El Valle trip

After long time I again left Panama city for a trip to countryside. El Valle - our destination - is small city in valley, which is basically the volcano crater created long time ago. I was told that the nature is very beautiful there, which definitely increased my interest in the trip.

We were meeting at 7am at bus terminal, I came at 6:55 as is my habit to be at the meeting point few minutes earlier. I did not expect anyone to be there, and actually I did not expect anyone to come within next 20 minutes, so I was nicely surprised, when first people came exactly at 7, but then I realized, that one of them was girl from Netherlands and other one was Franklin, who is actually quite punctual (I am quite lucky to have him in a team...). But until we were all, it passed another 30 minutes... Well - Latin America...

El Valle is approximately 2 hours away from Panama city in direction of Costa Rica, which means, that we were going to cross the Panama Canal. Fortunately we went in different way than the way to Costa Rica and I saw the Millennium bridge:

BTW. Did you know, that there are only two bridges over the Panama Canal? And that the second one was constructed just few years ago (maybe therefore it is called Millennium bridge).

Our first stop was in the ZOO. I was expecting different animals and definitely there were several quite interesting:

 

But most surprising for us was the presence of cages with hens and roosters. I am not sure if it is so exotic animal in Central America, or they were feeding other animals with chicken food, but definitely there were lot of them there.

Another stop which, is to be mentioned, was the thermal resort. There is a thermal spring (around 36°C). Maybe you are asking, why it is so important - well for me it meant, that I had a hot shower after several weeks... :D The thermal resort is also famous because of some mud, which is supposed to be healthy and help your skin. Frankly, I don't believe it, but for the sake of fun, here is the result:

 

The most important learning point of the trip came on the way home. In El Valle we were quite lucky,becausee it started to rain right after we took a bus to Panama. In the morning the journey took 2 hours, so we were expecting approximately the same time to get home. However after less than hour, the stopped in some very small village at the parking lot in front of some shop and after a while people started to get out of the bus. When we asked, what happened we were told, that the bus has some technical problems and is heading back to El Valle. For me the bus sounded perfectly OK and I had a strange feeling, that the bus driver just want to go home and not the whole way to Panama and back. And as I realized, lot of people thought the same way. But we got off, paid the sum we were asked and waited for another bus... If something like this happened in Europe, people would be bitching, cursing the bus driver and would be angry for next several days because of it. Here, we just stood there for half an hour and waited for another bus as nothing happened.
And I didn't even get pissed, I just accepted the situation and got used to it.

And that's the point - maybe we have feeling, that people in Latin America are all the time late and are not so responsible... But on the other hand Europeans are sooo stressed and in rush all the time. Of course, there is not right or wrong way, it is a different way of life standard and some people preferr this one, some preferr the other one. You just have to be born in the right region ;).