Panama: Day 5 - Boquete!

We arrived in David at 6am as scheduled and hopped on the next bus to Boquete (an hour's drive). It was on one of their brightly and uniquely painted city buses that Panama is famous for. They are converted school buses that are each uniquely painted in bright colours with random images. The backrests were FAR too vertical though, it was really uncomfortable.

We were dropped off in Boquete just as the shops were opening up and I had a coffee at a really nice little coffee shop there.

Boquete has clearly a MUCH higher standard of living than other cities we've seen in Panama (especially Colon). It is really nice here. Our hostel (La Jungla) was still a short cab ride into the mountains, so after walking around a bit, we headed into the hills.

La Jungla is a hostel/animal conservatory and restaurant.

They have a pet spider monkey (Daisy),

two Capuchin monkeys,

a coarti (racoon/monkey thing),

a Macaw,

a bunch of parrots,

boa constrictors,

pythons,

a horse, goats,

dogs, a bunny, a huge surly rooster, and some other birds. You can interact with all of them except the spider monkey, which still has tantrums sometimes. The spider monkey is huge, I'd be a little scared interacting with her. I did get to feed her...through the bars.

Once settled in, we had a lunch at the restaurant here, and ordered the best pizza I've ever had. Just $8.00 for the pizza and $1.00 for a beer. Minnie and I split the bill and had enough food for both lunch and dinner.

The art work was a little trippy in the restaurant. The capuchins had all-too-humanlike faces and resembled some celebrities (William Dafoe, Nick Cage, Tommy Lee Jones) and there was a creepy sloth who looked like he had just the right amount of mushrooms.

William Dafoe

We went for a walk after lunch and found this little trail going down the steep mountain side to a river where wild bananas, lemons, and oranges grew.

Lemon Tree

The rainforest is much 'cleaner' here than it is down in Colon. You can easily walk through it without a machete and there were few bugs.

Minnie went for a nap afterwards and I hung around in the animal cages.

The owner let me in the Capuchin cage (which was the best moment of my life I think). They went ape-wild and immediately jumped on me when I walked in.

The one started licking inside my ear, at least buy me dinner first!

They both went bananas when I fed them (bananas). I love monkeys!

We bussed back to town for the evening and just walked around a bit. We got on the wrong bus initially (well, it was the right bus, but going in the wrong direction), which I am glad for as we got to drive around and see a lot of the beautiful mountains in Boquete. We saw some wild forest fires on the way back though, that was a little scary. It has been very windy here, so I guess they are spreading easily.

Tomorrow, we are moving to the hostel Mamallena, which is right in town. There are no other travellers at La Jungla and we were hoping to meet some new and interesting people.