Boquete Tree Trek, the town’s acclaimed canopy zipline course, allows adventurers to zoom through the forest while taking in mountain views from hundreds of feet in the air.
Opting for the morning excursion, we show up at the Tree Trek office at 8 a.m. Note: this is not to be confused with the Explore Ya office across the street. (We feature Explore Ya in our rock climbing post.) Take the town’s main road until you see El Banco General. Across the street a set of stairs leads to a small plaza. The Tree Trek office connects to the Kotowa Coffee Shop. The Tree Trek team loads groups of people, all ages, into covered truck trailers to take a horsepowered climb up the mountainside. The road gets very steep very fast. It feels like the click-clack up a rollercoaster, assuring you that you’re in for a real adventure.
Our guides (six of them) greet us with a friendly hello. We can already tell these dudes know how to have a good time. They fit us with harnesses, clips, and helmets. I strap on the GoPro camera as well, which the guides take as a cue to laugh and wave at me every chance they get.
Then they take you up even further. We get off and hike about 10 minutes through the cloud forest where trees rise off the mountainside to intersect the passing clouds. It rains a lot up here, which makes the lines fast and cools you down enough for a light jacket. The guides point out different kinds of vegetation along the way, from brightly-colored mushrooms to leaves that span up to 14 feet in diameter. They call the latter “poor man’s umbrella.”
We arrive at the first platform. There you are, looking at the steel cable that separates you from the ground 70 feet below. The guides hook their lines up and speed off before us, each one stationing at a different platform to guide you through your journey. One guide stays behind to hook us in for the first trip.
You’re up. Fear of heights? Well, you’re going anyway. Stand on the edge, lift your feet up, put your hands in the set position, and gravity will do the rest.
Any fear you have going into your first zipline quickly disappears, replaced by the sheer thrill of whizzing across the mountainside. Before you know it, you’re at the end of the line to meet the next guide. In one swift motion he unhooks you, leads you across the platform to the next line, and fastens you back up. Legs up, arms out, and whoosh! It continues like clockwork, the guides pausing on occasion to give you a high-five or let you know about a waterfall you don’t want to miss on the next run.
We stop midway through for the guides to set up once again. These next lines are bigger. The guides are especially excited about platform 10—410 meters (more than a quarter mile up), which starts 160 feet in the air.
12 lines in all, over 14 platforms, ending up back at the Boquete Tree Trek Hotel where the guides present you with a certificate of completion and play a slideshow of pictures from the trip. We enjoy the show with some hot soup from the hotel’s café and coffee shop.
Hundreds of vertical feet over more than a mile of lines. Any of this course’s treks rival ziplines the world over. Just set aside your fear, cast off your doubt, and you’ll have an adventure travel experience you’ll never forget. It’s one thing to admire the way a distant mountain creates a perfect scenic backdrop. It’s another to become a speck whizzing over the side of that scenic backdrop.
TAGS: Adventure Canopy Zip Lines Chiriqui Do & See Island Intern Must Read Panama
