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14 May - Jungle Trekking
The Toilet ended up taking a bit longer than expected to arrive, but hey ho, this is Panama and nothing is set to a ridged schedule. It finally turned up on 12 May and in between times we decided to try and fill the time more constructively than we have been doing!
We took a walk through the countryside up to a large church on a hill it was a very pretty walk and we saw lot of nice birds. We met a guy called Heike who does horse treks and jungle walks. We were going to go horse riding but after a trip up into the hills to see the animals they got rather over excited and scared me enough to decide that walking was the best way! The mare who is the leader of the pack wasn't entirely please to see us and made a show of bucking around us to tell us who was boss! I ran away a bit being sure that she was gong to come a kick me in the head!
Click here for pictures of our church walk and another fort!
Mind you Heike did bring one of the horses out for us to test and got us bare back ridding it! My attempt was to sit on the thing for a while, make it walk 2 steps forward then abandon it! I though it was the bloody horse that had been bucking like a looney so I wasn't entirely happy with being told to sit on it with no saddle and no reins! I realised after I got off that it was a completely different horse just the same colour! Stuarts bare back ridding was a little more adventerous than mine, but after the horse kept looking like it may dash full pelt down the side of a steep slope, he also gave up!
Stuart did something very sneaky and unbeknown to me, went and brought a new engine for the dingy one evening, whilst in the pub! It turned out to be a very good decision though as the next day the old 5HP decided to break down for good! We met a lovely English couple who were back packing and we invited them on a trip up one of the rivers. After getting to a small lake we took the only passage that we could find, lifted the engine and paddled down a mangrove covered river not much wider than the dingy itself. The mangroves were crawling with small crabs and we saw lots of log crocodiles. No real ones though, apparently there are lots of them around they are just not interested in showing there faces to us! We turned back when the river became to narrow and paddled back to the lake. No sooner had we turned around to come back then the engine died. We all had to take it in turns to row back to the boat! Which was a very long way! Poor guys, we all had a good laugh doing it though and it was a bit of well needed exercise, I was glad there were 4 of us rather than just 2 to share the rowing too!
We have spent a lot of time zooming around in the dingy with the new motor, attempting to catch some fish, no luck at all any of the times we went out. We have also been finding new Forts to climb too.
Heike eventually got a few other people interested for the jungle trek and we set out on that yesterday. It was such a nice day and a fantastic walk. The rainy season seems to have settled in now and we generally get a good down poor at least once a day, but this day no rain at all it was perfect.
Click here for the jungle walk pictures.
The walk started through a finca and up to where Heike keeps his horses. They went mental again when they saw us and galloped down the hill to greet us hoping that we would be bearing gifts of food for them, all the more excited after Stuart got out his packet of crisps. Having got past the crazy horses we entered a very muddy uphill trail that took us to the top of the hill. Then back down again through tall grassy fields, into the jungle. The scenery was superb, very muddy though, we never managed to see any monkeys and luckily we didn't come across any scary insects! The most exciting things we saw were toucan and small bright green and black, highly poisonous frogs!
The Jungle trek lead to a wide river which we followed down to 3 waterfalls. The river walking was a bit adventurous, you were either trying not to fall on extremely slippery wet rocks, up to your knees in water wadding through the river, balancing across tree bridges or jumping over huge bolder's! It was fantastic, a little scary at times but really enjoyable. Suffice to say that Heather and I were pretty incredibly girly when it came to the scary bits and spent a lot of time sliding around our bums when we thought it was too dangerous to stand!! Ho hum, I don't think we were very Lara Croft about the whole thing!
After 5 hours of walking we reached the falls, where we all jumped straight into the refreshingly cool water. After stopping here for an hour or so to have lunch and dry out our boots and socks, we headed back for home all a little disappointed that we hadn't originally decided to stay another day and camp the night by the waterfalls. Off again and straight back up to our knees in water. So much for bothering to dry out the boots and socks!
Once we reached the jungle, we took a slightly different trail on the way back. This was was very muddy, steep and slippery, but luckily no one fell headfirst into the mud. We made it back to Portobelo after another 5 hours of walking and straight to the pub for a well earned pitcher of beer.