Catching up now because we’re in Panama City with an actual internet connection, and thankful that the rest of our travels have conditioned us to accept less than Canadian standards to rest our heads, we’ve holed up at Hotel Acapulco for a few days while we bandy about here and there.  Five bar signal in the room, A/C, hot water, gated parking, relatively quiet, and walking distance to the subway (who knew Panama had a subway?), restaurants, shopping, etc…
I’m inscribing a new map of the city over top of the old, dusty one I had stored upstairs, and with that, we managed to drive out to the Amador Causeway for dinner last night, had dinner at a restaurant overlooking the bay, and made it back alive.

Panama (read “Panama City” from now on) has elevated roads, spaghetti junctions, signs grown over with jungle, and all the nightmares a tourist can imagine, but our wrong turn on the way home landed us on a previous wrong turn we had to learn our way out of, so we just followed the same route and found ourselves where we needed to be. The experience was akin to going over a 4H line in HB. Learned.

Onto the current post… A week or so later and the ground had dried up considerably.  This was only a guess at first, but turned out to be a good one.  With traction, and a good pair of shoes, we drove up into El Valle in the morning, went right through the other side, stopped once to take a few pictures of these weird looking trees that were at the entrance to someones’ estate.  The sign just inside the gate stated that the area was a protected bio-reserve.  How awesome is that?

Not only do you get to build your estate in paradise, but then you apply to have the government protect it for you so that it can never be changed.  Excellent!

Onward and upward, we’re back at the entrance to the sendero, a small freshly painted, vacant building.  You find yourself scratching your head a lot down here, but the nearest we could figure is that this building is manned on the days they bring bus loads of people up here.  Not in frame, is a price chart: $2 for locals, $5 for visitors.  Typical, and was the same up at La Yeguada.

The trek begins nice enough, but it soon becomes obvious this trail is not well used, which is just exactly what I like about it so much.

Along the way were these rest stops.  Years back, you could plow your way through the growth surrounding them and poke your head out for some fantastic views.

This was the best I could manage here, as I was standing on the edge of a drop off that went who knows how far down.  At this height, we were in cloud forest, and the jungle is unstoppable.

Moss grows on everything here, and the pictures again don’t do it justice.

Scene after scene provide an eerie ambiance of decay and abandonment, which made for some incredible pictures.  You only had to wait for the sun to poke through the clouds, the light would change everything, and you’d have to go back and shoot it again.  There are pics we have of this area we’ll frame once we get home.

At the summit, I got a little giddy.  The entire trail to this point was shrouded in moss-covered cloud forest when at this point, in a matter of steps, you emerge into panoramic heaven.  The urge to grab onto something is a force of nature that takes a few minutes to pass, and then there is the lookout to contend with.

Overlooking the town of El Valle, it’s all laid out before you.  The view point in 360 degrees, with only one side of it taller than where you are.  There is a trail leading off in that direction, which traces the ridge all the way up to the top of the other mount, but it looked more like a broken ankle than a good idea.

The two of us were happy enough with that, sat down on the little bench underneath this lookout, and ate our PB&J’s that we brought along.

There’s a lot of different foliage up here you don’t see anywhere else but in cloud forest, and every few steps (now that the climbing is done) has you spotting something else.

I used to be tortured by my Father, who would make us all stop and wait while he set up his tripod to take pictures of mushrooms and crap… I guess I sort of get it now, but thank God for digital.

My camera came with a book as thick as my knuckle (when they came with books instead of PDF downloads), and poking around on the settings, I finally found the “foliage” button.  Wooo.

Eh?  How about that.  Pretty sweet.

We pay huge for houseplants like these in Canada, while here they grow like weeds.  I was taking too long, so while I was taking a picture of this, I got shot with a pink banana.

We decided enough was enough, but not before I spotted this out of the corner of my eye.

Flat snails…  Geez, what next?  There’s a snail in there, alright.  This was about 3/8″ thick, at best.  I sure wanted to take it home, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.

After all that fun, we made our way back down into El Valle, did some tourist shopping, and shot this on the way down the hill.

They make for interesting coffee table bases.

That was Cerro Giatal, out the back door of El Valle, and worth the wait, as far as I’m concerned.  A little later, I’ll try to get the video I shot from the top uploaded, but I’m burning daylight doing this, and need to get going so we can get to Parque National de Sobrania, about a hour from here.

If I make it out of Panama on the first try.