In Panama, a wet walk, a wild ride

Hike Up Volcano In Panama Turns Into A Strange Adventure

By Eric R. Danton, Hartford Courant Staff Writer
11:58 AM PDT, April 24, 2007

My father and I, in Panama for a week during Thanksgiving last year, decided to make the ascent of Volcán Barú part of our itinerary. It seemed like a snap, given our more strenuous previous excursions: hiking the Inca Trail over four days in Peru in 2004 and scaling peaks exceeding 16,000 feet in Ecuador in 2005.

Wrong.

Various guidebooks offer differing accounts of how challenging the hike up Volcán Barú is supposed to be. At 28 kilometers round-trip (more than 17 miles), the hike is plenty long, whether you decide it's a straightforward one-day walk-up or a trek best spread over two days. The idea, all the books say, is to the reach the summit at dawn, when it's usually still clear enough for climbers to see the Pacific Ocean to the south and the Caribbean Sea to the north. We first consider the two-day hike but opt at the last minute to avoid camping by doing the whole thing in one day with a local guide supplied by Panama Pete Adventures in Panama City (company motto: "No tours, just adventures").

Completing the hike in one day usually requires leaving Boquete at 2 a.m. We are unable to move up our pre-arranged start time, so we meet our guide outside our lodgings, Hotel Fundadores, at 6:15. We pile into an overloaded white Mitsubishi Montero - stuffed with the driver, a tour company employee, the guide, the guide's "assistant," another guy hitching a ride and us - for the drive from Fundadores to the ranger station at the foot of Volcán Barú. It's sunny and rapidly warming when we start up the rocky path at 7:15.

The hike is immediately grueling, thanks in large part to the humidity. Our roguish guide, Eduardo Miranda, is out of shape (later, after informing us that this is his first ascent of Volcán Barú in five years, he tells me his hobbies include "mujeres, fumando y cerveza" - women, smoking and beer), and we pause frequently to catch our breath during the first portion.

The path goes on and on, and parts are quite steep. Wooden signs inform us of our progress, though they soon start to seem like taunts as we huff our way slowly toward la cima, the top: "9 km a la cima," or "4.5 km a la cima." We trudge along, pausing now and then to eat fresh raspberries off the vine or to admire the view. Soon, though, clouds begin rolling in from the west, and they are ominously dark.

Rain And Rum

When we're "2 km a la cima," it starts to rain. This is a bad sign, given the deep, muddy ruts we've been seeing, but we're getting close to the top. So we don rain gear and hunker in brush by the side of the path. Eduardo smokes a cigarette while we wait for the rain to subside.

After a few minutes, the rain tapers to a chilly drizzle, and we continue on to the "base camp," where we would have spent the night. It's a flat area, marked by a dilapidated open-walled hut missing part of the floor, and by a large mound of garbage scattered near a perfectly serviceable trash barrel. It's 11 a.m., and suddenly our decision not to spend the night - and all of this afternoon - seems inspired, despite the rain.

Finally, after another steep, torturous stretch, we reach the top, but there are no oceans in sight. In fact, we are enveloped in fog, and the only water we see is falling on us from above as we wander gingerly around the murky summit, which is growing steadily colder.

The top of Volcán Barú is anything but pristine. Its altitude makes it an ideal transmission point for television and cellular phone signals, and a large flat area just shy of the summit hosts a small forest of towering antennas looming over squat concrete bunkers housing equipment and the engineers that maintain it.

The prospect of hiking back down the steep, muddy path is not pleasant, and Eduardo happily obliges us with a diversion: He knows one of the engineers working atop the mountain, and soon we are seated in the makeshift kitchen in a bunker as the engineer, Froilan Miranda (no relation), boils water for coffee.

We gratefully gulp it down, shivering in our wet gear as the temperature drops, and carry on a conversation as best we can with our broken Spanish and their broken English, in between peeks at a soccer game on a little TV in the tiny bunkroom next to the kitchen. Before long, Froilan produces a bottle of harsh Panamanian rum, which Eduardo tipples with gusto and passes around to the rest of us.

We're sitting on top of a dormant volcano, in pouring rain, drinking rum with complete strangers. Now that's adventure.

A Rocky Road

Single page | 1 2 >>