Estamos en Boquete

After an awesome week in Panama City it was time to move on to our second (and final) Panamanian destination of the trip – Boquete – a small town in the mountains in Panama’s coffee growing region… yep, we might have left Colombia – the South American country with the best coffee we’d ever tasted in our lives, BUT we’d read good things about Panama’s coffee and were excited to see if it could live up to the hype…

To get to Boquete we pretty much had to cross the whole of the country… but given Panama is pretty small it wasn’t actually that bad and we easily made it to Boquete in time for dinner!!! 🙂

Boquete turned out to be a pretty small place that was VERY touristy and overpriced!!! Before we arrived we’d planned to go on a coffee tour and see how different a coffee farm was here to in Colombia, BUT after a lot of umming and ahing we decided to create our own coffee experience rather than spend $$$$ on a tour…

Our coffee experience started with a gentle stroll to the visitor centre on the edge of town… The visitor centre might not seem like a logical place to start a ‘self-created’ coffee tour, BUT inside this visitor centre is a cool museum all about coffee, so we could start educating ourselves about Panamanian coffee 🙂 Outside the visitor centre was pretty cool too – no, not coffee bushes growing – but awesome views back to the town, and also a big shiny BOQUETE sign 🙂 🙂

Next stop on our self-created coffee tour (well after lunch… there’s no point rushing things after all!) was a stroll through town and out the other side… until we finally (it turned out to be a pretty long stroll in the heat…) reached our destination – Cafe Ruiz. ‘What’s so special about Cafe Ruiz?’ I hear you ask, maybe you’re thinking ‘surely if you’re in a coffee growing region then you can get a good coffee anywhere?!?’… well… I was determined to drink Geisha coffee whilst in Panama… and most of the cafes in town didn’t seem to have it on their menus!!!

‘Geisha coffee is a rare, ancient Ethiopian varietal that was rediscovered recently in Panama and immediately took the specialty coffee world by storm’ – not my words, but I liked them so I stole borrowed them!!! It is also the MOST expensive coffee in the world! Now, it’s not that I have to have the most expensive things in life, but surely I thought to myself – it it’s THAT expensive, then it MUST be good… maybe it could even give Colombia a run for its money!?!

So, Cafe Ruiz lured us there with promises of Geisha coffee…

… and kept us there a while longer than a cup of coffee would take to drink – as we ended up with THREE cups of coffee each instead of ONE!!! 😉 Yes, I’m accustomed to beer tasting paddles, but here in Panama you can get coffee tasting paddles (well kind of!!!). We went for it for $9 USD… that’s 13AUD or just under 7GBP per person for coffee… umm… anyway as a result of our long ardious walk to Cafe Ruiz, we got to try three home grown coffee varietals – Geisha, Typica, and Pacamara…

And the result was… drum roll please…

By far our favourite of the three varietals was the Geisha… BUT the roast was a little too dark for us… had it been more of a medium roast, it might have faired a little better – BUT there was no denying it – Colombia still remained the unbeaten coffee champion of the trip!!! Sorry Panama…

However, there’s also no denying that we enjoyed our time at Cafe Ruiz – as they had kindly put up a bird table, so we could birdwatch as we drank! 🙂

We actually spent most of our time in Boquete in our hostel!!! We stayed in a place which – while our room was far from perfect – had a shared outdoor area which was AWESOME… it was backing onto the river and was the perfect place to sit and relax 🙂

There were two other highlights of Boquete that need a mention in this post! The first – fried hojaldras covered with way too much sugar 🙂 Hojaldras are basically thick fried dough – sounds healthy, huh! – but at 25 cents a go (US), they’re a tasty filling bargain 🙂 🙂

The second highlight… tyre art… South America does tyre art pretty well too – but this resplendent quetzal hanging up outside a shop in the centre of Boquete was just cool 🙂

On our whirlwind tour of Central America it was time to move on…after just two stops in Panama we were heading to Costa Rica…