they refused unless we bought an onward ticket. Then when we agreed they said they couldn't use international credit cards and neither could they accept $US in Colombia, so I had to go into the airline offices and buy another (refundable) ticket on the internet for $780 from Panama to Costa Rica to get on the flight to Panama. And although they promised a written guarantee in writing at the departure gate that we could get a refund the letter never turned up.

The departure security was the stiffest we have ever seen. First they x-rayed everything, even my crutches then through the metal detectors which all went off because I had to get my crutches back to walk through them so they never even noticed my metal hip, then they opened all our bags at a separate inspection taking everything out and peering at it item by item.

When we arrived in Panama, the immigration didn't give a damn about asking for an onward ticket, so the whole thing was a load of bullshit, (or more a scam where the Panamanian government fines the airlines of they let anyone on, so they don't NEED to check!) When they then said at the Panama end that we would incur a $50 US penalty for canceling when the staff at Cali had said we would get a full refund I hit the roof. So they have put an entry on my booking that I have been raving at them about being ripped off and we'll see tomorrow how much of the $780 US I can re-extract from them. Just another hideous story of crossing the notorious Darien Gap.

Passing Cali

Neither did the Panamanians make any attempt to say we should have a yellow fever vaccination even though the airline quizzed us about it and we told them we had a medical waiver (and we haven't been anywhere near yellow fever because of the broken hip).

We then dissolved the $30 I had cashed up on a $28 taxi ride from the airport 47 kms out of town and are holed up in the most pseudo-traditional of old world hospedaje's in the most quaint old world sector of Panama City (whose central district looks like Miami fell off the bottom of the United States) - but Casco Viejo has a reputation as another neighbourhood where they might try to mug you for your camera and 'don't go out at night'.