We left on Tuesday, April 21 for our trip to the Costa Rican border, to Boquete, and to Santa Catalina. Here’s what the trip looked like on the map:
Panamá to Rio Encantado (very close to Boquete) to Paso Canoas (border) to Boquete to Rio Encantado to Santa Catalina to Panamá. Whew!
If you go back to the map comparing Panamá to North Carolina, you can see that the furthest distance that we traveled – from Panamá to the border (Paso Canoas) – is roughly the distance from Raleigh to Asheville. However, due to the road conditions and all the construction (they’re working to widen the main highway through Panama from 2 to 4 lanes and they’re doing it ALL at the same time, it seems), it takes about 7 hours to do that trip, where as in NC it would take about 4 hours on I-40. Ugh. We preferred not to think of it like that.
So the first night, we stayed…in a TREEHOUSE! It was super cool. It was right on a river in the middle of nowhere in a part of Panamá that’s a lot cooler than the City b/c it’s in the mountains. The general area is called Boquete, and because of the climate, a lot of expats live there. After living in this crazy heat for over three months, we were thrilled to sleep outside in the cooler weather.
There was a first deck with chair where you could sit and enjoy the nicely lightscaped river. Up one more flight of stairs was the bedroom/bar with a lovely mosquito/miscellaneous creepy-crawly net covering the bed. Around the corner with a wall separating it from the bed was a tiny half bath.
Down below was a separate building with an open air kitchen and a full bathroom with a shower and a spider.
We woke up cool and refreshed, and despite my fear of bugs and all creepy things, I had the best time “camping out.” After a run in with a spider in the bathroom and a quick cold shower, I ran around taking pictures of everything. We were sad that we had to get on the road to the border and couldn’t enjoy our little hideout a little longer. There were so many rocks in the river that we didn’t get to climb on and a lovely little swimming hole that we didn’t get to swim in! But alas, we didn’t know what awaited us at the border, so we decided to get going as early as we could just in case.
We did, however, take the time to eat bananas that had ripened right on the tree and recently fallen off. Amazing! They were meatier than grocery store bananas, and sweeter. Really good though. What a great breakfast! I have some pictures of this but I’m having some storage issues since we’re taking so many pictures here, so I’ll just have to post them next time.
We had coffee and watermelon juice with the two owners of the property and took a quick tour of their house first though. The house was filled with pre-Colombian art. Beautiful!
Next we were off to the border! As you can imagine, that was an adventure unto itself, so I’ll save that for another post.
