Panama, The Canal and Beyond

Day Six – 12 Nov 2014

Weather: Sun, cloud, shower and a reasonable 25.

Well, I was woken at 6:30 thinking it was my 7 am wake up call. This seems to be a trend and my name must be at the top of the list if I’m getting such an early wake up. And here I was thinking ‘wow, the sun rises really late here.’

I made the climb to the restaurant for breakfast which was basic. The staff did the toast for us and the tea was delicious. Being a coffee plantation, I hear the coffee was pretty good too. We met up with Gustavo outside the restaurant to start our tour of the plantation.

He split the group into mobile and not-so-mobile. I went with the mobile.

Our guide, Rolando, gave us a history of the plantation which I think their website tells best here:

“After participating in the design and construction of the Panama Canal locks’ emergency hatches and the gigantic docks in Colon, Toleff Bache Mönniche, a Norwegian engineer and graduate of the Royal College of Dresden, Germany, traveled to the High Lands of Chiriqui in 1911. He was looking for a place with clean, fresh air to rest and recover from his fourth attack of malaria contracted in the hot and humid lands of the Panama Canal. After sailing seven days in a little vapor boat along the Pacific shore and riding a horse uphill for many hours, he arrived in a unique spot in the world: Finca Lerida, nested along the lively skirts of VolcanBaru and the high ridges of the Central Range. Located 10 km uphill from Boquete, this property used to be half grasslands/half tropical forest yearlong.

In 1924, engineer Mönniche finally retired from the Panama Canal and along with his wife Julia moved to Finca Lerida. Here he built his house – completely by hand – in a Norwegian countryside style and built the first Coffee Plantation by gravity in Panama. Aside from this he designed and patented the “sifon”, a device made to separate good beans from the bad. This device is now is used worldwide by many coffee plantations and it is still working in Finca Lerida where Mönniche’s old processing plant still processes coffee of excellent quality. In 1929, Finca Lerida exported to Germany its first shipment of Panamanian coffee. This began Panama’s high reputation as one of best quality exotic coffee producers in Europe.”

This is the sifon.

The farm primarily grows Catuai Arabica coffee with about 20% of their crop being a variety of others including the famous Geisha Coffee, the best in the world. The plants can live up to 40-45 years and thrive in the volcanic soil nestled here at over 5000 feet in altitude halfway between the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea.

Rolando picked some of the coffee berries, showed us how to pop the beans from inside the cherry and had us suck on them and taste the different flavours emerge the longer we had them. I wondered if I’d sleep that night if I chewed them and swallowed them.

From here, he brought us down to a pool and showed us how water is used to sort the bad berries from the good. He tossed a few in. The good ones sank. The bad ones floated.

This is essentially how the sifon mentioned above works. The original is still here with the patent posted on the wall above.

From here, we went into the testing/tasting room. The coffee addicts sat down and Rolando ground up three types of bean – natural, honey and lavado. The three vary on how they are processed including the washing, the removing of the pulp and differing time for drying and fermenting.

He showed us the green bean and the roaster where they are roasted with varying temperature, time and air content depending on the variety. The bean is then ground down and the tester will smell the grounds. Hot water is added and it was smelled again. The crown was removed and the spoon was half immersed and moved away from the nose as it smelled it again. And then the tasting was done by sucking it up from the spoon (in order to add more air to it).

Everyone that wanted to got a chance to do the whole process. Someone asked about decaffeinated coffee and he said it could never be 100% decaffeinated.

From here, we went down to the coffee shop and everyone got a cup of coffee and a deliciously moist lemon/passionfruit slice of cake. I skipped the coffee…the cake was awesome by itself!

Once the tour was done, we boarded the bus for our free time in Boquete. Now, if you want to go ziplining or anything else today, arrange it before today and be aware that you likely will have to skip the coffee tour to do it. The ziplining left at 8:30 and 10:30 am. There are other activities as well, but one can’t hop on the bus after the coffee tour and expect to sign up and go do something as most seemed to start early. To me, this was the allure of Boquete yet no time was made for it and no optionals for it were offered. For that reason, I honestly think they should either offer optionals here for the more adventurous or replace Boquete with a visit to Colon via the Panama Canal train. (And my thoughts on this grow stronger given the very long bus day we had to return to Panama City. If they keep Boquete, they really should have a flight back to Panama City. The extra cost would be minimal and well worth it to avoid that long long drive).

We were dropped off at the plaza and given 3 hours to visit the area. There isn’t a lot there and the town isn’t really any kind of tourist town. There are a couple of souvenir shops and a lot of restaurants. I sat in a café with some tourmates and gorged on a mountain of nachos.

At 3:30, we boarded the bus just as a sprinkle of rain started. It was done by the time we got to the hotel and I found the wifi back on in my room, so I finally got my pics downloaded and then went for a walk. I ended up on a hammock outside one of my tourmate’s room and before long, half the tour had chairs pulled up around the hammock to chat and someone even rocked the hammock for me. It was everything I could do to not sleep.