Leaving Playa Coronado: Panama City to David, Panama

11:42 PM
David, Panama
Wait a minute!
We don’t have to leave Panama. We can go LOTS of places in Panama we haven’t seen yet!
Somehow, since we were riding with Dan, we were thinking we would have to leave Panama and go back to Costa Rica (since Dan was going to Costa Rica anyway), but we had the realization that there’s plenty of Panama we haven’t seen.
We realized last night that we would be driving close to many of the areas we’d like to see while we were traveling with Dan on the way to Costa Rica.
One of the towns we would be traveling through would be David (Pronounced: Dah – veed), in order to see some of the volcanoes and coffee/fruit plantations in the north and western parts of Panama.
Ergo, maybe Dan could drop us off?

And that’s exactly what he did.

View Central America 2009 in a larger map
We were glad to get to meet Dan and Rilda.
As members of the GreenJoyment community, (an online community Carrie and I run, with people from all over the world), we loved meeting and getting to spend some great time with them. We got to spend a lot of time with Dan in particular, and really enjoyed our conversations.
We hope to meet up with them again either in Playa Coronado or elsewhere in the world, wherever our combined journeys take us. (Maybe Dan will love being a ski instructor in Colorado so much that he will decide to stay long-term? Dan, if you’re reading… HINT! HINT!)
So tonight, we’re at the Hotel Madrid in David, Panama (a nice hotel for $38/night, with an air conditioner in the room and Wifi in the lobby and hotel restaurant ), and we are planning on heading up to the mountains of Panama on Wednesday by bus.
Driving across Panama today was very green and brought with it unexpected scenery. The biggest surprise to me was the plains/steppe area of Panama. I don’t think of Panama as having any kind of plains… just green hills, beaches, bananas and pineapples, and a really big canal.
But there are plains here, and crops like sugar cane and corn are grown in the plains.
On the way here, we also saw huge teak forests (which aren’t naturally occurring in the way they’re being done, but teak is a really good wood to use in lumber production because it grows so fast, and the teak trees were very interesting to see planted in rows for as far back as you could look through them from the highway).
And now, we’re looking forward to heading to the mountains on Wednesday.
Did you know Panama has mountains? And apparently the temperatures there are so moderate that you don’t really need air conditioning or heating. It’s cool at night, and comfortable during the day.
Sounds nice to us!
We’ll be headed to a town called Boquete, which is about a 45 minute bus ride from here.