Thursday, September 4

Our next stop in Panama was the quiet mountain town of Santa Fe. We were probably the only tourists in this small village. And as we said before, Panama is great for relaxing, so you can guess what we did here; not much. But we did go "tubing" on the river. We were both in a big innertube of a tire for trucks and floated down the river enjoying the sun. With a small rapid sometimes, but mostly tranquil water, we easily made it to the end after which we hitchhiked back to town. This was about as active as one can get in this village but we liked it.

After Santa Fe we went to the mountaintown Boquete. A small town full of Americans, mainly retired people. They come to live here because of the climate, although we didn't understand that completely because we had a lot of rain and humidity. The town has a very American feeling about it, with American products in the shops, Americans owning the restaurants and American haute cuisine (hamburgers, brownies, cheesecake ;). But we had a nice time and met some interesting people in our hostel. One of them was a photographer working on a project with an expensive analog 6x6 camera to make portraits of travellers. He also took our portraits, and we had to sit perfectly still because of the long shutter-times.

We still didn't feel like getting too active, so we strolled around the small towncenter a bit and visited a great animal rescue center (Paradise Gardens). The owners were very enthousiastic and put all their energy in making this a success. It was only setup 2 years ago, but they already have many animals (monkey's, different birds, cat-like animals, etc.) to take care of and the place was beautifully set up. Volunteers showed us around and we could play with the small monkey's who where already too much accustomed to people to be released again, really cute!
That same day we went to the town of David and stayed in the funny hostel "The Purple House" ... really everything was purple! The friendly owner told us that at the coast they were releasing small baby turtles to the sea that evening and we could help. So within half an hour after arriving in David we were already in the taxi to the beach and had a great time helping the tiny little animals find their way to sea. We really had an animal day!

Because it was raining a lot we didn't feel like going to the coast to ly on the beach in the rain and we didn't really have a good idea what else to do in Panama. We changed plans about 5 times per hour and in the end we decided to go northwest and take a bus directly to San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica. So that's where we are now, enjoying more rain (unfortunately the rainy season didn't stop at the border) and visiting the RAINforest...