Touring a Coffee Farm

Highlight of this trip to Boquete? The coffee farm.

Panama is well-known for its coffee, with the mountains around Boquete offering the ideal growing conditions. Last year, Panama grew the most expensive coffee in the world: Geisha.

We joined the tour for Cafe Ruiz, a major coffee producer in Panama. There were maybe 12 people on our tour, and it was drizzly and chilly. We met at the little coffee shop, and rode together to the fields and factory.

I had absolutely no idea how coffee is grown. The coffee fruits, called cherries, are actually red when they're ready to pick (which happens by hand) and the shells are peeled off to reveal the yummy little bean inside. Which is tan/white, of course, as it hasn't been roasted.

We saw some Geisha plants next to some other varieties of coffee plants, and there were far fewer beans per Geisha plant than there were on the other plants -- thereby explaining, at least in part, why it's so much more expensive than other varieties.

After picking, the beans are meticulously sorted (again, by hand) according to color, size, and density. The whole process is incredibly long: if I remember right, there are 12 steps from the plant to your cup -- 13 if you include roasting.

After our time in the field and the factory, we returned to the coffee shop in town, where we smelled a variety of coffees and roasts. I learned that the strength of your coffee has nothing to do with whether it's a dark roast or a light roast (in fact, the light roasts have more caffeine): if you want stronger coffee, just put more coffee in to brew. We then enjoyed a coffee tasting, and were given a bag of Cafe Ruiz coffee to take home with us.

It was such a fascinating tour -- if you want to come visit us, we'll gladly do it again.

Touching Costa Rica

In Panama, you are only allowed to drive for three months on a foreign driver's license. We haven't gotten around to getting our Panamanian versions, so we need to enter Panama every three months to be allowed another three months of driving privileges. As we love traveling, it's kind of nice to have an excuse to cross a border now and again.

As our three-month limit approached, we didn't want to spend the money on an all-out excursion to Costa Rica, and we kind of wanted to go back to Boquete, anyway, so we thought we'd just hop across the border and come back.

There are different stories as to how this works:

1. You cross over, you have to stay over for 72 hours, then you come back.
2. You cross over, you have to stay over for at least a day, then you come back.
3. You cross over, you come back.

My guess is that the official rule is 72 hours, but it depends largely on which border guard you get.

We were going to give #3 a go -- the worst that they could tell us was that we had to wait.

By the time we left, we were already over our three-month limit, so Brent's dad came with us to do the driving. It's about five or six hours (or two speeding tickets, depending on how you're counting) to the border from where we live, and we arrived in the afternoon.

Larry tooled around on the Panamanian side of the border, and we stamped out of this country and into the next.

We wandered around. Had lunch. At one point, we walked through a store that had doors on each end, and when we exited we realized we were back in Panama. Oops.

There's not much to do in the border town, so after about an hour or so, we went back to the border (officially this time) to return to Panama, reconnect with Larry, and go to Boquete for the weekend.

And they let us through. Easy as pie.

P.S. Not true for our friends David and Stephanie, who gave it a go a couple of weeks after we did. Their guard said no way, and they had to spend the night in Costa Rica before returning.

Panama Food Porn

While I was writing travel reviews for the now sadly defunct IgoUgo, I took a lot of food pictures so I had them to accompany my restaurant reviews. IgoUgo shut down earlier this year to merge with Travelocity or something, and now I'm left with pictures of a lot of gorgeous and delicious food, and nothing to do with them. So here they are.

Best fish tacos in Boquete at Big Daddy's.

My Italian salad was AWESOME at Art Cafe in Boquete.

Our friend's crepe at Art Cafe.

Greek salad -- I LOVE Greek salad, and went through a phase where I ordered one at nearly every restaurant we tried.

Brent's club sandwich at Super Gourmet in Casco Viejo.

My incredible fish on a bed of veggies at Ego y Narciso, Casco Viejo.

Brent's steak and potatoes at Ego y Narciso.

Lebanese sampler plate at Beirut. LOVE this restaurant.

My own cooking: a Thai coconut soup with mushrooms and broccoli - one of our favorites at home.

This volleyball thing gets better and better.

When I lived in Fort Collins (cerca 2008), I joined a volleyball league. We played once a week for four weeks, 4-on-4. Each week involved finding the latest venue, but that's a small price to pay. It was a lot of fun, and it was over too soon.
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When I moved to Denver, I looked to join a league. I found some, but with my crazy fitness-teaching schedule, it was so unappealing to have to do that some venue-hunting in a much larger city, with each venue much farther away from the comfort of my warm apartment.

Volleyball was practically unheard of in Argentina, so there was no hope of playing there. I was starting to think I might never get to play my favorite team sport again.

Then we moved to Panama, and there's a whole group of people, coming and going, who love to play this game.

We're on a regular twice-weekly schedule now: every Thursday and Sunday and 3:30. Sometimes we have 25 people, enough for four teams and some subbing. Other times we play 3-on-3 (which is awesome or terrible, depending on the caliber of players that showed up). People of all ages and playing abilities join in, and it's one of things I look most forward to during the week. If you never quit, you never lose it.

How do I know Brent loves me? BABY TURTLE

Oh, my dear goodness sake. Brent came home one day and put this little treasure of a creature in front of me.

His name is Nacho and he is THE BEST! (He's also surprisingly fast, when he gets going.)

Hikes and hidden waterfalls.

We went out in search of the waterfall at Las Lajas, which we'd heard about but had never visited. We got directions from several people, so it seemed easy enough to find. It wasn't, not at first. We even stopped and asked a local, but she just shrugged.

Finally, a couple of phone calls later, we managed to make the correct turn. We parked and walked, since we weren't sure what the road ahead was like.

It ended up being a short walk, and we came up on the wrong side of the falls, so we didn't get much of a view. We're none of us really jumping-into-the-water-from-up-high people, to tell the truth, so we walked around a bit.

The whole excursion took much less time than we thought it would, so we headed up the road to La Laguna, a lake that Brent and I love.