Click here for a full-size image of above, taken at The Anachoreo, our current home.

Holy crap, has Santa Fe ever changed.
The last time I was here, there was just one place in town to stay, the Santa Fe Hotel.  It had a small sign nailed to a tree across the street, and was pricey.  There were two paved streets in town, and maybe one restaurant, but it was questionable at best.
Now, this hotel has some competition, which is good, because the prices are about the same.  Off of the two paved roads are a multitude of paved streets, which used to be nothing more than horse paths between houses in the mud.  Every single one of them is now paved, and a nice job of it too.  It’s odd, because it makes the town a veritable spider web of roads and cross-roads, which would only be possible to memorize with time.  There isn’t a road sign anywhere, and how could you name them anyways?  Jose’ street?  Julio Ave?  They just went between houses built on the flat spots.  Ok, enough on that.

Just up the road from here is a Chinese supermarket, and it’s big, covering everything from butter to boots.  You know a place has “made it” once the Chinese find it.

Yet again, though, it’s notable that there are relatively few people here for this time of year.  It was a little bit harder to find a room this time around, but more so because we had to make a decision between three different places.  There was a dorm room for 12 buks a person, this place for 27 or 33 with hot water (up here you want hot water), or another place we’ll try to be at a few days from now for 50, or 60 if you want breakfast with it.  The view from that place is absolutely fantastic, as are many of the views here, being a mountain town on one side of a large valley.

The notable things to do around here are hiking, and hiking.  While you are hiking, there is bird watching, and there are waterfalls worth hiking to, while bird watching that is.  It’s just a nice quiet place to be.

The president that was in place the last time I was here was making noises about pushing the road the rest of the way through from here to the Caribbean coast, which would open up the whole area to tourism.  Granted, this is a tough road, and there’s no other way to put it. These pics are just a sprinkle of what we got up to on the first day.

You can go tubing on this river, who knows how far, but I bet it’s a ways.

Cass wanted a picture of the funky cemeteries down here.  I forget why, but they don’t like to bury their folks below ground here, which makes for an odd collection of tile work.

The majority of Panama is mountainous, being entirely volcanic at birth.  There are valleys, and plains that filled in over the millennia, but for the most part, it is a string of volcanoes, all inactive now, that connect the Americas.

Today, we’ll probably do some hiking.  Definitely do some exploring, as I want to know just exactly where the pavement now ends.  Aside from that, it’s become a challenge to figure out where we can hole up for Christmas as a storm of holiday money lands on the country.  Having witnessed things up to this point, I’m suspecting hotel owners to have a slightly different attitude after the new year, once they see for their own eyes that the slowness of the last few years is here to stay, and quite frankly, only going to get worse as the US economy shits a brick and drags the whole world back down with it.  Certain places that are wholly self-sufficient, such as the highlands around Guadalupe where they grow all they need to survive and rely little on imports, will be relatively untouched.  Places like Santa Catalina, whose entire economy is dependent upon the “fluff” of economies, already feeling the pain, will languish and die.  I suspect that, with many of the homes here freshly painted and crisp, this is as good as it is going to look for a while.

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Today, we did end up hiking.  After exploring a few roads here and there, trails end was Casa Mariposa, owned by a Canadian from Toronto, is $65/night with a minimum 2 night stay, and has views that simply cannot be described vividly enough to do justice to the scene.  She says she has a website…. of course she does.  How else could you get customers wayyyyy out here, but I doubt it does it justice either.  We didn’t take a whole lot of pictures here because we know by now that panaoramas just don’t come out.

 

There are citrus fruits everywhere here.  Like a moth to a flame…

For good reason….

From there, we did an about face, and headed all the way back to Santa Fe, where we took the other road wayyy up towards Cierro Piedras.  There was supposed to be a hiking trail up to the falls, that appear on all the tourism brochures for Veraguas Province, but we searched and searched, turned around and searched some more, then found some other folks sitting on the side of the road (literally sitting there) looking for the same thing, offered them a ride, and the four of us eventually found that the only way we were going to find how to get to the falls was to pay a guide to show us the way.  This, after finding the sign for the falls thrown in the river down the road from it.

These “guides” were all sitting in the open bar/restaurant/tourist center about 500 meters up the road from where the entrance to the place actually was.  Essentially, you had to pay the guy 10 buks to show you where the hole in the fence was.  Ladronas.

Here’s where they were all hanging out, sort of.   The bar was right next to it.

The “trail” wasn’t much of one either.  Santa Fe mud is a special thing, and way up in the mountains sees rain pretty much all year round.

There were clothes strewn about all over the place about 50 meters from the actual falls, and I found myself scratching my head at that.  Who forgets that many clothes?  It set off alarm bells for some reason, and that’s probably a good thing.  We carried on up toward the falls before we took anything off, and then only our shoes as the foot of the falls wasn’t much of a swimming hole.  It was on the way back down that the little local boy trotted through, waved kindly, and carried on up the other bank to a house that you couldn’t see before. Have you caught on to the set-up yet?  Listen to the little hairs on your neck, because they don’t lie.  The clothes were a suggestion about where they would like you to place your valuables before you went on up to the falls…

Anyways, the falls were nice looking, much much smaller than I thought they would be, but pretty, and definitely worth the effort.  Now, where is the swimming hole we were told about?  Well, that turned out to be down the other path, and was what made the trip worthwhile for all of us, I’d say.  All but Cass got in.  Poor girl, she was wearing jeans, but said she didn’t want to anyways.

Eventually, we all made it back to the car, we dropped off our fellow travelers back in Santa Fe, and got ourselves to the hotel for a short breather.

I say short because in the morning I spied someone heading off down a path right across the road from us, and from looking at another map, knew it wasn’t too long a trip down to another stream.  Along the way, we passed an actual mandarin orange tree, loaded with oranges just beginning to ripen.  Cass was in heaven.  Christmas oranges right off the tree!  The variety of plant species up at this altitude is amazing.  Coffee plants right beside banana trees, beside orange trees, limes, strange melons, soy beans (??) and God only knows what else, this place is a veritable smorgasbord, however, Santa Fe has a shortage of bananas in all the local stores.  Not a one can be found, and may explain why all the ones we saw along the way were picked clean except for the ones that were still green.  I have no idea what the plant is I am looking at in the picture… but the little “worms” are soft and fuzzy.

At the end of the road was a Panamanian style suspension bridge which served as access to the other side of the valley, and worth a few shots as well.

Now, I’m looking out the window at the evening fog rolling in.

It’s been a good day, and coming on time to check out the rest of the menu up the hill.  Cass says she’s going to try another hamburger.  LOL  Will she ever learn?  Who knows, this is also cattle country up here, and they may make a good burger after all.  Matter of fact, the only thing they don’t have up here is a lot of tourists.  I’m OK with that.  Travelers are more interesting.

Cass asked me to post the difference.  A tourist is an annoying pain in the ass that gets off of a plane and expects everyone to want to please them, usually overweight and arrogant.  A traveler is a person who comes to a place to experience it as it is, hairballs and all.  Usually has a dictionary, and often carries a smile no matter the day.