Back to Nature

Hey all,
The day after my last post was supposed to be our kayak trip. In the morning we met up with our travel mates Simon and Seamus who live in London but are from New Zealand and Ireland. Locals on Bocas solicit tourists into go on a five hour tour of several bays and Islands for $15 per person. We ran into one of these locals on the way to the kayaks and chatted him up. It´s the low season right now, so the locals must be a little desparate because Martin let us take his boat for the day, leaving him on shore, for $10 each. The owners of our hostel had never heard of anything like that happening. We took his shoddy laminated drawing of the Islands and bays as our map. We were quickly lost.
-- Our boat for the day --

Regardless, we had a great day, finding our own little nooks, doing some snorkeling, and throwing anchor and hanging out, eating lunch on the boat.
From Bocas we headed to the Lost and Found hostel, one of eight parcels of private property in Panama´s largest nature preserve, and the one deepest into the jungle. Beautiful spot. It felt so good to get out of the towns we´d been traveling between and into a remote nature preserve.
We spent one day touring Cune´s organic coffee farm. Cune grows everything on his farm, and continues to experiment with rotations of his various crops to see how they affect and interact with the soil of the various steep mountain slopes he farms. Erosion is a big problem for Cune.

-- Cune and the love of his life, his farm --

At the end of the tour you eat a meal fresh from the farm and sample Cune´s fruit wines that he´s been making for the last several years.








The next day at lost and found, Mike and I went on the Hostel´s ¨treasure hunt.¨ The treasure hunt is a series of clues that take you through a surprisingly treachurous hike up and down a mountain and upstream a river. It was a great way to throw a little fun into a beautiful hike through the cloud forest.


-- Mikey going to get our next clue (under the yellow sign in the top left corner)


From Lost and Found we separated with our travel buddies, Seamus and Simon, of the previous 10 days, who were headed south to Panama city. Brandon, Mike and I took several buses to the small mountain village of Boquete, arriving last night. Today we took a leisurely three hour hike via mountain roads surrounding the town, stopping to explore ¨mi jardin es su jardin.¨ Beautiful area with countless rivers flowing down from the nearby volcano and the hills covered with coffee trees.


-- mi jardin es su jardin¨



This afternoon, when I finish writing this post, we head off to a hot springs. Tomorrow we have some more serious hiking in store...possibly in ¨ search of the elusive Quetzal bird. Hope all is well.