Boquete: Coffee Heaven

We left Panama on Tuesday on a 7 hour bus ride to David from where we transferred onto another 1.5 hour ride to the highland town of Boquete.  Higher up, this town has much milder temperatures and is considered by many Americans as an ideal place for retirement.  For us, the main draw of the town was a famed Quetzel
 hiking trail and the various coffee plantations.

Unfortunately the news upon our arrival wasn’t too good.  Turns out they had record breaking rains over the winter that continued longer than usual.  These resulted in mass flooding and extensive damage to the trail and caused the death of a guide.  As a result the trail has been completely shut down until all the requisite repairs are completed.  With despair setting in we decided to get up really early to have a chance to get orientated in various backup options and planning out our day accordingly.

In the end, the final result was quite alright.  We started the day with a short hike up to El Pianista, a local viewpoint.  The first half of the hike was quite pleasant through local countryside and some jungle.  However, after that it got steep, muddy and quite tiring.  Julita ended up bailing whereas I slogged on to the summit.  The problem was that with this being a cloud forest, the view was of clouds, not a very rewarding compensation for all our exertion, especially considering that on the way down my knee decided to start acting up.  We did however make a very loyal friend, in the form of a little black dog that followed us down all the way to the main road.  His reward, however, was much better than ours.  Julita bought him a filet meal at the local restaurant (and paid more for it than she did later on for her own dinner).

We managed to make it back into town just in time to sign up for a local Coffee Planation tour.  We ended up going to Fica Milagrossa, a small 5 acre plantation operated by Mr. Tito for the last 28 years.  I’ve been to coffee plantations before, but never had I known as much about coffee as I do now.  Apparently Arabica coffee is the best coffee out there and it is a highland based coffee grown at between 1400m-2000m above sea level.  There are numerous different varieties of coffee plants, each of a different flavor.  Locally, the most expensive and most prized coffee is Gesha, or since its newfound fame in Japan, Geisha Coffee.  These beans can sell for over $100 per pound. 

The plantation we visited is all natural.  All the beans are hand-picked, pealed and fermented.  Then they go through a sorting process which distinguishes between the qualities of the bean and washed.  Once this is done the beans are left out in the sun for at least 15 days to dry at which point they are sorted for size.  Green beans are then exported whereas for local sales, they are roasted and either ground or packaged as whole beans.  Mr. Tito’s coffee last year managed to win 2^nd place out of nearly 200 participants at the annual Panamanian Specialty Coffee competitions.  Oh, and for all of you who are those flavored coffee drinkers (i.e. vanilla coffee’s etc), please be aware that those are the 2^nd rate coffee beans which are not good enough for independent sale without the addition of the various chemical processes.  Did I mention that aside for the harvesting, Mr. Tito has been doing all the rest on his own for the last 28 years?  Including the stamping of the coffee bags with his lable and the packages.

Our day was wrapped up with the most delicious meal in a high class restaurant next to a river and a blazing fire.  Tomorrow it’s going to be another long bus ride that should take us all the way to the Caribbean coast and the Archipelago of Bocas del Toro.