Panama - Boquete area, Los Quetzales Trail

Time to move on then from our lucky find and head up both in terms of geography and altitude to Boquete, one of the genuine tourist destinations in Panama.

We'd worked out directions for our after breakfast drive, with some help again from Olga, and were able to follow a relatively new road rather than going to David and back up again.

The landscape changed as did the rock, as we drove through canyon-like features:

We headed through Boquete on arrival and on to Los Quetzales trail, which it turns out is a very long and indeed very well maintained trail.

By now we were seeing more familiar faces, this time a Dutch couple who we'd bumped into in the Canal area, it was good to meet like-minded people from time to time.

A higher altitude specialist and quite common once you're up, is the Rufous-collared Sparrow:

On the trail proper we encountered lots of birds including this Collared Redstart:

A Tufted Flycatcher:

Ochraceous Wren:

Prong-billed Barbet, cracking bird:

And a precariously hanging Red-faced Spinetail:

We turned around on the trail after a few kilometers as we were running out of time, we'd only started walking after 10am.   It's probably our one regret of the whole trip, not being able to walk the whole length of this trail, the birding really was magic.

Back in town the clouds were bubbling up in the fading evening light:

Boquete is very heavily visited so at least there's plenty of choices for dinner, it's very noisy at night though...