Lost and Found - An adventure in Panama

You know you’ve found somewhere pretty special if you have 24-bed dorms, require a complicated bus route to reach you, followed by a 20 minute uphill jungle hike with giant backpacks, and you’re still able to be fully-booked and have to turn people away. Let me introduce you to Lost and Found-Panama’s infamous jungle hostel!

The offending triple-decker bunk-bed. We were at the top...oh joy.

 To get there from Corcovado we had to take a boat, then 5 buses, including one terribly chaotic border crossing. The border crossing itself was quite hilarious (although perhaps more in retrospect than at the time)…We had to queue up 4 times, the officials were wearing what looked like home-made polo shirts (the kind you get for a hen do), and then no-one actually checked our passports when it came to entering Panama to the point that we didn’t realise we were in it until a friendly American pointed this out to us. Perhaps my favourite bit?....you have to pay an exit fee to leave CR, and this involved giving your passport to a woman (in another polo shirt) through the window of a camper van (yes a free-standing camper van!!), where she enters your details into an oldschool laptop on a car seat and a child (yes a child!) eating a kebab hands you a receipt.

Like, sooo official!

Anyway, we made it through, and finally made it to Lost and Found after a whole day of travelling.

Lost and Found is actually a pretty crap hostel-it has ridiculously overcrowded dorms and we were in the top of a triple-decker bunk bed (yes that is actually a (rather petrifying) thing), it has a horrible dirty kitchen, and pretty gross toilets….but it’s in an incredible setting, has a resident rescued honey bear (a kinkajou) and has an awesome bar with and equally awesome happy hour (hello $1 beer!). It also has a really sociable vibe, and attracts the kind of people who are willing to put in the effort to get to such a tricky place in the jungle, so we ended up having a fab few days here with some great people!

On the first day it was really rainy so we decided to do some jungle trails and simultaneously the famous Lost and Found treasure hunt with some other guys we’d just met. It was great fun and had us trekking through jungle, wading through rivers, exploring caves and figuring out cryptic clues…needless to say we’re too competitive to fail at something like this so we managed to complete the hunt and earn ourselves some free drinks which led to a rather messy but insanely fun night in the bar, where we managed to convince the entire bar to play a giant game of spoons (or ‘empty cans’ in the absence of spoons).

Some (rather wet) photos taken on my smashed up samsung...they give you the idea anyway!...

This tree is sooooo cool!

Figuring out the riddle for our free drinks!

On the second day, nursing the mother of all hangovers, we decided to catch a local bus to some canyon river rapids near the small town of Gualaca. I won’t go into the details, but hangover + car sickness + hot, overcrowded bus = one very sick Emma, stopping the bus twice and being sick into a (very holey!!) carrier bag in front of the entire bus…it was not one of my proudest moments, but I’m sure will be funny when I look back on it….one day.

 The canyons were amazing though! Beautiful blue skies, crystal clear, cool water and some wicked canyons to jump in from, and once again a great group of people to hang out with…perfect!

Cup of tea and a view!

The view from the hostel