The Art of Hiking and How I Fell in Love with a Bird

The travelling blogger is a bit stumped how to start dissecting the last five days in Boquete, a charming small town in the mountains of Panama, not far from the border of Costa Rica.

The town is pretty, the people are lovely and the climate is not too hot due to the altitude, a pleasing 20-25 degrees daily. There is only one reason people come here; To hike in the lovely hills and mountains around Boquete. 

According to my phone’s activity tracker, I’ve walked 90 000 steps amounting to 55 kilometres in the last five days. This doesn’t really sound all that impressive, but nearly none of these steps has been on flat ground. I have walked up the equivalent of 462 floors (calculated at 3m each by my phone). And back down the same 462 floors. And I can guarantee that none of these ups and downs have been as easy as, say, going up the stairwell of the empire state building. This has not been a case of stepping. Rather of clambering, slipping, scrabbling, jumping, teetering, tottering and balancing up and down 462 floors.

Today was the most undignified ascent and descent to date, as we groped our way towards la Piedro de Lino, a hilltop viewpoint next to Boquete. 

We thought we were going to get to take it easy today, since the hike was a short one. But the trek is really steep in sections and the elevation is mostly through coffee fields, where we ended up scrabbling on all fours in the dry, loose soil, which slid under our feet on the steep slope, puffed around us like a sandstorm and gave no traction. If I had had a bit of cardboard, I would have been tempted to use it in the same way local children do: For lack of snow, children here go tobogganing on bits of cardboard down steep slopes of grass. Only in this case, it would have been slopes of dry soil. Well, I certainly don’t think I could have gotten any dustier today even had I come down toboggan style. 

Progress on our hikes has been slowed down considerably by Uupi’s and my tendency to stop and admire little bits of nature - and admittedly oftentimes try to capture them on film. The jungle is a constant play of flickering light and darkness, as the hard sun filters through layers of leaves of countless different shapes, hues and sizes. It makes for a pretty sight - though hard to capture on camera. 

In the last five days we’ve seen our share of rickety bridges,

 

gorgeous trees,

walked our share of muddy tracks, where the tree roots try to trip you up

clambered over rocks

 

and just generally messed around and had a jolly good time.

On the way we have passed beautiful jungle and rain forest flora. Leaves, admittedly, have become a bit of an obsession with us.

But there’s just such a variety of shapes, texture, size and colour

and the sun’s lighting technician is certainly doing a smashing job!

I am also obsessed with the layers of plants that grow on trees! 

In fact so many plants grow on trees that the cows here sometimes graze upwards!

I love the vines that weave nets around trees

the aerial roots that hang from them, 

the liana, the climbers, the creepers.

A special shout-out goes to these liana, which had twined themselves into perfect rope!

And, cherry on the top, there are the birds. The birdsong here is as varied and beautiful as the plants. 

I have never really been the biggest bird enthusiast, though I have an uncanny ability to recognize, whether a particular bird is a big bird, a little bird or a sea bird. But I now found out there is at least one exception to my indifference: I am totally and passionately in love with quetzals!

Quetzals are the birds, whose feathers adorned the headpiece of Quetzalcoalt - the feathered-serpent deity of the ancient mesoamerican culture, who all mesoamericans claimed to descend from. Birdwatchers from around the world come here hoping to see this rare and beautiful creature. We, with true beginners’ luck, stumbled on a  couple on our first day-hike near Boquete. These birds, according to a bird-buff friend of mine, are THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BIRDS IN THE WORLD (her capitals, not mine). I heartily agree! 

Not once on this trip have I rued not having my big camera with me as I did during our quetzal sighting. So the images below are, sadly, blowed up and blurry. But all the relevant parts should be there - the furry head and incredibly long tail feather of the male, 

the smug expression of the female.

This pair were hard at work building a nest in a tree not 10 metres from the path. Well, I should say the male was hard at work. The female clearly held a supervisory position. Chips of wood flew as the male hacked away at their future nest hole. 

At times he went in to do some interior decorating, so that only his tail feather stuck out. 

We stood mesmerized. An american birdwatcher (he was actuallly the one who alerted us to the presence of the quetzal) lent his binoculars. I could practically count the eyelashes on the darlings. A glorious sighting indeed!

There is much more I could say about the hikes - and bits and pieces may creep up in later entries. Should you feel the urge to dig deeper into hiking in Panama (so far I’ve done hikes 1-4, 7, 17 and 20 on the list), there is an excellend blog about trecking in Panama at: https://www.journeyera.com/best-hikes-panama/

The guy who writes these seems to be faintly dyslexic, seriously over-uses the words amazing, awesome and epic and likes to include pictures of himself without a shirt, but the information is sound and the photos rather epic, amazing and awesome.

Tomorrow I head for the Bocas del Toro on the Carribbean shore of Panama, for some days of relaxation and reading up on Costa Rica. Time to hang up my hiking boots for a while.