After our appearance in our telenovelas was over we decided to pack our bags and head to the volcano we looked at every morning. Upon arriving in Boquete we went straight away to the perfect hostel, Suenos del Río! We chatted with the lovely owner Itza who set us up with a room. We promptly laid down and slept the afternoon and evening away.
The next day we decided to sign up for the night hike up the Volcan Baru, the highest point in Panama. The hike was meant to leave at half past eleven, so we decided to get some coffee/sweet treat and relax (nap) the afternoon away. As soon as we layed down the rain began to pour and didn’t stop until eleven; alas, our trip was cancelled (we were actually to tired at any rate and had already decided to hike it in the morning)!
We awoke to a sunny partly cloudy morning, ate our usual muesli breakfast, and hit the road! The plan was to try to either hitchhike or catch the bus that was possibly meant to pass by. As our luck would have it, a little truck with an adorable gentleman pulled up and offered us a ride! He thought we were mad and got quite a laugh at our expense for thinking we could walk all the way to the base and hike up the volcano (apparently it’s something like an 8 hour hike or more from town, and we were definitely sauntering), so he decided to take us on a detour to see his coffee plantation and Casa! His view took in the entire valley and his coffee plants; it was beautiful and a wonderful start to the morning. After the quick visit he drove us up to the start of the 14km hike (he actually drove us farther up the path than we expected, which was incredibly lucky!).
We severely underestimated Panama’s volcanic potential! I was sure that we would arrive at Baru and breeze our way up the mountain… Well, that was not the case! All the booze that we ingested over the weeks (let’s be honest, nearly a month of booze had been happening) finally caught up to us on this severely uphill hike. It was so intense we both have now decided to either A: drink only once a month (this is R’s current plan) and/or B: if drink is ingested a serious exhausting work out will be followed the next morning (my idea, we’ll see if R will/can follow through)! We also decided to work harder at keeping in shape and begin with meditation in the morning (yes, we are aware that this now makes us the traveling vegetarian sisters who don’t drink, exercise daily, meditate, and haven’t shaved their legs since january).
After the hike we proceeded down the mountain to find our friend (insert English accent) Paul in order to arrange a breakfast date and a journey to David together. We missed running into our inter-continental couple friends, but we hope to see them again further south. We were sad to leave Boquete, but after a fantastic vanilla coffee treat we were also excited to head to the waves :-)!
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Rule #2: Don't Die. 