Boquete: I Give Myself a Week

I walked the two kilometres uphill along the highway, admiring mountain views and enveloped by the tonal music of grinding gears and a madrigal of horns blaring at any car with the temerity to slow down before turning off. The brilliant sun lasered a part through my scalp as I passed empty Italian and Argentinean restaurants, an art cafe and the mandatory nightclub called Taboo. This is Boquete, Panama.

Boquete is a town of approximately 22k people, the capital of the Chiriqui province that together with Bocas del Toro above it, fill in Panama’s western border with Costa Rica. It is described as a quaint mountain village and I might have agreed if not for the highway that runs through it. But move off the main drag and some of it’s charm appears. There is a river, a central square with a grandstand, and flowers set off against the backdrop of the Baru Volcano, the highest peak in Panama from which you can see both oceans at once.

The expat community in Boquete is a thriving 15-20% of the population and is actively involved in local business, including producing tasty fish tacos at Big Daddy’s, a Trip Advisor favourite. We met Big Daddy himself, nice guy. Tall. Boquete has been named the fourth best place to retire in the world and takes the number one spot for Latin America, according to the American Association of Retired Persons magazine. I’m not a subscriber, just checking my facts. 

Most of the others in our group chose the three-in-one activity combo of coffee tour, cliff jumping and blanching themselves between hot and cold springs. I designed my own mini Feria de las Flores y del Café (Flower and Coffee Festival) that Boquete is famous for, one we missed by a few weeks. Part one was visiting Mi Jardin Es Su Jardin (My garden is your garden) and I had the highway-adjacent flowerful expanse to myself. 

While K was off hiking to the “Lost Waterfalls of Boquete” on the side of the volcano, I admired my own modest example, water flowing down a channel of wide, shallow steps into a goldfish pond. No Latin signs explained the phylum or genus of plants; just trees and bushes filled with pink, purple and yellow blooms with a few blue or white flowers thrown in as counterpoint. The architects did, however, include wildlife so I surprised a cutout of a moose and dolphin and an oversized plastic flamingo hiding among the greenery. I hopped and sprinted around the gardens, playing double dutch with the ubiquitous sprinklers, which were often hidden so that it felt like someone was throwing a bucket of water at me from behind the bushes.

Part two of my self-created flower/coffee festival was the tour with K of an organic coffee farm, a Franken-farm with pulpers and coffee bean roasters made out of used car engines and drive shafts, and implements soldered together from screwdrivers and spoons. We spent an hour learning to identify seven types of trees the owner uses to make high quality Arabica coffee. All of the coffee on this farm is exported, some under the Royal brand name, a contraction of the owner’s parents’ names: ROsa Y ALfredo. It reminded me of the South African winery I visited that was commissioned by Prince Albert and Charlene to make a wedding wine and call it Chalbert, much to the mortification of the winemaker.

What we learned on our coffee tour:

  • Coffee beans are actually green seeds, living two by two inside plump red and yellow berries or cherries, and growing on trees
  • There are a myriad of ways to tell coffee trees apart but they all looked the same to us after an hour of trudging through the coffee forest in 30-degree heat
  • The farm was organic “because the owner reuses car parts” challenging K and me to refrain from reuniting the guide with the definition of organic

Coffee facts we wished we’d learned from the tour:

  • It only takes ten minutes to feel the effects of caffeine from a sip of coffee (sciencedaily.com)
  • Coffee is the second most traded commodity on earth after oil (globalexchange.org)
  • Coffee growing regions around the world are contained within the “Coffee Belt” (cornerofthecafe.com), a kind coffee cummerbund around the world’s waist if it were dressed in black tie
  • The practice of paying for an extra coffee so that a future stranger gets theirs free is believed to have started over 100 years ago in Naples by people who had had good fortune and wanted to pass it on. It was called ordering a suspended coffee or caffè sospeso (uh, wikipedia.org)

I’m not sure how I feel about Boquete. A little too touristy for me but looking back at my pictures, all I have are gorgeous views and beautiful flowers. Every meal we had was great, although not especially cheap. But I didn’t take pictures of the traffic or audio of the honking. You can’t feel the humid air or see my lobster-red face peeling off like a mask in a Mission Impossible movie. And we narrowly managed to avoid the room temperature, e-coli-breeding buffet our friends got trapped into. If Boquete is a metaphor for its all in how you see it, I want to take a little of that back home into my real life, overlooking small frustrations in favour of the larger I-have-it-pretty-good picture.

I give myself a week.  

  

  

   

    

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