Santa Fé and David (January 12th to the 17th)

Friday January 12th

We took the 7 AM bus out of Santa Catalina, and had made it back to Santiago by 10:30. From the bus terminal in Santiago we walked a short distance to the pan-American highway where we visited an ATM and Los Tucanes Cafeteria restaurant again. We were pretty early for lunch, and as a result, there were no beans to be had! There were no plantains either! We had boiled potatoes, coleslaw and a salad consisting of tomato and cucumber.

Los Tucanes, ample room for buses

a good enough lunch 

Some buses with 4 axles! We have never seen these before!

On the way back to the bus station we stopped at an El Rey supermarket to once again stock up for being in the middle of nowhere. We are headed to the small town of Santa Fe. It’s located at about 1,500 feet up in the mountains above Santiago.

While we were having lunch yesterday at La Buena Vida we ran into an American lady that we keep seeing. She was on our bus to Santa Catalina and also on our snorkel tour. Her and her husband recently retired and relocated to Panama. They are currently on a scouting mission trying to see where they might like to live long term. I asked if they had been to Santa Fe and they had. She told me that the grocery stores were horrible there, worse than Santa Catalina, and that if we were lucky we might find an onion in one, but that would be about it for produce! She also said that there were no restaurants. That sure sounds like the food dessert! This is why we stocked up on two bags full of groceries in Santiago. It wasn’t easy carrying them back to the terminal or riding for an hour and a half in the crammed bus with them on my lap!

Always loaded down with food!

It was still pretty early in the day when we arrived to our new lodging, Hostal La Qhia. We have a dorm room to ourselves, and are only paying $12 each per night. That’s our cheapest dorm in Panama so far! There is a very nice yard surrounding the hostel and a lovely outdoor kitchen and dining area. There are hammocks and a nice deck on the second floor of the main house. In the reception area, there is a binder full of information on all of the local activities. We are near a national park, so there is hiking, and since we are in the mountains, there are also lots of rivers and swimming holes. There are also farms to visit. The weather today was beautiful, dry with sunny skies. We hope that the rainy season officially came to an end while we were at the beaches! We’re excited for our next few days here.

View from the second floor deck

Rather than be lazy and only accomplish one activity today, the bus ride, we got out of the hostel and walked down the road to a place that rents tubes for floating down the river. The guy who rents the tubes sometimes goes along to act as a guide and facilitates the transportation back. He wasn’t there, but we made plans with the other people at his house to come back tomorrow at 10AM. The walk there was really pleasant. It’s nice not being in gringo central for once, there are few tourists around! There are nice mountain views all around and pretty gardens and trees. There seem to be a lot of orange trees! There was a swimming spot on the river right next to the tubing place, so we took a refreshing swim before walking back to town. The water was nice and deep with a fast current, perfect for swimming in place!

In town we explored the mini supermarkets, three of them. I found them to be nowhere near as depressing as the American lady led me to believe!! They had a good selection of canned and dry goods like oatmeal, cereal, rice and beans, and they even had produce! I found lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, celery, onions, bell peppers, garlic, potatoes and ñame (yam). There also appears to be a produce market in town. It wasn’t open when we walked past, but we’ll be going back to investigate! There are also a number of restaurants in town. The options are mostly Panamanian, but there is also pizza and Cambodian food in one of the foreign run hotels. We will probably go out for a meal while we are here. Tonight we had dinner in the hostel. I really enjoyed the outdoor kitchen. We had veggie penne pasta with lentils, cabbage, Swiss chard, onion, garlic and bell pepper.

This is a cute baby dog here called Marú. He sure is a rascal! Soon after we got here, he came running from out of nowhere and jumped into my lap and started biting my braids, then he bit my ankle and tried to rip off my sock. We’ve since seen him steal various shoes and socks from around the hostel, as well as harass the cat. The cat must be used to it, because it just laid their while the dog put it's whole head in his mouth. After dinner the dog jumped into the hammock with Jeff and fell instantly asleep. He had a busy day!

View from the balcony of the yard and open kitchen and dining area

What a rascal!

Poor kitty!

Swimming hole

the walk down to the river

it's pretty hard to be mad at the little dog, he's too cute.

Saturday January 13th

I awoke at 6 am to the incessant crowing of roosters right outside our window. Jeff kept sleeping. I read my book in the hammock for awhile, but eventually got bored and decided I could start making breakfast. When I tried to go outside to the kitchen, I discovered we were locked in! There is a main house, and the outdoor kitchen and dining area, which is connected to another part of the hostel. In the other building is another dorm room and a private room. The other dorm is full, and we are the only ones in the main house. There are two private rooms next to our dorm, but they are unoccupied. I waited until 7:30 and finally decided to jump out a window. All of the windows are located on the second floor, but at the back of the house, the ground is higher and less of a jump. About 15 minutes later, someone finally came and opened the house. I didn’t see why they lock it though! There is also a gate for the whole property that gets locked too, so we couldn’t leave here early if we wanted to.

Today sadly it wasn’t as nice out as yesterday, and even got a little drizzly at times, but we were able to get out and have a 2 activity day unhindered! In the morning we went river tubing, and in the afternoon we hiked to a waterfall.

When we checked in yesterday there was a not too friendly or helpful lady here, but today there was a new lady who was much more helpful and so friendly! Her name is Rosa. She called the tubing guy for us to make sure he was available before we made the long walk to his house. It only takes about 20 minutes to get there, but it’s down a big hill to the river. We arrived around 11, and two gigantic tubes were waiting on the porch for us. We were given life jackets, and even a dry bag for putting my phone in. A lady who lives at the house helped us. She is the same lady we talked to yesterday. She called William, the guy who is in change of the tubes and told him when we were setting off, so he could be at the other end to come get us and bring us back. We didn’t know what to expect, but we actually went over quite a few rapids! The water was cold but refreshing. Since we are in the mountains it’s warm, but not hot like the low lands. It was a ton of fun, but over too quick! Jeff’s tube was huge and fast moving. Mine had a slow leak and shrank as we went along, so I was slower! We were instructed to get out at the second bridge, which only took about 45 minutes. William was waiting for for us in a 4WD truck taxi. I guess he’s a taxi driver. He took us back to our hostel which was on the way to where we started. The total cost was $10 each. We found it to be $20 well spent!

there is a baby dog biting my ankle in this photo 

a series of photos of jeff riding down the river

i am down river on a rock

jeff had to stop and wait awhile for my slow tube to take the lead

you can't help but smile and laugh the whole time

we want to go again!

We had lunch in the hostel (arepas, refried beans and steamed veggies) before setting out for the second activity of the day, a walk to the Bermejo waterfall. Most of the walk was on farm roads with just the last bit being on a trail. We passed tons of citrus trees, as well as banana and cacao trees. The citrus grows like weeds. I got to collect a number of fruits! 6 oranges, a grapefruit, a lemon and a lime! We had a hand drawn map from the hostel to find our way. It was a bit confusing. There are more intersections than the map would have you believe! We went the wrong way and few times, but eventually found our way. We never saw any other hikers, but I was able to occasionally ask for directions from people living on the farms. We were tired and sweaty when we finally arrived, so we took a refreshing swim. We had it all to ourselves! The falls had multiple layers, with water flowing from many different paths through the large boulders that filled the riverbed. It was hard to take a photo that captured all it’s channels. We didn’t stay long, because it was getting a bit late in the day. On the walk back, we took a different road, so we could make a loop.

Am I the only person that loves that refried beans in a can retain the shape of the can??

map on the wall at the hostel, town is bottom right and falls are top middle

description from the activity book at the hostel

one of two suspension bridges we used along the way

farm road

a old orange orchard, trees covered in bromeliads

bermejo falls

farm road

We were extremely exhausted by the time we got back. It took us about 3 1/2 hours. We haven’t walked that much in awhile! There are a lot of steep ups and downs to the roads here, and the last section was a long exhausting up. On this long hill we began salivating thinking of the super fresh bananas we would eat as soon as we got back. Earlier in the day there was a small display of bananas for sale on the table in the hostel. They are perfectly ripe un-bruised bananas that grew somewhere on the property!

world's best bananas!

I cooked us more veggie lentil pasta for dinner with salad and now we will be going to bed nice and early! As I type the puppy is laying on my arm snoring. He’s pretty cute and has continued to amuse us every time we see him. He’s always up to no good! 😄

veggie lentil pasta and salad

Sunday January 14th

We were locked in again this morning and this time the door didn’t get opened until 8. We had neighbors in one of the rooms next door to ours last night, and just before the door was unlocked, a girl came downstairs and learned we were locked in. Only we weren’t really locked in, she had a key! We were given no key by the mean lady that checked us in!! 😠

We had oatmeal and bananas for breakfast. The bananas are so good I ate two of them and did not put them in the oatmeal. I swear they are the best bananas I’ve ever had! It’s a combination of windy and rainy and sunny today. We weren’t real motivated to get out and do anything. I packed us a lunch of curried cabbage salad made with raisins and orange juice, curried chickpea salad (also with orange juice) and veggie sandwiches on the packaged German bread that I like. We found the bread again in the store in Santiago, and even though Jeff doesn’t really like it, he agreed to eat it in favor of avoiding eating more yoga mat bimbo bread. I was glad to find a use for the abundant oranges we have collected!

We left the hostel around noon to do another loop hike. The first part of the hike was a 7 km walk up a paved road to Alto De Piedra, the highest elevation community in Santa Fe at 900 meters. Walking on the road uphill for so long didn’t sound very fun, so for $5 we took a taxi. There were supposed to be good views from the road, but it was a little foggy and we couldn’t see much. The driver dropped us off at the entrance to a waterfall called El Salto de Alto de Piedra. From the highway it was a about a 15 minute walk from the highway to the waterfall, first through an orange field, then down a steep muddy hill in the jungle. There were several side trails, so even for a such a short distance it was a little difficult to find the way! The waterfall was small and unimpressive. We sat next to it under our umbrella and ate our delicious lunch.

description in activity binder

town is in the middle, the falls are on the left middle, we did the red trail back

steep jungle trail

unimpressive falls

the best part, a delicious lunch

After we ate we hiked back out of the mud pit to the road where is was windy and drizzly outside of the shelter of the forest. We followed the instructions given in the description from the hostel and turned right onto a dirt road just after a “pond with a pretty chalet.” There were 3 ponds that I saw on the ride up. We chose the one with the best looking house and hoped for the best. We walked for about an hour on a muddy mucky dirt road through jungle and remote farms. It was pretty and we were fairly sheltered from the wind. We wore long sleeve shirts and our rain jackets with shorts. This is the first day since sometime in the mountains of Colombia that we have worn long sleeves for an extended period of time while outside.

Eventually we came to the end of the road and had the option of turning right and continuing along the mountains or going left back down to town. At the intersection we saw some people from our hostel who have come up the road from town, so we knew we were on the right track. The descriptions at the hostel call these roads trails, but they are definitely roads, rough 4WD roads. We saw a really capable land cruiser along the way. The view before we descended was really pretty. The walk down was through more remote farms. We also saw a gigantic tarantula on the road! 😱

nice Toyota LandCruiser

View before descending back to town

We were really tired when we got back to the hostel. I kind of feel like I could be getting sick. There were lots of coughers on our bus ride to Santa Fe. I ate a big spoonful of chopped raw garlic earlier today to help fight off the sickness. We rested in our room for awhile, then some annoying messy French people moved into our dorm and we decided to leave for dinner. For me, listening to French speakers is just as bad as listening to Israelis speak.

I still have a few raw ingredients remaining in the fridge and could have made us savory oats with lentils and veggies. We really wanted to go out to eat though, because one of the other hotels in town, El Anachoreo, has a Cambodian restaurant. The hostel is owned and operated by a Swiss-Cambodian couple. According to the American lady we talked to in Santa Catalina (she stayed at this hotel) the couple is getting divorced and the future of the hotel is uncertain. The restaurant is the only Cambodian restaurant in all of Central American. We enjoyed fried veggie spring rolls and delicious veggie curry with white rice. It was really strange to eat just plain steamed white rice without all the salt and oil that Panamanians put in it! The view from the hotel is really nice. We made a point of going early so we could see it in the light.

View from the restaurant at Hotel Anachoreo

Cambodian veggie curry

Back at our hostel we packed up our bags because we will be leaving tomorrow, and hopefully early. I made us a reservation for the next city, David. We never make plans more than a few days at a time. The hostel is called Bambu, and David is the capital of the Chiriquí province. This province borders Costa Rica, on the Pacific side of the country. When we leave this area we will visit the Caribbean side before going into Costa Rica, so we will likely be in Panama another two weeks.


Monday January 15th

We managed to ignore the morning roosters and sleep in until 7:30. I woke up feeling as though I’d successfully fought off the sickness. Since we slept in, we didn’t have to jump out the window, the door was open. We ate our last farm fresh bananas and took some orange juice soaked oats to go. We made it on the 8:30 bus. The seats in these buses are so small, even though they are designed to carry 2 people in each set of seats, Jeff and I barely fit. To make matters worse, the aisle is incredibly narrow. You can’t walk down the aisle without rubbing your body on every person you pass. In the back row, 5 people are expected to fit. We chose the back row, knowing we’d get crammed in eventually. The back row is as far as you can get from the speakers though, and often, like this morning, the music is blasting! We got on the empty bus at the terminal in Santa Fe. There are 28 seats on the bus. They slowly filled with people as we went. Eventually as expected we were 5 adults across the back row and a kid on someone’s lap too. The bus goes extremely slow and stops frequently to pick up more people. We had at least 40 people on board as we neared Santa Fe 1 hour and 45 minutes later, after having covered 35 miles!! 😂

Packed in at the back of the bus

In Santiago we stayed in the bus terminal and switched to a bus headed for David. This bus didn’t get too crowded and it drove fast along the Pan-American highway, covering 120 miles in 3 hours! We had to get a taxi from the terminal to our hostel, because it was a few miles away, and the air felt stiflingly hot after being in the freezing air-conditioned bus.

These are our fair share mugs. We bring them everywhere. They were both Jeff's from a long time ago, but I inherited the red one. I put oatmeal in the mugs today. They are like giant measure cups and come in handy often. No one uses measuring cups down here, which kind of drives me nuts!

On the taxi ride I spotted an American clothing store which are like a combination between a thrift store and an outlet or close out store. All of the clothing comes from the US and can be new or used. We decided to go there because Jeff could use a pair of shorts. The drawstring on his broke and in not a way that can be easily repaired, so they fall off. The store ended up having a ton of Patagonia clothing and lots of other name brands that no one down here would know anything about. It was really strange. It took a lot of willpower not to buy a bunch of stuff we didn’t need. In the end Jeff didn’t get any shorts, but got a t-shirt, and I got some cheap cotton shorts and a cotton tank top. Cotton feels more comfortable in the heat, and I have little to no cotton clothing!

A San Diego tourist shirt in the American clothing store!

American clothing store, looks like a US thrift store

After our shopping extravaganza we went to a rotisserie chicken restaurant that I remember fondly from when I lived here. I loved the cheap side dishes of steamed yuca and fried plantains, so much so that the two other American exchange students and I ate there for our Thanksgiving dinner away from home. I have been looking forward to going back there for weeks now! For $2.50, you can get a giant plate of either yuca or patacones. We got one of each and shared them. They were of course delicious! The yucca came with a ton of sauce on top that was probably mayo based, and very rich, that combined with all the oil in the plantains left us feeling quite ill by the time we finished! It’s unfortunate that the healthier you eat, the less you can tolerate an unhealthy meal! That was our dinner.

Patacones and yuca

We checked out the grocery store on the way back. We are in Panama’s second largest city, with a population of about 150,000, but the selection in the grocery store was nowhere near as good as it was in Panama City. The produce section was actually rather depressing, and reminded me of what you might find in a middle of nowhere small town USA. We retired to our room after returning to the hostel. We have our own room this time, because staying in the dorms would have only been $2 cheaper!


Tuesday January 16th

I did lots of research this morning and tried to come up with a plan for our next week or so. I hate planning. It’s the worst part of travel in my opinion. I also wanted to update the blog and get another post up, but the internet here keeps going in and out and is frustratingly slow. You’d think it should be pretty good in a big city!

We were both still feeling ill from last nights meal, maybe we got mild food poisoning, I don’t know. We didn’t eat until well after noon when we finally left the hostel. We searched for a fruit stand from which we bought bananas and each ate two. We decided to visit a different grocery store where we found some nice apples and probiotic prunes, haha! After eating the apples we took a walk to the central plaza. This is the first city we’ve been to in a really long time that has a central plaza! I remember going there in the past and buying freshly juiced sugar cane. Jeff has never tried it. Sadly there was no sugar cane man, and the area really didn’t look familiar to me. I wonder if it was renovated or if I simply don’t remember it? We got a late lunch in a cafeteria restaurant called Multi-Cafe. I ate there a lot the year I lived here, and remember loving it. It turned out to be the best cafeteria food we’ve had in Panama, not counting the vegetarian one in Panama. It was really clean in side, all of the food was well stocked and looked fresh and appealing and there was actually a decent vegetarian selection. We were really happy with our meals, and also very glad not to strike out again with Panamanian food! We had veggies, sweet plantain slices, stewed beans and potato salad with beets and some slices of cantaloupe and papaya.

Finally, a colorful plate of cafeteria food!

On the walk back we visited another fruit stand where I got more bananas, some avocados and a super ripe cantaloupe. We wanted to go out for dinner to try a new Vietnamese restaurant, but I still had a few leftover veggies that I had brought on the bus with us from Santa Fe, so I cooked instead. We had rice, curried lentils, steamed carrots and chayote squash and avocado. I got free white rice from the hostel. There is always white rice and pasta to be had for free in hostels, those are among the only things we never take! I had to look up instructions for cooking white rice, I have never made it before!

Chayote squash is very common in Central America. It is kind of like zucchini. It grows on a climbing vine.

Wednesday January 17th

I have become obsessed recently with hiding beans in our oatmeal. My Dr. Greger book is planting crazy ideas in my head and causing me to long for health foods, so today we had lentils in our steel cut oats! They didn’t bother me a bit! Dr. Greger thinks you should have beans in every meal!

These are steel cut oats, and they are brown from cinnamon and cocoa powder.

Today we are moving an hour into the mountains to the famous coffee growing town of Boquete. Boquete produces the worlds most expensive coffee, the geisha variety of Arabica coffee. Boquete is also famous for being a top destination for retired Americans to live. It was featured in AARP magazine and international living and the towns population of retirees exploded after that. Sadly, they are driving up property values, and forcing the locals out.

We decided to hang around the hostel in the hammocks for awhile before leaving so that we could squeeze in one more patacones and yucca meal at the rotisserie chicken restaurant before we leave David for good. The hostel has a resident coati that has a few nests in the trees of the backyard. The coati was already here when the owner of the hostel bought the property. How exactly it got here is not really known, but someone took it from a forest somewhere. Coatis are not native to the city of David. It’s sad, because there’s only one coati, and she will never have a mate or any coati friends or family. Whenever we see coatis on hikes, they are always in family groups. Yesterday the owner (a guy from NYC) gave the coati a raw egg to eat. This is a regular occurrence, but we didn’t see it again after that. While we were in the hammocks it came to visit us. Jeff gave it a piece of cantaloupe and we watched it dig around in the dirt for insects. For a wild animal, it is fairy tame and allowed us to lightly and carefully feel its fur. It was worth sticking around just to visit with the coati. When we left it was resting in the rafters of the open air kitchen, after having broken into someone’s food locker and devouring a loaf of whole grain bimbo. The coati had broken a secret entrance hole in to the back wall of the plywood locker sometime in the past, and probably routinely gets free food this way!

Look at that big fluffy tail!

Coatis are related to racoons

Jeff likes to pet everything

So cute!

We didn't know how much we could get away with, but it never lashed out.

My new "American" clothing! The backyard is nice, like a jungle.

In the end we decided against going for more patacones and yucca and took a taxi straight to the bus terminal. We rode a big old school bus to Boquete, squished into the back row next to our backpacks. The bus went full thanks to a fair that’s going on in Boquete through the weekend. It was hard to get a hostel reservation. Everything in town was sold out on Hostelworld when I checked yesterday, so I emailed a few hostels and got reservations at two different hostels. We will have to move after a few days. Our first few days we will be at Mamallena. Mamallena belongs to a chain of hostels. We have stayed in the Cartagena location and the Panama City location. We learned though that each hostel has different owners, so we don’t really understand the shared name.

It was cold and rainy when we got to Boquete. We tried to go to a popular bakery called Sugar and Spice for lunch or to possibly buy bread, but today is the one day of the week that it is closed. We next went to the local Cafetería restaurant and didn’t really like the available options, so we left. Next we went to the grocery store, so we could just make our own food, but when we got back to the hostel the kitchen was closed. We forgot, they close it everyday from 3-4 pm for cleaning. Next we visited a health food store I found on Happy Cow, it’s called Orgánica. This place was like an oasis in the food desert of Panama! It was a tiny store, but they had the best collection of health foods we have seen anywhere in Panama! They also had natural body products and supplements. They even had our favorite, Dr Bronners soap and freshly ground peanut butter! We ogled all the food, but in the end settled for a container of fresh peanut butter and a kombucha to share.

When we got back to the hostel, the kitchen was open, and I made haste in surveying the free food box and shelf in the fridge. I got some free tortillas, olives and salad veggies, so we had chickpea salad wraps and a green salad, and some pineapple that I got for free before we left the hostel in David. I am always carrying the food that others leave behind. It makes for a cheap and varied diet.

Chickpea salad, tortillas and green salad

We were super tired after dinner. We had been considering staying up to do a hike that people do overnight up the volcano in town, Volcán Barú. This volcano is the only volcano in Panama that is considered active, although it hasn’t erupted in at least 500 years. The only other volcano is the extinct crater valley of El Valle de Antón. The summit of Barú is the highest point in Panama at an impressive 11,400 feet. I bet most people would be surprised that there are mountains that high in Central America. From the top on a clear day lucky hikers can see both the Pacific and Caribbean Oceans. We frequently hear that it’s the only place in the world from which you can see both oceans while standing in place, but I don’t know who started that rumor, because there’s definitely a volcano in Costa Rica that has this feature as well. The volcano in Costa Rica is called Cerro Chirripó, it has a summit elevation of 12,500 feet and represents Costa Rica’s highest point. We want to hike that volcano too! The higher elevations are home to unique alpine cloud forest vegetation! Volcan Baru is commonly hiked all night starting at midnight to reach the top at sunrise when you have the best chance of a clear view. Even in the “dry” season, the cloud forests surrounding the volcano remain cloudy and rainy. They don’t call it cloud forest for nothing. We don’t tend to be wake up for sunrise hiking people, but we will do what it takes to get a clear view! We checked the weather forecast for the mountain on a website called mountain forecast, and it wasn’t looking good, and we were tired and not mentally prepared for an all nighter, so we decided against it. The “trail” is nothing more than a 4WD service road for the antenna forest at the top, you can actually pay $150/person to ride to the top, but that’s no fun! It’s an 8 mile walk each way, and takes about 5 hours of walking through the night to reach the top, so it requires some endurance and a certain level of fitness and we aren’t ready for that just yet!

The area surrounding the volcano is a national park, so there are other hiking options. Another hike we are interested in is called the Los Quetzales trail. This trail links Boquete with Cerro Punta, the town on the other side of the volcano. Cerro Punta is the town I lived in when I was an exchange student. I hiked the Quetzales trail as a group outing with other exchange students and a chaperone, but I don’t really remember it. I hadn’t yet developed a passion for the outdoors at that age. I wasn’t raised in an outdoorsy family and had only been on a few hikes in my life. It’s possible to hike the trail on your own, but the transportation for the trailheads can be tricky unless you hike it round trip, which we didn’t want to do. I wanted to use it as an opportunity to show Jeff where I lived, so we signed up for a tour through our hostel. All of the transportation will be arranged, and we will have a guide, included snacks and we will drive right past my house on the highway.