Onwards we go then on our Panama adventure. The next stop on our itinerary was the Mount Totumas Cloud Forest Reserve, tucked away near the border with Costa Rica. Getting there from Panama City involved a 6 hour night bus with the loudest snorer I have ever heard sat right behind me (reader, not a wink of sleep was had), followed by another bus to get us to Volcan and then a transfer into the mountains using tracks that could barely be described as roads. I could have cried when someone finally put a cup of coffee into my sleep deprived hands, but let me tell you, it was worth every bit of the journey.
The reveal of the main lodge, looking tiny against the jungle-covered peaks, was absolutely spectacular. We stayed in the lodge’s treehouse, which is perched on a hillside and puts you very much in the thick of things. Mornings would consist of a huge early breakfast while we took our pick of the trails, which led you up and down the steep sides of the mountain to the tune of the troop of howler monkeys that lived nearby. One of paths took you to a natural hot spring nestled near the foot of the mountain – we arrived just as it started raining and had the surreal experience of soaking away our aches and pains surrounded by forest, the ultimate irony being, of course, that we’d have to hike all the way back up to the lodge again. The forest surrounding Mount Totumas is home to thousands upon thousands of species, but what was most memorable for me were the huge canopy emergents – Mexican elms and wild avocado trees that held whole ecosystems on their branches and towered into the clouds. The tallest, a short walk from our treehouse, must have been many hundreds of years old and had a system of buttresses that felt like they were the entrance to some tropical Narnia. Some of them were covered by Monstera plants big enough to envelop my house.
On our last day we took the trail all the way up into the La Amistad National Park, which flows into Costa Rica and is the largest nature reserve in Central America. Taking the path (relatively) less trodden rewarded us with a sighting of a peccary and her piglets and a black-faced solitaire, a species that’s endemic to these mountains and found nowhere else on earth. Then it was back to the lodge to watch the sunset with a glass of wine and the myriad hummingbirds zipping around. Certainly a life one could get used to.
