Livin' la Vida Coco

After bidding more emotional farewells, this time to the Caribbean family that had hosted us for the last 3 nights, it was back across the water to the bus station.  We'd upgraded to a single bus (so much for roughing it to the heart of darkness) but given that the upgrade got us a single bus for our next 3 stops, rather than travel on 4 local buses just to get to the next stop, it was an easy decision to make.

The next stop was in Boquete, about 4000 feet above sea-level although, given that we had to swap into a truck to make it up to our hotel, we had to be quite a bit higher than that.

The hotel was by far the nicest one we've stayed in on this trip.  Our Intrepid tour companions were delighted and with some of them having been travelling for 60 days, I can imagine how good it feels to hit some luxury!

The hotel had great rooms and showers and a large deck looking out onto the mountainous vista.

View from our hotel's deck

Apparently this area is (or was) the number one retirement place in the world.  I'm not quite sure how that's worked out - certainly not by the number of old people walking around the town.  I guess we needed a guide to be able to see them, although Paul, using those sloth-detection super-powers, was able to spot one up on a balcony...





There was the option to make a midnight climb to the rim of the local volcano to see the sun rise (so we're talking a several hour climb here) but we decided to go on a coffee tour instead.

It was high-risk - we were going to be drinking coffee in the afternoon, after all.  Call me crazy but sometimes you've just got to be out there!

The coffee plantation had been set up by a guy, Tito, who having driven back from seeing a working plantation, promptly started to cannibalise his jeep to make the relevant parts.

What's left of Tito's Jeep

Some beans

As well as being taken through the harvesting process, we were also shown how the beans are dried, graded and roasted.

Some roasted beans

The light, medium and dark roasts are commonly known as American, French and Italian.  Strangely enough, those dark more flavoursome beans actually have less caffeine in them than the lighter ones.

But obviously the most important thing is the skill of the roaster.  Fortunately, this guy really looked like he knew what he was doing: