el valle, day two

I woke this morning at dawn and looked out the window above our bed. Sunlight was streaming up around La Dormida, the mountain which overshadows the town. The sunrise was splendid, and it also meant no rain!!! I went back to sleep and we both got up at about nine thirty, which is perfect sleeping in time for vacation.

We ate breakfast at the downstairs restaurant. I ordered faux Arroz de la Cuba (see all my notes on Peru), but it was so not good. The plantains, which are normally sweet and somewhat juicy, were smushed and fried in salty dough. These are called patacones. The Panamanians took a delicious food and managed to make it completely unpalatable. Even in ketchup they were gross.

El Valle Day Two´s events were to include the El Nispero zoo and the hot springs. Lonely Planet warns that people who are sensitive to animals in cages should avoid this zoo. I can second that one hundred percent although the animal empathy wears off after twenty minutes or so. This zoo had no paved roads and no advertisements for Steve Irwin (see notes for Australia). Just a lot of grass and a lot of animals in cages. We saw the following non-American animals:

• tapir (ugly!!!)
• ostrich (Nadiv touched its beak!)
• very loud sheep (I know sheep are American but these were so loud they must have been a Panamanian variety or something)
• birds, birds, and more birds
• also chickens (possibly to feed the other animals with? There is no other reason to display four hundred chickens at a zoo.)
• the golden frog, Panama´s national animal, and other frogs
• crocodile
• monkeys
• a sloth!! My kindred spirit!!

Overall, the zoo was A+, even though we both got bitten very badly on our ankles and legs.

After the zoo, we rented bikes and went to the hot springs. These were a sad affair. There were like four other people there and the whole place looked like it was created by a concrete enthusiast who had a thing for circles. There was one large tub of water that was luke-warm and brownish. Two older gentlemen were sitting in there. There was a station where you apply your own mud mask and then another station where you sit with your legs in a pool waiting for your mask to dry. This second station resembled a large bathtub and also contained brown water. Also, most importantly, we were informed that the hot springs weren´t really hot because all of the recent rain cooled down the pools.

I managed to convince Nadiv to stay and even to put mud on his face. While we waited in the bathtub for our faces to dry, we met a nice Italian family and chatted about our trips. They told us about the Panamanian New Years tradition of creating a life size stuffed scarecrow person and burning it at midnight. As it burns, it gets rid of all the bad spirits and memories from the year past. We had seen numerous stuffed figures on the side of the highway yesterday and even at the zoo this morning. This sounded like an awesome tradition.

After rinsing off the mud, we all moved to the larger pool where about fifteen other people were already standing and joking and having fun in the water. The hot springs turned out to be kind of fun, because the pool was filled and we had some nice conversations and I discovered that I could tread water quite better than the rest. We soon forget that the water was dirty and to be honest, since it was so hot outside the lukewarm water felt pretty good.

Back at the ranch, we met a monkey type animal named Monica and then chillaxed on the rooftop hammocks.