El Salto

May 20, 2025

Ryan and I escaped further into the junlges of Panama for a boys weekend gettaway to El Salto, a small farming community that is a two hour hike from our place in Santa Fe. 

The hike there took us a little over two hours and was mostly uphill, sometimes very steep, but we passed the time with a good father-son chat about a variety of topics. It's nice to have a teenager's captive attention with no devices or siblings to compete with for it. 

The cabin we stayed in is owned by the same people who own our home exchange place in Santa Fe (they also own a beach house on the Carribean side that we'll visit next week).  The farm is owned and run by a lovely couple Egberto and Esther Soto with help from their 22 year old son (the youngest of 10 children!) Josue. 

The cabin, nicknamed Girasol (Spanish for sunflower) is small, but bursting with rustic charm and it's built perched above a waterfall so you fall asleep to the roaring sound of the falls.  There is no electricity so no lights (we used candles and portable LED lights), no charging sell phones and no Wifi - Ryan and I passed the time reading on the deck and playing chess and card games.  

During the day we hiked and swam in the cool waterfall pools of which there were many.  The one a few minutes from the cabin was called La Iguana and had the best swimming hole. One day Josue guided us on an hourlong hike up the mountain passed several other waterfalls, some magnificent, to La Golindrona where we swam and played in the falls.  

The journey is not for the faint of heart in the best weather conditions - indeed Josue brings ropes to help ascend and descend parts of the route - but it was particularly terrifying because all the recent rain had rendered the rocks extremely slippery.  At several points I had to take off my shoes as I had better grip with my feet than my slick soled shoes. 

We ate tasty local meals provided by Egberto and Esther Soto, the farmers on whose property the cabin was built. All the food came from crops they grow on their farm and was largely vegetarian, but we did have a delicious chicken and yucca soup on one occasion. 

At each meal Esther would be in the kitchen cooking and Egberto would sit near us and pepper me with questions in Spanish which I would answer back in my Duolingo Spanish with a healthy helping of Google Translate. 

It was a fun weekend getting back to basics in nature, but we were happy to get back to our creature comforts, and the girls.