Saturday, January 24 2009
Written by Matt Landau
The Panama Report
I’ve been around Panama now for something like four years, a time in which I’ve traveled like a mischievous sprite to the nation’s rural valleys and the barren beaches. I’ve met and lived with its indigenous tribes, I’ve explored its jagged coastline by air, land and sea, and I’ve hiked its most wild and isolated peaks. In a way, I’ve turned the glove of Panama inside out, enjoying both its well-known attractions and largely nameless hidden gems. I’ve spelunked in Darien, I’ve suntanned in Cambutal, and I’ve driven the treacherous Carretera Llano Carti all the way to San Blas. I’ve visited pre-Columbian gravesites amidst the jungles of Veraguas, I’ve hunted iguanas in Chiriqui, and I’ve bet on cockfights in the heart of Chorillo. But I can’t say my relationship with Panama has ever been that in-depth.
It’s one of those things that’s almost as embarrassing as it is curious, visiting the famous town of Boquete for the first time. It’s like living in France for four years and procrastinating a visit to the Eiffel Tower. I arrived in Boquete blindly to write a freelance article for a major US news publication and hoped to gather enough information in three days to put together a cohesive and accurate piece. This objective, I soon realized, was paramount to ignoring new neighbors for several years, then showing up unannounced and asking if they have happen to have all the ingredients for a traditional Valencia paella.
You can’t carve a turkey in the dark: I’ve never been a fan of journalists who visit places for several days then write articles making sweeping assumptions and giving expert advice. Unless you’re a longtime local or have stolen a longtime local’s diary, it’s almost impossible to fully grasp the character of a place in that amount of time. But in truth, how can you visit for a few days and NOT make assumptions and get some things wrong? Similar to shopping for a camcorder, I’d hoped to simply gather some useful opinions and get a good feel for the product.
Boquete is like a Vermont ski town in the summertime, all the time. In the days, there’s this cool, fresh air that isn’t quite chilly enough to warrant a jacket; a polar opposite from the oppressive heat that lingers elsewhere in Panama. That people like this little nook of Panama because of the chilly weather at night seems somewhat harebrained to a kid from New Jersey: like traveling all the way to Florence for a Big Mac. But surprisingly, the afternoon breezes, crackling fireplaces, and morning dew are like Cape Cod in their coziness. Lodges on the main street of dark and polished woods house boutique tour agencies with hand-drawn signs – a testament to its eco-village reputation and reminiscent of grassroots villages in Maine.
There’s also a weird aspect of the Swiss Alps about Boquete, with small babbling brooks that run between restaurants and bakeries, a naked yet complex landscape that seems like it should be covered in a layer of snow. Yugoslavian settlers in Chiriqui imparted a theme of steep triangular roofs, which peek up from the forests, reminiscent of Bavarian chocolate houses. The first thing I did when I got into Boquete, in fact the first thing I do when I arrive in any foreign place for the first time, was go in desperate search of a barber shop. Barbershops, no matter where you are in the world, are universal in their procurement of town gossip: perhaps the best possible way to gain insider knowledge without sneaking into a town hall meeting. From Frankfurt to Philadelphia, some of the best travel advice and town scandals I’ve been privy to come from a barbershop. Plus, I needed a haircut.
The small room with its windows and doors open to the street was empty except for a sixties-style couch that was leaking foam, three old school barber chairs that appeared to have been rescued from wartime USA, and a deep sink that was filled with soapy warm water. The owner of the shop, a withered old man around sixty, stood with his loose white shirt unbuttoned and several combs sticking out from the pocket.
“Sit down in that chair and don’t move your head one inch,” he said as I entered the shop. It was as if he’d held some sort of grudge against me in a previous life, like I’d borrowed his scissors and never returned. The barber had owned his humble shop for forty years and spent roughly that long on my simple buzz cut explaining the pros and cons, from the perspective of a longtime local, of Boquete having evolved into the town it is today. While the money he makes on a haircut had nearly quadrupled since he began, Boquete had also lost some of its harmony, he said, some of its peace.
“You see that?” he pointed through the window of the shop, aiming up into the side of a mountain where the green sheen of a massive home protruded from the tree line. “Puro dinero. That guy gives me a two-dollar tip,” he said as he cut my ear with the straight edge razor and a small rivulet of blood trickled down my cheek.
The Caldera River acts like Boquete’s spine: a beautiful rush of whitewater that varies in width from one end of town to the other, reminiscent of rivers and creeks that flow throughout the Canadian Rockies. Giant displaced boulders from Boquete’s recent flood lined the riverbanks and an emanating chilly breeze circulates throughout the majority of the valley. Boquete is a thirty-minute drive to Panama’s second biggest city David, and a 1.5 hour drive from Boca Chica, one of the nation’s most beautiful up-and-coming white-sand coastal regions. It’s altitude hovers around 3,000 feet above sea level.
The entertainment scene in Boquete is small scale, but its locals socialize a lot. The dining scene is limited yet of high quality; my favorites were the hearts of palm salad at the Panamonte Hotel, the hamburgers at Boquete Bistro, the falafel platter at Tammy’s, and the fresh trout with tomatoes and mushrooms at Il Pianista, a little Italian place tucked away somewhat obtusely into the riverside hills. Nightlife-wise, the two go-to bars are Zanzibar, a funky African/beach saloon, and Cabana, a gringo owned cliff-based lodge. The small local restaurants are tasty and simple, with a decent plate of rice, beans, protein and salad running around $2.50. The local cantinas charge anywhere from $0.50-$1.00 for a beer.
I heard it a lot from expat transplants: that people enjoy Boquete because it still offers an affordable lifestyle. While the high-end places charge close to Panama City prices (Peruvian ceviche for $7.95), there are certainly still the small bodegas and local businesses that offer inexpensive services. The beef, trout, and strawberries in Boquete are all first-class.
Wandering through the humid wings of Panama City’s most luxurious mall, I often find myself uncertain as to why exactly stores dedicate entire sections to winter jackets, sweaters, and heavy wool pants. The answer, I now realize, is Boquete. It gets really cold here!
The closest I’ve ever felt to Boquete’s chill factor in Panama is El Valle and honestly it doesn’t compare. People in Boquete, not unlike the Eskimos and snow, have four words for rain, each of which I experienced on my trip. The most signature of these rains is called bajareque: a fine mist that’s similar to the mist they spray on lettuce at the grocery store. When it’s not drizzling or experiencing a chilly breeze, Boquete temperatures hover around perfect.
Tourism in Boquete is not unlike a healthy newborn giraffe: plenty of potential yet burdened with the realization that not all its infant legs are in sync. There are those who have a vision, and those who have trouble seeing tomorrow. Small (mostly foreign owned) tour operators have popped up offering rafting, tree canopies, hiking, and canoe trips while roughly ten to fifteen boutique hotels handle sleeping accommodations, ranging from $40 rooms to $425 suites. Celebrities both old and new, from movie stars to US presidents have visited Boquete over the past 100 years: it has an old-world historical charm that’s irresistible.
As in most parts of Panama, due to the Republic’s greenness to the tourism industry, there is a disconnect in Boquete when it comes to excellence in service. This disconnect is represented by weird contrasts: for example, during my three visits to the Panamonte Hotel bar/restaurant, I experienced innovative food and a extraordinary ambiance contrasted starkly with some of the weirdest, most offensive service. Similarly, the views from my ATV tour were stunning, but they were dulled by the guide’s affinity for silence (even though he had my last name). These were just two good examples of the same divide we talk about on this site all the time: Panama’s search for a tourist service sector that can do justice to the nation’s people and natural resources.
The main drag in Boquete is peppered with signs for accommodations, cafes and tour guides, staggered one after another eager like listings in a phonebook. The handful of hotel operators I spoke with showed extremely high occupancy numbers: a positive sign after the recent flood threatened the life of the annual Flower Fair (and the integrity of a town bridge). According to Lisette Rodriguez of the Boquete Visitor Center , tourist demand for everything from sightseeing to scooter rentals has remained high.
One of the major attractions to Boquete is its coffee, which is grown and processed here, then shipped throughout various places in the world. For the most part those who currently profit from the sector are plantation owners who export to Panama City and abroad, as well as Ngobe Bugle Indians who both live in and migrate to Boquete from their nearby Comarca for coffee picking seasons where they’re compensated a few dollars a day. The Indians live nomadically in improvised huts that border on the oppressive: a stark contrast to the now-famous local geisha strain that is reportedly selling in San Franscisco for $10/cup.
For a time in Boquete, real estate stole the show: with longtime landowners selling their dying coffee farms to take advantage of the property boom. But with the onset of a slow property market, the town’s four major types of coffee trees are re-emerging as valuable assets and bolstering Boquete’s allure as a Napa Valley-type destination where aficionados and connoisseurs are able to visit and buy directly from the source. There is little cohesion pointed out Carol Delonis of Boquete Mountain Safari Tours (one of the only coffee tour operators in town), between foreigners who strive to commercialize or touristify the coffee industry in a way that benefits locals, and the locals themselves who are slow to grasp the widespread trickledown effects of such ideas. Only a small handful of the many coffee growers in Boquete, suggested Delonis, actually buy into the idea of coffee tourism. She gave the example of Kona, Hawaii where guests sample different coffee roasts and estate labels on a bevy of guided tours, as a model for success.
Boquete gets a reputation for being an overpopulated gringo hangout. But a large expat population, according to Paul McBride of Valle Escondido , is actually somewhat of a misconception. Paul pointed out that maybe 10% of Boquete’s population is from outside Panama, and one main reason for this false impression was that locals tended to link incoming dollars directly with incoming foreigners: as in, lots of money means lots of people, when in reality it is proportionally few foreigners that are responsible for the injection of that capital. You still see foreigners everywhere in Boquete, from retirees to lots of backpackers, usually running into the same person more than once during your stay.
Like everywhere else in Panama, the real estate scene in Boquete appears to have slowed to a crawl. A small handful of projects that’d once hoped to jump on the “retire here” bandwagon are, not unlike the same sort of projects elsewhere in the Republic, losing steam. Local experts tended to cite three main reasons for this lull: 1) the global financial crisis, 2) overambitious buyers expecting ridiculous discounts and 3) still-hopeful sellers willing to hold out. While the market seems desperate for some third party property assessment, its pricing ambiguity haunts Boquete’s real estate offices where several major players told me business was down as much as 75%.
I visited the offices of a few luxury real estate projects in pre-construction mode, all of which seemed depressed. With some prodding, representatives admitted that construction would not restart without a certain percentage of sales which, with the gloomy economy, appears to be an immeasurable amount of time. My personal favorite was the team at Cielo Paraiso who, after reminding me in my undercover bathing suit and Chuck Tailors that sales for this exclusive project started at $700k, assured this out-of-towner business was strong and phase two would begin around June. According to a group of Panamanian locals I spoke with, around half of Boquete’s residents are happy about the arrival of gringos – the other half would prefer otherwise.
The infrastructure in Boquete can best be described as “advanced for a Panama mountain town”. Far ahead of anything similar (including El Valle, Santa Fe, Altos de Maria…etc), Boquete is still hampered by the lack of several major institutions such as a big grocery store: Romero, it’s current only option, is itself a great symbol of the town’s growth though, having evolved from aisles of little more than rice and beans in the days before the Boquete boom, to current displays of exotic tea and twelve different types of toilet paper.
Everything seems relatively clean in Boquete. Main roads are well paved whereas back roads are not unlike Littletown, America where poor maintenance isn’t a flaw, but rather a cherished design imperfection. My good friend Jim Procter, the Panama Guru , has lived in Boquete for two years and has been flabbergasted by the development activity over the past year: he explained how the town really started to boom several years ago and in the past year specifically were erected about five significant-sized shopping center type buildings.
Clinic-type labs accommodate patients in Boquete but still serious medical work must be done in David. Beautifully paved two-lane roads wind throughout the mountains and new real estate developments are bolstered into the hills: construction that is great for the region but also a detriment to its ecosystem: wildlife like howler monkeys and quetzal birds, once a regular sight near and around town, are now mostly relegated to the high mountains.
Boquete-proper seems to have been affected by the recent flood, but not to the fatal degree that was portrayed in newspapers. Those who were affected to the degree of tragic were Ngobe Bugle Indians who experienced landslides up in the mountains. The flood was not a total surprise, with one of similar proportions dating somewhere around the 1950s. Though that didn’t seem to stop the construction of new restaurants and hotels perched directly in the flood’s death path and now seriously in need of renovation attention.
As far as safety, people in Boquete feel overwhelmingly safe, especially compared to Panama City where crime is on a steep rise. It is possible in Boquete to feel earthquakes that originate closer to the Panama/Costa Rica border, but damage is never anything more than a few broken windows. Crime has increased notably here, characterized mostly by home robberies and is thought to be the work of outsider maliante, making trips into the valley to target gringos.
Conclusion: I like Boquete. I like it a lot. I like it enough to go back regularly. Being a young, city guy, I’d probably limit my Boquete trips to about three or four days for fear of getting bored. Its real estate market is pioneering for Panama, its tourism sector is blooming, and its people, both foreign and local, seem to be amazingly happy and calm. Like any other great town, Boquete faces challenges: challenges of development, of balance, and of synchronization. Its climate is unbelievable and its location – close to David and the southern Pacific coastline – is both and convenient and strategic. I don’t know why it took me so long to visit, especially since flights are back down to reasonable rates and the drive from Panama City is only about six hours. Boquete is a cool mountain town, best for older people and lovers of nature. Although it’s long been a Panama staple, those of us who took a while to get there are having fun experiencing it for the first time.
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