Rolo on Tour

Escaping the rain I wound up in the second biggest city of Panama called David, where I had a nice relaxing time. At the beach next to it I had a very tasty pescado frito, which to my surprise came as a whole fish!

Birds like fish too

For new year´s eve I went to Panama City to celebrate it there. The first thing which struck me when I arrived is the skyline: After having traveled for quite some time now, where the tallest building I saw was maybe 15 metres high, this one came as a big surprise:

View of the skyline from the balcony of my hostel (Luna´s Castle)

Well at least that explains where the money earned off the canal might go to…

Quite unorthodox: The Revolution Tower in Panama City

The first night I had to sleep in the hostel´s „movie theater“, because all the regular beds were taken, nevertheless I had a surprisingly good sleep there. Besides that, the time I spent in Panama City was rather unspectacular – including the visit of the Panama canal.

Having seen enough of scyscrapers for the moment I went to the valley of Boquete, situated in the mountains. From there I climbed Panama´s only volcano – Barú (Yeah, another volcano, I know. It is really funny how you never do that back home and here you do it every other week or so..) starting at 11 pm in hope of seeing the sunrise the next morning. Also on some days you can actually see both the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean.
But me, I was not that lucky. All I saw was clouds and all I felt was rain and wind, so it was freeeezing.

Rather disappointed near the top of Barú

Besides that Boquete is a very nice little town, where you have many options to wander around or visit some gardens. You can also do many activities there, which I did not do as I considered them quite overpriced. As well it was funny to find many brochures where Panama is trying to attract US citizens to retire here and especially go to Boquete for that.

View of Boquete

Deciding that Boquete was still not remote enough I spent some days in a hostel called Lost and Found, which is situated in the middle of nowhere in a cloud forest reserve. Unfortunately it rained again almost all of the time, which made hiking difficult and also it got a bit monotone therefore – the major distraction being the foosball tournament which is held there every night.

View from the hostel: Rainbows were quite common to see as the weather there changed so quickly.

The most difficult thing turned out to be getting back to civilization: I waited 2,5 hours on the road, where there are supposed to come busses by every half an hour. I saw 4 busses while I was waiting, but all of them were full. Finally some truck drivers picked me up, so I got my first ride ever as a hitchhiker!

Waiting for somebody to pick me up…

View of the inside…

and of the beautiful landscape outside of the truck.

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The time intervals between my posts get longer and longer, so one short update on what I did the last 2 weeks:

After having relaxed enough in Liberia I made my way to the national park of Monteverde without actually going to visit the park. Instead I went to another canopy tour and it was not quite comparable with the one I went to in Nicaragua. This one was called ‚Extremo‘ and that name was justified as they had crazy long and high cables, the last one being a 1 km long so-called superman cable, where you were basically flying over a valley, 180 metres high. Awesome!

Next I spent two nights in the capital of Costa Rica, San José. It is supposed to be a bit dangerous there, but nevertheless I was quite surprised that when I got off my bus at 7pm on the main road and only had to walk 200 metres to my hostel, everybody advised me to take a cab there. I still walked and it was fine.
San José was quite fun, in the hostel with some creative dinner and drinks and later watching a full lunar eclipse in the middle of the night and the day I left in front of it, where I met some street artists juggling for tips, so I could not help but helping them earning some money ;-).

Those guys were pros, here one of them got an indoor surfboard on his chin 😉

I also found a german book in the book exchange and it was so cool to once again understand everything you read which for me is not the case reading in english.

The days of Christmas and New Year’s I planned to stay at the caribbean coast and Puerto Viejo de Talamanca was first on the list. The hostel I was in there was quite huge, there was a countless number of tents and hammocks plus some dorm rooms. The first time during this trip I slept in a tent and it was quite comfortable.

The area, where all the tents were set up; mine is next to the bucket

Christmas was spent ruining my feet playing soccer in the woods with locals and having tacos for dinner. Quite different than normal!

Next day I had enough of Costa Rica and went to Bocas del Toro, Panama, where I met my friend Mack again. Unluckily it turned out that the day I arrived was the only one for a long time with sunshine, which prevented all beach plans and made us leave there after 3 nights.

This was as close to sunny as it got…

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