Activity Summary
Wednesday 14th June - Day 286 (continued)
Travel to Boquete
Tour De France Netflix series binge
Thursday 15th June - Day 287
The Lost Waterfalls / Las Tres Cascadas
Afternoon in the lodge
Friday 16th June - Day 288
Luke: hike up Volcan Baru
Nicola: relax & gym
Summary
Boquete
Boquete turned out to be a very pleasant place to stay, walk and get some energy back in our lives (except Luke’s Baru hike of course). The town is small so didn’t offer all that much excitement but Boquete has some nice nearby walks, all accessible by public transport and for Luke he got to conquer the highest peak in Panama in relative safety.
It helped that our accommodation was pretty nice and in tandem with that cooler mountain weather that appeals to our British heat and humidity weakness, were super comfortable. The supermarket was the best we had had for as long as we can remember and we were so happy to indulge in some finer foods on offer. Very much enjoyed our time here without the stress of running out of water…
Transport
Boquete
Private transfer from Bocas Del Toro to Boquette with Hello Travel Panama
Hostel -> [walk] -> private boat terminal -> [water taxi] -> private boat terminal -> [shuttle] -> Boquete
Volcan Baru / hikes
To get to Volcan Baru for sunrise it’s a taxi jobby. The hostels have contacts for ‘the guy’ and it is a cost per person basis.
The other hikes are all accessible by colectivo in town. Google has the know how and made this all pretty easy, just may need a quick ask around to ensure getting on the right bus.
Accommodation
Boquete - Gaia Lodge
Number of nights - 3
Price per night per person - £20
As an American tourist hotspot the prices in Boquete were a bit steeper and not wanting to go into a hostel, we splashed the cash for a much nicer place. It was more like an Airbnb with a shared lounge, kitchen and dining room more akin to someone’s home.
The room was spacious, with two double beds and a private bathroom so if we had to, we could have spent all our time very comfortably here. Instead we binged Netflix from the comfort of the sofa and loved life.
The lodge owners were less than helpful with any Boquete local know-how but we could get past this given other hostels were able to better help.
Diary
[Continued]
The latter part of our bus trip to Boquete was through pretty torrential rain that, despite more or less flooding most of the roads, barely slowed down the bus driver. Not the most pleasant of rides as he navigated winding mountain roads but we survived.
Once off the bus near the Panama Travel office we managed to gather together our game plan to get to our accommodation while under a tiny bit of slanted roof that offered some respite from the torrential rain. It wasn’t a long walk to the lodge but we got soaked, made worse by the apparently locked gate at our accommodation, no one around to let us in and no real indicator that this was the right place bar a ‘Welcome’ sign. We ended up huddling under a bush as Luke tried to hopelessly navigate his soaked phone for more check in information before a simple shouting of ‘hello’ from Nicola finally caught the attention of someone in the office that was doing absolutely nothing and should really have seen us struggling at the gate.
After being let in we were shown around the lodge and into our room where Nicola could let out her frustrations of being drowned unnecessarily through accomodation incompetence. This anger with Gaia didn’t last long as we were surprised about how nice the place was. The private room was pretty good (minus the lack of substantial curtains) but the lounge area and kitchen were the highlights. We would find ourselves in the lounge most of our time here.
Once the rain calmed down a little we walked to the Super Baru supermarket and were in awe of the place. It was like stepping into a less than mediocre UK supermarket but it was a cut above anywhere we had been in Central America, offering reasonably priced branded things that were actually appealing and we had an absolute field day here.
After laying claim to a deep burgeoning desire for bangers & mash, Super Baru was able to deliver on Nicola’s craving, albeit so much worse than would have been on offer in the UK but it was a little victory for us.
We spent the evening in the lounge area binge watching the Tour De France Netflix series that would keep us entertained while in Boquete, Nicola wrapped in a blanket and with a calm comfort that we could have enjoyed for days without moving. It seemed like we were the only people staying here so had the whole place pretty much to ourselves.
Much to Nicola’s disappointment, Luke forced the team out of bed at a reasonable time to seize the dry morning and her desire to have a lie in was a little ruined. She would get the opportunity the next day but the lack of black out curtains and morning sun didn’t really facilitate this ambition.
We were up and out to the ‘bus terminal’ in town to get the Colectivo to The Lost Waterfalls / Las Tres Cascadas. Our timing was pretty spot on as one had just taken off and seeing some gringos in walking gear had the sense to stop and ask if we were heading that way. There were 3 other tourists on the bus already, Mark, Gill & Victoria who we got chatting to and walked with when the ride was over. The shuttles do not have a set time of departure of course but appear to be max every 30 minutes and only cost $2.50 each.
Entry to the waterfalls was $10 each and was a surprisingly entertaining walk. The waterfalls were nice, assisted by the heavy rains that consistently hit the area with really nice views over the valley.
We walked to the first two waterfalls with Mark and all 3 with Victoria, the latter who was really not well and by the end of the hike was in pieces and in desperate need of bed and recovery.
Waterfall 1
Waterfall 2
Waterfall 3
The walk was surprisingly technical, steep in a lot of parts (which naturally Luke enjoyed running up) and in parts required some decent scrambling that was assisted by pretty well maintained rope sections. It wasn’t completely dry so it required a little care when navigating.
Once back at the road there was a cab waiting and for $3 each (so not a whole lot more than the bus) we took the easy route back to town as it had just started to drizzle so fearing a soaking waiting for a bus that had clearly just been and gone, opted to ditch Gill for our own personal gain as we had got separated from her at the first waterfall (apparently going 1, 2, 3 was the wrong order?). Apologies.
Nicola went back to the room while Luke walked back with Victoria to her hostel. The night before Luke had enquired about the bus to the waterfalls and the people at Gaia were so hopeless with local knowledge he had no faith in asking them about how to get to Volcan Baru for his next big hike. Victoria’s hostel however had kitted some guests that had done the hike this morning with a contact that Luke was keen to get hold of. Sadly the knowledgeable hostel worker was not on shift and he was left trying to communicate with another useless tool but on hearing this struggle he got talking to another guest and even more fortunately was introduced to a guy who had just done it. Luke came away with the shuttle drivers number that seemingly sourced Baru with all the walkers in Boquete.
We spent the rest of the day in the hostel, Luke sorting out his $7 11.45pm pick up this evening to Baru and a quick trip to Super Baru to stock up on hiking provisions.
Our poor man’s paella inspired rice was a hit (made easier by the kitchen quality) and it was an early bedtime for Luke.
Luke story time:
While being in bed at 8pm I barely got a wink of sleep before my alarm went off at 11.15pm. It was such an unusual time to get up and start for a sunrise hike that Nicola had only just gone to bed and wasn’t even close to being asleep.
I didn’t have all that much time to drag myself around the room and get ready, having to forgo a coffee because they had locked the house up and gate so I spent most of the time trying to problem solve how to get in using which keys to open and lock the gate. Not the easy start I wanted really.
I was getting picked up on the main road, a very short walk away from the lodge, at around 11.45pm and standing there in the dark dressed in full hiking gear (pole and all) while a number of people were strolling around drunk and the bar down the road going at full swing was super weird. I actually felt a little uneasy and more so when some weird blacked out pickup truck started doing loops around the block, only stopping when a police car rolled through the area.
I wasn’t waiting too long before my shuttle guy pulled up and shouted my name. I was the first picked up, the driver said nothing and we were off on our way in the dark towards the volcano and blaring out the dirtiest dingy techno you would expect to see on a graveyard shift on a night out. As we pulled out of town and into the remote areas, this had all the hallmarks of me getting murdered. I was very close to sharing my location with Nicola to let her know where I was ended, but fortunately Luis Antonio was legit and stayed true to his word in picking up two Irish girls, Niamh & Alex, from their hostel that just happened to be in some remote stretch of road in Boquete.
With me in the back, a lone male they were probably not expecting, also likely made them feel a bit uncomfortable but this was all rectified once at the base of the walking route and I could show I wasn’t a weirdo. It was only us 3 that were dropped off by Luis and there would be no other walkers that morning. The only people that traversed the path were those getting a sunrise tour by monster truck up the incredibly rocky mountain path.
All 3 of us walked the entire route together. Personally, we were there a good hour before I would have wanted to but the pick up times were non-negotiable and I completely understood the reasoning behind this. By the reviews, it would seem most would require between 4 and 6 hours to do the 14km (AllTrails distance) summit and therefore arriving just after midnight would allow those of slower pace to make it in time.
Because we were here so early there was no point in me running off by myself (unlike Chirripo) and the girls were really good company. I found out in the taxi on the way back to town that had I not been there, they would have felt incredibly uncomfortable at the start and likely not followed through with it. They also didn’t have proper head torches or lights bar phones, so my Walmart purchase in Costa Rica ended up being used 1 between 3 to guide them. So all in all I was very happy with the team effort, my expected boredom and likely uncomfortableness being alone for hours in the pitch black alleviated.
The climbing to the summit was dead simple. While reasonably steep, going around 1,600m in 14km, it was super gradual and at no real point required big stepping that is the usual culprit of (for me the fun part) leg burn. The terrain was a bit unpleasant, having a lot of loose gravel and big rocks that made navigating in the dark and also in the light pretty annoying due to slips but not difficult.
What was super nice about this walk compared to Chirripo was the clear space in the canopy above us. We had massively lucked out and it was a perfectly clear night and being a good 15 minutes drive away from town and climbing from 2,000m of altitude meant we had wonderful views of the stars above us, the likes I had not seen in such beauty since New Zealand. If I had seen nothing at the summit I honestly would have still deemed this hike an absolute success, partly because I didn’t even get remotely close to sharting myself this time. Whenever we took a break, the head torch would go off and I would just get so unashamedly gassed about it.
There was a pretty treacherous and run down shelter about 1.5km away from the summit and I had been forewarned that this was a good spot to have a rest in if early. The summit would have no windbreaks and at closer to 0 degrees would get cold very quickly. We had a 30 minute break here before ascending and the aim was 5.15am, an hour before sunrise at 6.10am. This was some solid advice.
Just before the rocky scramble to the very summit is a flat ridge line of the mountain which houses a weather station. It would have been pretty nice to have this gone due to the excess light pollution but obviously this is wishful thinking. There were nice 360 degree views from this point however and we could stand and watch the distant lightning storms that were kicking off seemingly in every direction (albeit far away and over both the Caribbean and Pacific oceans).
To get to the summit there was a short but pretty scrambling climb over some rocks. Not the easiest to route plan in the dark but it wasn’t too bad.
We were the first at the summit and at this point realised we were the sole walkers on the trail and would be up there in isolation until two jeep loads of tourists, paying well over $100 each for the hour long bumpy as hell ride up the mountain. But it was super nice with the initial peace.
Niamh set up an attempted time lapse, all 3 of us apparently the opposite of a clued up influencer so had little clue how to do this and the result was therefore pretty weak. We had timed it really well and were up while there was near enough pitch blackness and got to see the whole of the gradual transition to the full sun coming out.
The views from Baru were great, incredible ridge lines stretching around the area and the lights from nearby towns lighting up the darkness.
The summit of the active stratovolcano is marked by a cross and has views of both the Caribbean Sea (East) and South Pacific (West) oceans.
Much like Chirripo (albeit less impressively at Baru), the sunrise kicked off the day for many of the local birds who were flying and jumping around in the nearby paths and bushes.
We were super lucky with the weather and got a glorious sunrise without much cloud cover. Once the sun was up it did immediately fall from view but the red morning hue was about as good as we could have hoped for in the rainy season and was in stark contrast to the walkers the day before who saw nothing.
With the sun now fully up and all 3 of us closer to popsicles than humans, we descended down the mountain at about 6.30am. As is always the case, walking down is never particularly fun on my knees and with the unstable rocky terrain it wasn’t long before my right knee ligament was crying out in pain, although it was manageable. I did subsequently move past this knee pain when the soles of my feet took over as enemy number 1 with a fair amount of pain arising from the impact of walking. May be a clear sign my wonderful Meindl walking boots are on their last legs.
Conversation naturally lulled as the effect of no sleep and the highs of summiting were now at their end. The most entertaining part came when we got to see the jeeps coming down the ‘road’ and it honestly looked so unpleasant with the pollutant revving vehicles and savage side to side jarring going on. Did not look like fun and the summit was definitely not worth the cost but that’s my opinion.
We had descended to the base of the walk at around 9.30am, the pace at this point controlled by Alex. Niamh on the other hand was really fast and I reckon I would have struggled keeping up on the downhill on this particular day (disappointingly seem a far cry off the downhill half trail running pace I had in NZ, but I guess this was expected when the hiking would slow).
A cab just so happened to pull around the road at Baru so we went straight from mountain to car and were dropped off back at our respective hostels for a measly $3 each.
Overall distances per Strava:
30.24km
1,665m elevation
Moving time = 7hrs 29mins
Elapsed time = 9hrs 26mins
After Chirripo I was pretty confident about summiting Baru. It was a similar potentially uncomfortable night hike but felt safe enough on both but will return to part 2 travels with a sat phone to hedge against potential future trouble. I feel like I’ve pushed the edge of what was safe a little too much and it’s about time more precautions are taken. Baru did however have infinitely less people on the trail and is not the well oiled machine that Chirripo is.
The hike terrain was a lot easier here, shorter and less steep. The morning hike in Baru was more fun than Chirripo because of the stars, although the sadist in me would have liked the more challenging exercise of Chirripo.
I believe the views on Baru were better than Chirripo, probably in large part because of the sunrise so the two aren’t quite so comparable, but Chirripo was a bit samey while Baru had more interesting terrain and differing views.
I was back at the lodge for about 10am and to quote Nicola ‘you’re not as dead looking as you were after Chirripo’.
Luke story over.
Luke would spend the next 5 hours napping and feeling largely uncomfortable from over exhaustion, post getting a very nice foot rub from Nicola who spent the morning at the gym.
We spent the rest of the day in our favourite sofa spot in the lounge and only moved to have a quick stroll around town post dinner. Luke’s last big hike of part 1 of our travels was celebrated with a nice bottle of Argentinian Sauvignon Blanc, found for a very reasonable price in a local fancy shop.
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