Easter is not just a day in Panama, it is an entire holy week, thus the name Semana Santa. Since I work at a school which enrolls students from across the country, my holy week vacation was a little bit longer than the other volunteers’. I worked the Monday before Easter and that was it because Tuesday was a half day, with the other meant to be spent meeting with student’s parents. Of course I found out that my vacation was more than a 4-day weekend at the last minute, so I was not able to extend my stay in Boquete, but I think the week turned out just fine.
I spent Tuesday relaxing at home while my host family was at school and work, then packed up to head to Boquete Wednesday morning. Boquete is a beautiful little town up in the mountains and is about 45 minutes away from the Costa Rican border. This 3.5 day vacation was my first solo vacation and I managed to do it in another country too! It takes two buses and about 4 hours to get from Santiago to Boquete. My hostel was situated right on the town square where there was a fountain and a gazebo. After checking into my shared dorm room, I found a nice place to read for a little while until it was time for dinner. I didn’t get very far before I began striking up conversations with other people staying at the hostel. I befriended a girl from Washington state who was taking a semester off from college and we had dinner that night to continue our conversation and so she could help get me oriented around this little town.
Can never have enough air fresheners!
fountain in town square
gazebo in town square
The next morning, I woke up and took a luke warm shower, the first I have had since my weekend in Santa Catalina a month before, and then made my way to the kitchen to make pancakes. The hostel provides the batter and coffee, you just have to make your own pancakes. The first day of pancake making was not a pretty sight, but by the next day, I had mastered the making of a giant fluffy pancake in the hostel kitchen.
My main reason for going to the mountains was to escape the heat for a few days and relax, just do what I want when I want for a few days. Across the bridge, the fair grounds were open for the annual orchid festival and if there is one thing missing in Santiago, it’s an abundance of flowers. I went over early in the day to avoid crowds and to also scope out potential things to buy as well. The fair grounds were a giant garden with a few stands and make shift shops set up on the sides and few permanent little shops spread throughout the middle. Being overwhelmed with freshly bloomed flowers was quite the refreshing experience compared to my normal life in Santiago of sun and dust; I had time to actually stop and smell the roses! The flowers were beautiful and souvenir shopping was productive.
The next thing on my agenda, relaxing in a coffee shop. Boquete is one of the prime areas for growing good quality coffee and as a result, there are a number of little coffee shops in town. I slipped into one just a block down from my hostel, ordered my drink, and snuggled into one of the big chairs in the corner in front of the cooling fan. I spent a couple of hours in the most comfortable chair I have found in Panama so far, sipping on my coffee and reading…..and of course people watching out the window that looked out to one of the main streets. I enjoyed this place so much, I went back the next day for more reading in a cozy chair!
Good Friday, the next day, would turn out to be a little tricky because it is a holiday in Panama, yet this town was packed full of tourists from all around the world. An interesting dilemma, considering I had a few things that I wanted to do before leaving Saturday morning. My host family had shown me pictures and told me about this one garden that I had to go to, so Friday morning I flipped through the tourist book at the front desk of the hostel and figured out how to walk there and set out on my way. A 25 minute walk through town and then gradually winding up part of a large hill, I finally reached the garden only to be told that the garden was closed for the weekend. There would be no exploring the garden with wooden statues of cows painted in crazy designs. I walked back down to the hostel and busied myself until it was time to leave for my coffee tour.
That afternoon I walked down a block to another coffee shop that was bigger than the one I had been going to because this was the one place that was doing coffee tours on Good Friday. I walk in, and just who do I see standing in line for coffee, my other teaching half, Maddie, and her boyfriend who came to visit for the week. We talked while we each waited for our tour buses to leave – my coffee tour and their canopy zip-line tour. The Kotowa group had a hostel up in the mountains that was also home to a canopy line and a coffee plantation. Just as it began to rain, we hopped on our separate buses and headed up into the mountains. The drive through the mountains was beautiful with flowers and low cloud coverage hanging around the other mountains in the distance. Upon arrival at the Kotowa plantation, I was whisked away to the coffee room, where our group was split into two, those who wanted Spanish and those who wanted English. First, we heard the history of how coffee was discovered on the Eastern Coast of Africa and then how it slowly began to be exported and grown in other parts of the world. The best place for growing coffee is between the tropics in the highlands. Panama may not be able to produce quantity, but they pride themselves on producing quality coffee. At this point, the rain had slowed and we took off down the side of the small river and across the swinging bridge to walk down into the coffee plant field.
Our tour guide began to tell us about the different coffee bean plants grown here and then began to tell how long it takes 
before a plant becomes a production plant. The bean plant must be grown for a year in a small bag before it can planted in the soil on the plantation and then it is another 4-5 years before you can begin to harvest the beans off the plant. The coffee beans are actually two very small beans inside a red berry. Each of us picked a berry off of a plant and popped it open with our teeth; coffee beans initially taste very fruity because of the berry they grow in. When it comes harvest time in Panama, it is the indigenous who are brought in to harvest the coffee on the slopes of the highlands. They are paid $3 per five gallon bucket picked and $5 per five gallon bucket of the geisha plant that is picked. After harvest season is over, the indigenous go back to their villages. After picking, it is a lengthy process before the beans are ready for the market. It can take a year or longer for coffee beans to be ready for sale. From the plantation, the beans are then shucked out of their berry skins and then left to dry for about a month. Once they have dried most of the way through, the beans are placed into bags for about 6 months to age, continuing to enhance the flavor of the bean. The next step is sorting the beans for roasting. Did you know that the difference between light, medium, and dark roast is only one minute? Light roast beans are roasted for 14 minutes, Medium for 15 minutes, and Dark for 16 minutes. Also, if you drink coffee for caffeine, then you should drink light roast because it contains the most caffeine.
The final step of our tour – taste test! Six varieties of coffee grown on this plantation were placed on the table before us in whole bean form – light roast, medium roast, dark roast, organic, pacamara, and geisha. Our guide took us through the steps to show us how the smell and flavor of the coffee changed with each step. I tasted a coffee bean from almost each one before they were ground. After grinding the beans, we passed them around to get an idea of the different fragrances of each. The last step was to add hot water to the ground beans and let it steep for a few minutes before tasting. Did you know that coffee in a whole bean form can keep its flavor for about 2 years, but once it is ground it begins to lose flavor after about 2-3 months? The trick to tasting coffee like the critics – slurping! Each person has their own spoon, once you have a spoonful of the coffee, you quickly slurp the coffee off the spoon so that you can get the full effect of all three components of tasting coffee: flavor, acidity, and after taste. The acidity and caffeine you feel on your tongue and the after taste is felt in the back of your 
mouth and throat. After trying all six different types, my favorites were the organic and pacamara. At the end of the tasting round, there was a test! We were sent to the corner while our guide moved around the cups and chose four different kinds of coffee for us to try to see if we could correctly identify each of the coffees based on the things we had just learned. Out of the four, I got two or three right. I felt quite proud of this because I am not a big coffee drinker, but I do like to try different coffee when I am abroad, especially if I am in a country that grows coffee!
On my last night in Boquete, I went to dinner with Maddie and her boyfriend so we could spend some proper time catching up on the past few weeks and complain about working at school. To try something different, we went to a Peruvian seafood place that was a block off of the main street. It turned out to be a great choice. I even tried a little bit of octopus that came with my fish, along with the largest shrimp I think I have ever seen in my life! I think the nice surprise was that the side for my dinner, as well as Maddie’s boyfriend’s, was creamy mashed potatoes! We had good food and good conversation for the evening, a great way to end my first solo vacation!
My other teaching half and I
From Panama with Love 