Taking the bus from Panama City to David the scenery changes from lush jungle to dry scrub; I'm also surprised at how mountainous this little strip of land is. You can appreciate how painful it would have been to engineer a canal through terrain like this, once you see it.
David is yet another gridded town, Spanish colonialism to the core, but quieter and cleaner than Colon; its closest town in Panama for comparison.And the architecture is caribbean; it all loks like ordinary modern Spanish influenced stuff to me. I've decided to spend the night in Boquete, an apparently popular touristic town nestled in the mountains away from the heat.
Suddenly upon travelling to Boquete I'm in the B.C. okanagan, or rather perhaps the Nevada foothills. Farmers use rocks to create stone walls; and the mountains begin to loom around us. The road is surprisingly good, though.
.....And Boquete is a tourist town, without a doubt. It reminds me of Sinaia in Romania, or Leavenworth in Washington state. It is a nice small town nestled in the hills, though. I'll have to do some hikes around the town before I go back tomorrow morning.
These resort-ish little towns are paradoxical for me; I stick out like a sore thumb, and in a small town there's nowwhere to hide. It took me about 20 minutes to figure out which side of the plaza the hotel I was looking for was on - LP screws me up twice in one day(the first was showing the wrong location in Panama City for buses to David). Luckily the town sees a lot of tourists, both local and foreign. Oddly, I was relieved to find other tourists poking around the town. It reduces the number of eyes which are on me at any given time.
Obviously, I was embarrassed to be the only foreigner visible in the town when I arrived there in the late afternoon; everyone noticed me. I don't like being noticed, because people will begin to follow me, and perhaps surround and/or attack me. Unfortunately the Johannesburg robbery has made me a much more paranoid traveller.




The next morning I did some wandering around, looking for some viewpoints mentioned in the Lonely Planet maps. Guess what - they don't exist. But the walk was nice, and it was surprising how much it felt like home. Boquete's environs are not tropical whatsoever - they are akin to the brush and pine of the arid midwest. And the temperature was cool and nice. The scenery was good, and the atmosphere was laid back. There are a few major hikes in the area, but for someone like me - who hails from the land of major hikes- coming down here just to do a major hike seemed a bit odd. And thus, in the late morning, I headed back to David, where I was determined to find a route to Bocas Del Toro. Little did I know about the place...

To Chiriqui Grande, Almirante, Bocas Del Toro, and then Bastimentos.....
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