Volcan and Cerro Punta

Last full day with the rental car, so we thought we'd take advantage of it and drive out to Volcan and Cerro Punta.  Everyone was telling us to take the "new" road that cuts across to Volcan, instead of driving all the way down to David, across to another city where we would then make the turn back up towards Volcan.  That's a much longer drive, and fortunately yesterday, when we went to David, we saw where the new road goes to Volcan, so today we were able to get on that road with no trouble at all.

It was a beautiful day today.  This new road to Volcan is quite an interesting drive.  First of all, there are many turn-offs on this road, but one person told us, make sure you stay on the road that has the yellow line going down the middle.  That was such good advice, because there were several times when it looked like we could go either way, but the yellow line was the clincher.  The road twists and turns a lot and has plenty of steep grades, but all in all, it's a much much nicer drive.  There are hardly any cars on this road which makes it even better.  There was one part of the road where we thought we were going through some sort of national park or something, since it was so beautiful.  We decided to stop and ask what that place was.  While Guillermo went to ask, I went over to the bridge and was amazed by what I saw.  (We actually stopped here on our way back.)

A river running through this deep canyon that was just spectacular!  When Guillermo got back, he told me that they said this was part of a hydro-electric plant.  That was surprising to us.

This was a little canal running along at the top of this canyon.

Once we got to Volcan, we were disappointed to see that the restaurant we ate at last year, called "Fernando" was closed.  We had planned on having lunch there.  So, we drove on through Volcan to Cerro Punta and then on to Guadalupe.  It was still a little early for lunch, but we had decided we'd have lunch at the Quetzales hotel so to use up a little time, we drove on up through Guadalupe a little past the road that turns off to the Quetzales cabins.   This is what the hills look like around Guadalupe.

Then we turned around, parked at the hotel and went upstairs to have lunch.  What we ordered was absolutely delicious and what I had (an eggplant dish) was far and away better than the pizza I had last year.  The sky started clouding over while we were having lunch, and it actually started sprinkling.  By the time we left the hotel, the skies were looking a lot heavier and darker.  We spent a little time back close to Volcan looking at a few houses that we had seen on the internet for rent.  But nothing worked out.  Everything looked a lot worse in real life than it did on the web.

Driving back to Boquete was nice, but it was a lot harder because it was rainy and foggy.  As we got closer to the highway back to Boquete, the rain was coming down in buckets and it was really slow going almost until we got to Boquete.  Surprisingly enough, in Boquete it was dry!