Well, that Bird Island fun day was enough beachy touristing, next on the agenda was adventure tourism again (heavier on the adventure, light on the tourism). Rick wanted to take me to see “the Cuban”, who – as far as I can gather – is, well, a former Cuban, 
who homesteads a ways up the mountains on the mainland. Going there had the obvious attraction of man with interesting life history (a lot of good that does me, when I sit there mute, understanding a word here and there and making up my own stories to string those words together until Rick later re-tells the stories to me. Yep, nobody’s fault but my own), a homestead Panama-style, a hike through some virgin rainforest, and a boat trip to a village on Laguna de Chiriqui, 
Miramar. This time, we took Ricardito as our guide and escort – Ricardito is from Miramar, thus we’d be able to leave the boat at his mother’s house (and Ricardito likes the opportunity to see his family, which, given the length of the boat trip, does not occur that frequently).
The trip to Miramar from Rick’s place is interesting – you go through a number of mangrove passages and cuts, and over piles of coral. Rick hung out on the front of the boat to make sure we didn’t mash up any coral (bad for coral and motor), and I took on the role of wide-eyed innocent in the middle. Tita once again had to stay home.
We stopped at the store at Loma Partida, where Rick bought some cinnamon buns (for Ricardito and me - despite being an all-round ok guy, Rick foolishly turns up his nose at cinnamon) and cokes. I liked looking at the store, and learned much from the path to salvation posters. Soon 
after that, we were in the creek mouth at Miramar, and it was shallow, and we had the 
“two-foot motor” Ricardito pushing the boat and then his sister was pulling it. I met Ricardito’s mom, Gina, and Ricardito’s pig (un-named, referred to as him hog) and the sister’s man, Fidel (who used to work for the Cuban), and then Gina took us on a tour of Miramar where her church sisters were pointed out to me (I resisted sharing my new-found path to salvation knowledge, though), we stopped by Gina’s husband’s work (he repairs boats) and we swung by the playground. At the playground, 
Gina in no uncertain terms told one of the kids that his brother wants him to come to the Cuban’s and to go home and get his things. Rick bought a bunch of frozen chicken and some tamales. The chicken joined the packet of rice and the bottle of coconut oil already in the bottom of the big pack Rick and I were sharing. Ricardito and Manuel, together, had a pack the size you see pre-schoolers carrying their lunch in, plus a string bag (mostly empty).
We got a car to the trailhead, and then, we started hiking. Our first stop was a creek, not 200m into the trail, to eat the tamales (for those 200m, Manuel had already double-wrapped the tamales, which I was carrying at that point, and then offered to put them in the string bag so I wouldn’t have to carry them. The trail was muddy, and double leaf or not, 
there was a good chance the tamales would be muddy if I dropped them, so I forked them over pretty quickly). I balked when I got to the chicken part of the tamale, and passed it off to Rick. I was having an aversion to el pollo by this time, and I knew what supper was going to be, so I was happy with the corn mush for lunch. Plus, there were more cinnamon buns in the pack…
Rick said our strategy should be to walk fast in the sun, and slow in the shade. I followed instructions (note that 
Rick, not I, was carrying the pack) and walked fast in the first patch of sun. I got a bit slower by the second patch. I was not at all fast by the third, and when we picked some oranges a few patches on, I was glad for the break. And then it got steep, and I started thinking, whose bright idea was it to hike straight up a mountain in 35 degree heat and 90% humidity anyway? Ricardito cut me a stick to make it go easier. That boy was barely sweating! Manuel was trudging ahead of us, clearly bored with my snail-like pace. I grabbed the water bottle from 
Rick, but we’d put some sugar cane concoction into it and it had fermented and ick. Thus, when I caught up to Manuel only because he’d stopped at a stream in a wooded section, I spent about 30 seconds looking for the water purification tables, concluded we’d forgotten them, and just drank. I *know*, these are the sorts of things that can haunt you later, but I was hot, verging on dehydration, I saw Manuel drink it, and there was still a long way *up*.
It was around this point that Rick finally started feeling the climb, too, and gave the pack up to Ricardito. 
Ricardito shouldered it without seemingly feel it – after the jungly bit with the stream, we took a break in the shade, and used my watch to check our heartrates. Both Rick and I were at about 120, and we weren’t carrying anything beyond our cameras. Ricardito, with the massive pack, and Manuel, with the little pack and the string bag, were at about 80. Ricardito laughingly pointed to himself and said “burringa”, which I took to mean little donkey (and 
he said yes, that’s right), and then he pointed at Rick and said “burro”. Big donkey. I was glad before I learned the term for sloth, or something less appealing. I felt like a giant white sweatball that was completely unsuited to movement. And I was thirsty again. Ricardito promised of a clear and wonderful stream upstream of any cows, and said we were maybe 15 minutes away from him. I figured, 15 minutes, ok.
In reality, it was much more like an hour at my pace, and closer to two hours with our other distractions. 15 minutes or so after the break, we came across a lone bateo tree, and there were seeds scattered all over the ground. 
Bateo is one of the trees Rick wants, and there were a *lot* of seeds. Ricardito, Manuel and Rick turned their attention to snuffling about on the ground. I devoted myself to sitting on the pack and enjoying the view. And then, on we went, it seemed like straight up still but with a break for taking pictures of some bateo trees and for stashing the sack of seeds somewhere. Soon after the seed stashing, we entered virgin rainforest. This was magic. There were soaring trees, and well-developed vines, and there was the sound of more birds than you can imagine. The axe-handle tree was explained to me, and then there was a special tree that the three boys were looking for but I’ve forgotten what. The sun filtered down weakly onto our trail – once you were off the trail, I’m sure you wouldn’t have seen the sun. The rainforest was beautiful. I was still terribly thirsty, slick with sweat, and exhausted. I wanted the water.
The drinking stream is just a trickle, but we were all pretty happy to see it. I sucked back a liter in five minutes, and we refilled the bottles. Manuel was particularly excited – not because he was dehydrated, but because the water was cold. Agua fria, he kept saying. A treat to a kid who lives without refrigeration. At this point, we were heading down again, before starting to go up – I gathered from Manuel that the 
Cuban’s place was on a parallel ridge. It was still magic – so many of the plants I know as garden flowers and ornamentals were the size of Manuel. There were huge clumps of impatiens (“them flowers is pretty,” Ricardito said the next day as he dug some out and put them in the string bag) and coleus, and I started to feel like I was wandering around a giant’s potting plant store.
We left the jungle when we hit the Cuban’s acreage. First there was his “winter place”, which Rick admitted 
was maybe not for winter, since there are no seasons, and from the look of the place was rarely used. He figured maybe it was where the Cuban crashed if he didn’t make it all the way to his other place (uh-oh, I thought, that means it’s still *far*). Manuel suddenly exclaimed “ripe banana!”, and Ricardito proposed taking down the bunch – which would have belonged to the Cuban – and carrying them up to the Cuban’s place. This was a good idea, particularly as it allowed us to gorge on ripe bananas. Some of them, Ricardito left at the winter place (for dem rat bird no molest – which Rick translated so the bats don’t get at them) for the way down, and then it was back to trudging.
Perhaps because I was expecting the trudging to go on for a long time, it seemed like we were there immediately. I saw a building. Manuel (whose guari guari I did not understand and who, unlike his older brother, did not have familiarity with more standard English and thus preferred Spanish when dealing with Rick and me – which only worked to a limited extent with me) said si, el cubano.
El cubano was out, though. His door was wide open. His mashed ripe banana on the stove indicated he might come back soon. His cat (“him puss”) found us curious, and wanted nothing to do with us. We waited. After a while, 
Ricardito said him hungry, him cook. I dug the rice and oil and some onions and chicken out of the pack, Manuel was dispatched to pick some peppers, and Ricardito started a fire in the Cuban’s hearth. Him puss was suddenly *very* interested in the goings-on. I was chilling rapidly by this time, and felt utterly filthy. However, the Cuban has an outside shower, and I figured I’d risk being naked when he came back and had a quick cold shower. It was a lot colder than the shower at Rick’s but I didn’t care – I didn’t stay under long enough, just to soap up and rinse off and then I was wearing long pants and a 
dry shirt and clean(ish) sandals and I was much happier. Rick followed my lead, and I heard a squeal when he got to the shower. I assumed it was because the water was so cold, but Rick was excited because the Cuban has a *hot* shower – the shower head was the water-heating kind if supplied with electricity, and the Cuban does, after all, have a tiny little hydroelectric plant for lights and, it seems, showers.
After that, we took turns on the hammock in the kitchen, watching Ricardito cook. He kept asking Rick and me to taste and evaluate, which made me laugh: I can’t cook rice without burning it on an electric stove with measuring cups, and he’s asking *me* on rice opinions *here*? And yet, he made perfect rice, and (sigh) chicken in the familiar chicken sauce 
(which contains some sugar, a lot of oil, and in this case onions and peppers). I will save the commentary on how often I had chicken for another time – the dinner was delicious, but I was done after one piece of chicken. There were four pounds of pieces, and a vat of rice. We liked the idea of the Cuban coming home to a hot meal. Bound to be better than mashed banana. Him puss thought so, as he got some scraps.
But the Cuban never came home, and it was dark and getting late, and Ricardito had finished the dishes and the cat had gorged itself and not even Rick, Manuel and Ricardito – all of whom have healthy appetites (I do too, but I am not in 
Rick’s league when it comes to rice and chicken) – managed to make it all disappear. We would have chicken and rice for breakfast! And now, we would invade the Cuban’s upstairs and sleep there. The first thing Manuel (who had stayed there before) showed us was the Cuban’s loaded gun. Next on the tour was the pee funnel going from the Cuban’s bedroom to outside, and this was the source of much giggling for Ricardito and Manuel. The final item on the tour was unplanned: a cockroach the size of a mouse. Even Rick jumped (then he laughed, looked at me, and said, “well, you wanted adventure”). Ricardito jumped too – with the machete that is a near permanent extension of his hand. He hacked away, but the bug disappeared down the crack in the floorboard. We were on the second floor and Ricardito took off after the creepy crawly, and we heard hacking downstairs. I surveyed the floor and saw much evidence of – well, there’s really no other way to describe it, filth. This was the point where Rick remembered that we’d failed to bring either a bug net or those ubiquitous mosquito coils (mechita, they’re called). He was not happy about this. I explained that I would be sleeping with the duvet cover cinched around my neck, a conclusion I’d reached when I saw the giant cockroach, and would deet my face, problem solved. I spread out the thermarest (Rick proposed I take the Cuban’s bed, but was faced with a no way no how no sir, picturing an angry Cuban who had never before in his life seen me charging in wielding a machete and then grabbing his gun. *I* would need the pee funnel then. No!), Rick put up his hammock. Ricardito and Manuel hopped into the spare bed, and there was much giggling from the brothers. It was a long night. I heard the boys use the pee funnel, with muted giggling. I heard the hammock crash to the ground, accompanied by bigger giggling from the bedroom. I heard Rick cursing as he hung it up again. But I heard no angry Cubans on the stairs, so all in all, that was fine.
In the morning, I acquainted myself with the particular filth that was the outhouse, and I turned up my nose at chicken and rice and ate a cinnamon bun and a banana. The cat was much friendlier, watching the boys gnaw on chicken ones (yeah yeah yeah, not supposed to give a cat chicken bones, but you try throwing them away without the cat getting them anyway. She was fine.) The Cuban hadn’t showed, and we cleaned his kitchen and Ricardito 
swept out the house and all in all, we left it cleaner than we’d found it, and we left the rest of the (uncooked) rice and the coconut oil and (accidentally) the cinnamon buns. I took a handful of his drying, unroasted coffee (the coffee plant was right outside the front door). And I was ready to descend (so was Manuel, who tried to go ahead and ditch all of us cause the white people were so slow, but Ricardito sharply got that idea out of his mind, and turned to Rick and explained, him no respect me). Rick wanted to check out the trees at the top of the Cuban’s cow pasture. I was apprehensive about this idea, but was persuaded.
Harumph. Very early in this exploration, we had to cross a gully, far off the ground, on a slippery log. I did not like. I ended up executing this on all fours. Graceful as always. After that, we were in tall grass-like vegetation, and Ricardito slowed to a crawl. Even I figured out this mean there were snakes, and, sure enough, there were. It was steep. At one point, Rick had 
extended a hand to me from above to help me up, and I felt little Manuel’s hands pushing my bum. If I hadn’t been so afraid of the vipers, I would have sat in the grass and giggled at the absurdity at that point.
We never did make it to the big trees, and it was so overgrown that finding seeds would have been difficult. We aborted, and came down through the clean cow pasture. It started raining. Squelch squelch.
That was the theme of the day. Squelch. The trail down – even through the rainforest – was a mudfest. I took some pictures, and at some point, it stopped raining. But it had rained a lot at night, and now, we had mud up to our knees to contend with. Not even the alternate route down, through a lot of cow pastures and thus avoiding the jungly bit, helped. I had a bad moment where I noticed a *huge* ant on me, and 
Manuel sprang to life with “bad ant!” and got it off me with a knife. Rick later confirmed bad ant indeed, he called it golofa, and he said it could take me out of commission for a day or two with fever and pain. Great! Let’s get off this damn mountain, then!
I did have some guilt about never carrying the pack, so I shouldered it for a while on the way down. It just meant more weight on me when I sat down in the mud (always inadvertently). If I hadn’t had *two* sticks at this 
point, I would have been buggered. Ricardito and Manuel merrily skipped along, now carrying the little pack, the string bag full of seeds and plants, and a sack starting to fill with fruit. I gave the pack back to Rick. He stayed with me, while Manuel and Ricardito were way ahead of us. I was now the giant dirty white sweatball.
We found Manuel sitting on a rock peeling grapefruit with his knife and Ricardito washing his boots when we returned to the pastures. Then Ricardito came and challenged Manuel to a peeling race – he used his machete, Manuel his knife, and lickety-split, two grapefruit were peeled. This was the point where the man on the horse showed up, and Rick was quick enough to figure out that it was *his* grapefruit we were about to enjoy, and asked permission and offered the man a peeled grapefruit. Guillermo Santos quickly became Saint William to me – he not only told us to take *more* grapefruit, after a chat with Rick about all sorts of things (I made up 
my own stories again, while sucking on grapefruit) he pointed to his orange tree, and told us to go pick. Manuel climbed up, and tossed down oranges, and both the sack Ricardito was carrying and Saint William’s soon started to bulge. Ours was mostly full, now. And Saint William said something which involved pointing, and aguacate, and I perked up, because I love avocado, but Rick looked at the jungle where the horse man was pointing and 
thought about it and then said, muy duro. Too hard, too much work… Guillermo Santos said something that included the word camino, so I knew there was a trail, and then he tied up his horse and he and the boys disappeared down that way. I chose not to go. It looked jungly. I stayed behind, looking at (and then sitting on) the newly carved cayuco that Guillermo was about to help move down the mountain, just as soon as the other guys showed up.
They were gone some time, but I was happily sitting. When they came back, there was another bulging sack, and then Guillermo gave me a ripe cacao pod from the trees under which we were standing. I love the cacao pods. I gave half of it to Manuel, whose delight at this matched his glee at the agua fria, and we both sucked away. The horse man expressed concern that I would get a stomach ache to Rick – since I’d been exercising (as evidenced by the layer of sweat all over me) and the cacao was “cold”. I ignored this. I did not get a stomach ache.
Rick started re-arranging the pack, so we could at least fit the avocado sack inside, but Saint William thought that was a bad idea. He tied our two loot-sacks together, and said he’d carry them down a ways on el caballo. The horse was not consulted, but we were thrilled. When we met the guys he was waiting for further down, he would only relinquish the sacks to Ricardito (clearly, he’d figured out who had the stamina). Ricardito passed the plant and seed sacks to Manuel, and I – refreshed now, and full of fruit – felt left out, so Manuel let me carry the string bag.
We washed in the creek near the highway, and then got super muddy again on the last few hundred meters. Within seconds, a bus came by on the highway, and our muddy bodies joined all the other people and the music was blaring and I hardly had time to absorb any of that before the bus slowed down enough for us to get out at the turnoff to Miramar and we were back! And it was sunny again! And Gina was happy to see us, and Fidel said, yeah, the Cuban came down while you went up (we took different trails) and he hoped you were smart enough to find a way in. Fidel was also worried that we weren’t smart enough and hadn’t eaten, and we were ferried to his house, where Gina and her daughter had cooked up a huge pile of rice and beans and – guess what, chicken – and I ate almost all of my rice and beans and almost none of my chicken (but Rick took my plate and cleaned it) and our adventure was over.
There was dengue in Miramar, and leishmaniasis, and I added more deet to my layers of filth. Gina invited us to stay the night (Ricardito’s family clearly adores Rick, which I thought was cool), but we didn’t. She also invited us to visit her when she moved to th’other side (i.e. the Pacific side of Panama), and I thought this was a fantastic idea and I really liked Gina and her family, the welcome felt very genuine. 
We didn’t stay, though – no clean clothes, and the idea of a night in a town with active tropical diseases and no mosquito net did not appeal. Instead, Ricardito loaded his pig into the panga, and we left. The ride home included the memorable phrase “him hog shit plenty”, when Ricardito started scooping pig poop out of the panga with a 
coconut shell.
It was an adventure all right. And, despite being – in Rick’s words – an exercise in exhaustion and filth, a very, very cool one. I’m really glad I got to have it. I was also really glad to clean up when we got home, and sleep in a bed with a mosquito net in a house with only tiny cockroaches.