Agua de Salud is located at the headwaters of the Rio Cobre, a river that runs through western Veraguas Province. 

I had been to the river 7 years before but far downstream from Agua de Salud, closer to the Inter-American Highway, in the lowlands far from the hills, but still rather remote. Remote was always on mind in the interior of Panama. Why would people live in such a remote areas was always a question that came to mind when thinking about the hill country in Panama. The accepted answer to that question was that they had been forced up into the hills by the Spanish, who wanted the best land for themselves, which needed to be flat for growing sugarcane. But that answer, which on the surface seemed right, was not correct as people were living in the hills before the Spanish arrived. To really understand what motivated people to live in the hills I would have to live there myself.

A Little Background

When I lived in the deep countryside of Panama people in the countryside told me about Agua de Salud; that it was very far away - they would point far off in the distance when trying to show me where it was located - and that it was an incredibly beautiful place, had hot springs, but in the end was just too far away to ever reach by foot. Some people in the countryside where I lived had made it to Agua de Salud, but had told me that the walk was impossible, especially in the rainy season. That made me want to go even more. Agua de Salud like the countryside I lived in in Panama was hill country: life in the hills was very difficult, soil was poor, people made their living cutting sugarcane in the sugar mills, and growing beans, rice and corn at a subsistence level. Many of the communities in the hills were beyond the reach of the police or civil authorities and therefore were wild and free places where almost anything might happen. Life in the countryside was hardest on women. With few liberties and few rights, women were often subjected to their husband’s demands: A woman I knew told me her husband wouldn’t let her leave the small farm they lived on for 34 years. She had to stay there and work, clean and look after the animals. She couldn’t see her mother or family or talk at all with other members of the community; she hadn’t seen the town in 34 years until her husband died of a snakebite. Those were the kinds of stories you would often hear from women. Most of the young people had moved out of the hills and gone to the city, especially girls who could get jobs as domestic servants in Panama City. They would return to the countryside once or twice a year, sometimes spending their 13th month with their family - in Panama any worker has a legal right to one month of vacation; it is called the 13th month.

I began my work in Panama in 1995 and worked in and around a town called Cañazas, which is located in the western part of Veraguas. The town of Cañazas, which was a two-hour walk from where I lived, was a small cattle and fishing town. But someone had hit gold, probably the early Spanish who settled in the area; in fact, one of Panama’s oldest mines was near Cañazas, El Remance Mine, which was an underground mine that the Spanish had established in the 1500s. But the town of Cañazas had a gold mine as well. It was run by a Canadian mining company, Greenstone, which worked closely with a Texas earthmoving company by the name of Brown & Root. The mine, right next to the town of Cañazas, no matter how you cut it was a disaster. The earth was cut wide open by explosives, arsenic leached out the gold and bulldozers flatten hills and changed the lay of the land. There wasn’t much gold and in the end Greenstone and Brown & Root left, leaving behind a huge lake that no one wanted to swim in because of possible arsenic poisoning.

One of the first people to visit me in the countryside after I had first arrived and was taking in the hardships of the countryside and the foreignness of the nearby mine was a man named Bill Dyal. During the time I knew Bill Dyal he was the Director of Peace Corps Panama; he had been the director of Colombia Peace Corps in the mid- 1960s. He had made a name for himself in Washington as the founding president of the Inter-American Foundation and then later as president of St. Johns College in Annapolis, Maryland. He was a very close friend of television commentator Bill Moyers; both were Texas Democrats. Bill Dyal like other Texas Democrats I met, had an uncanny way of being incredibly concise in pointing out the root of a problem and then offering a very brief exit strategy to that problem. It was survival technique that helped me make sense of the complexies of life in the hills of Panama as a foreigner.
 

Onward To Agua de Salud

For some reason I thought of Dyal as we turned off the Inter-American Highway and headed onto the rough road that would take us on the very long and difficult drive to Agua de Salud. The road was mostly rock and it went through a landscape of rugged undergrowth and cattle fields. There were no electric lines or telephone lines so at night everything was lit by candles or flashlights. As we drove people were hanging in their hammocks and relaxing, some were driving cattle down dirt paths, which ran perpendicular away from the main road. The air was filled with dust and smells of cow shit. This was the lowlands of Veraguas an area famous for its sugarcane alcohol. The alcohol is made by squeezing a stick of sugarcane through a trapiche, which is made of wood and has two rollers that you force the sugarcane through, thereby squeezing out the juice. The juice then ferments and you have an alcoholic drink that will really rough up your kidneys and mind, believe me. In the lowlands of Veraguas, unlike in the mountains, there are horses or donkeys that walk in a circle around the trapiche as their strength is used to squeeze the juice from the sugarcane. They say about the lowlands of Veraguas that people are either making sugarcane alcohol or they are thinking about making sugarcane alcohol.

We were in a rush so we passed quickly through the lowlands into the foothills and then on up into the mountains. At what I thought was the end of the road, we pulled into a small town called El Piñon. I pulled up in front of the local cooperative where people were standing around buying food and watching the sky and trees. There was no electricity in the town; the town was situated too deep in the interior for electricity. There was a wireless public phone. The electric supply for the cooperative were some solar panels on the roof. This produced enough electricity to run a refrigerator. I spoke to the young kid at the store window and asked him about how to get to Agua de Salud; he said he didn’t know how to get there, and that he really knew nothing about the hot springs in Agua de Salud. He didn't want to deal with me. He passed me on to another gentleman who seemed to have a position of power in Piñon and he told me that there was a schoolteacher he knew that was heading to Agua de Salud right now; he told me it would take 3 hours to reach Agua de Salud from Piñon where I now stood. It was getting late to begin any long walks – it was 2:45 – and I knew for sure that I didn’t want to be out walking in the dark in such a remote place where I didn’t know the people.

The man of importance pointed with his lips to the far side of the town and beyond a hill. In the countryside of Panama people point with their lips, which for some strange reason I like and often find myself doing. He pointed with his lips and I confirmed his directions by pointing with my lips in the same direction. He told me I should go there; that was where people left for Agua de Salud, so I drove ten minutes and arrived at a small shop made of mud and wood and asked if the maestro was here. The people in the shop looked at me nervously and spoke a little amongst themselves and told me that the maestro was around back. And he was. He greeted me as though he had been waiting for me all day, with a smile and a ready handshake. He spoke freely; there was no fear or hesitation on his face. He liked my t-shirt; from Spain, red in color with a yellow sun and a black bulls head in the middle of the fiery sun: he found it amusing. He said he would show me Agua de Salud if he and his family could catch a ride in the back of my 4X4. It was a deal. Off we went. All 7 of us packed tight. Up and up a white-bleached dirt road we went. It was as though we were driving straight into the sky. The road was dangerous and after we circled up the road to the peak of a small mountain and across a very narrow earthen bridge, the landscape changed. We were now in the highlands, the sky grew huge around us, the winds picked up to a fierce speed and the road ran like a small ribbon along the cliffs of the mountain, just enough road to keep the 4X4 from rolling off the cliffs and down into the river valley far below.

We drove through highland prairie once we were away from the cliffs. There were a few people walking on the road and in the far distance you could see people walking around in open prairie and pine forests that had been planted in straight rows. The road eventually became so bad that we could not continue. I stopped the car and told everyone to get out. I was thinking to myself that we would never be able to make it back the road we had just crossed. Everyone exited the car. In the car the winds looked fierce, but now that I was outside the car, I could feel just how strong they were: You couldn’t hear much because the winds howled so hard in your ears; you had to get close and scream at the other person to be understood. But with every breath you took, the wind forced pounds of fresh air into your lungs and bloodstream. This was not relaxing fresh air, this was fresh air by force. The maestro led me through a small field of golden grass and up a small hill that looked down over a huge wide-open valley. He pointed far down at the bottom of a valley, “there is Agua de Salud”, he screamed. We have to go there to see the river and hot springs. Looking at the distance, I could see it would take at least a good hour and a half to reach the bottom. What I didn’t realize until we began walking was how much the wind would effect our descent. You just couldn’t move quickly because the wind was pushing so hard against you. We fell a few times as we walked. The descent went slowly at first. Then three members of the group decided to turn around about a third of the way down because they knew they would never make it up if they continued the descent.

On the way down we walked near the houses of a few locals who came out to greet us and they were very friendly and encouraged us to push on. I looked back to see if they were watching us as we made our descent and they weren’t, which was unusual. They were not at all afraid of us; they welcomed our presence and did not try to avoid us or leave. Nor did they follow our movements. They were strangely comfortable with us: that was very unusual.  In the countryside of Panama where suspicions can run deep and blood feuds run hot, outsiders are viewed with suspicion, but strangely, not here. We finally reached the bottom of the valley after a good one-hour walk. It was only the maestro, Gabi and I. I was very thirsty by the time I reached the bottom and drank from the river; the water was clean and tasted very good against my windblown throat.

We passed the river and walked to some small hot springs nearby. They were very small, but the water was extremely hot. The maestro told me they boil eggs in the water. I looked at the river that flowed by in front of the hot springs. It was the Rio Cobre and the river was running very quickly. As I sat by the river putting on my shoes, I heard a funny sound coming from the hillside and I looked up and saw water shooting all through the tops of the trees. A clicking sound  like an insect chirping filled the air. I finally realized that it was a lawn waterer. But not a simple lawn waterer but the kind you would find, say, at a professional golf course. The waterer had been mounted on a plastic tube which was then stuck in the ground, so that the waterer was high off the ground, in the treetops almost, as it shot water through the air. Funny this piece of technology in this completely isolated part of Panama. It wasn’t the first time. I remembered as I looked at the jets of water traveling through the air, about the time I came to a very remote country house far from any road or town, and a large clock that looked straight out of an American high school was leaning up against a mud house, displaying the same time all day.

We did go to the larger hot springs which were set back further from the river. The maestrotold us there were other larger hot springs, but it was a two-hour walk and he knew we wanted to go. He pointed up the hill on the opposite side of the valley from where we had descended. He said that that town right there is called Guayabito. The town looked about a 30-minute walk from the river. He said that is the furtherest point where people live. Beyond was just an empty valley and then the highest points of the Continental Divide.

We wanted to get the hell out of there, get back to the car, and our friends who had turned back. It was going to be a very long walk and so up the river valley we went carrying heavy bags we had brought down the valley that were filled with food. The picnic never happened and now we were going to have to carry the heavy bags up the valley. We said goodbye to the maestro; he walked along the river to his house and we headed up the valley. The winds increased in velocity halfway up the mountain and the bag I was carrying became like a flag catching the wind. The winds were so strong that I was almost knocked over on my back. Fatigue set in and I started to become very light-headed and weak. The altitude was much different than what I was used to and I was beginning to feel it. Then I started to feel sick in my stomach. It was at that point that I began to look at how much longer it would take to finish our ascent of the valley. And it was far. I became weak very quickly; Gabi walked far in front of me, but I could see she was struggling on the path. Suddenly, the desire to get out of that river valley began to increase and I started to worry about getting out of there alive. I started to think about how the situation might disintegrate, like one of those real life documentary-esq movies where people put themselves in danger without realizing it until it is too late. I was able to think my way out of that trail of thought by focusing on my experience hiking in the hills of Panama and focusing on wanting to get to the car and get out. My anxiety about the situation increased when I looked back behind me and saw a huge rain cloud coming off the mountainside on the far side of the valley, and felt the wind grow cooler,  but the rain clouds never did reach our side of the valley.

We collapsed on the ground when we finally made it to the car. The time was 5:40 and I figured we had about one-hour of sunlight left. That was about the amount of time we needed to get back to Piñon; from there it would be a three-hour ride on the dark rocky road to the Inter-American highway. And from there it would be a 40-minute ride to Santiago. Through the night we went. The road was even worse at night. In the far distance you could see headlights coming in the opposite direction on the remote road. After an half an hour you would pass the headlights. There was no light anywhere beyond the headlights and the scrubland and plains that surrounded the road were dark and foreboding. Stopping your car here did not feel like a good idea. We finally did make it back. When we left Agua de Salud to make the long climb and ride back to Santiago the maestro told us we should come back in March. But it’s an invitation I doubt I will be able to keep. If you are ever lucky enough to find Agua de Salud, Veraguas, Panama, you will have really come to what feels like the end of the world.

Notes

If you are traveling through the town of Santiago, Veraguas check out a great seafood restaurant called Restaurante Mariscos. It's open 24 hours and serves great seafood.

Other articles by the author:

Santa Catalina And Coiba Prison Island ~ Little Known Frontiers
John Wayne Island ~ In An Imaginary Tropical Western
Hiding Out In Panama - The Hotel Ideal
Living And Investing In Panama ~ What To Look Out For
Looking At Property On Contadora Island ~ Exploring The History And Landscape Of An Island
Isla Grande ~ The Lost Sides Of Isla Grande.
An Interview With John Carlson ~ Talking With An Old Hand About Investing In Panama
Altos del Maria - Another Look
Carnaval 2003 - Hanging In
Cerro Jefe ~  In An Old Cloud Forest
Daytrips In Panama ~Looking At Real Estate And Passing Through Colon
Deep In Veraguas - Traveling Down Backroads In Panama
El Cope, Cocle ~ And Some Other Ideas
On The Pacific Coast Of Panama - Traveling Through The Mountains And Beaches Of Panama
Up On The Contential Divide And Down In The Desert ~ Hiking And Discovering Panama's Beauty
Playa Grande - The Beauty Of A Remote Panamanian Beach
Italy In Winter - From Rome To Venice
Panama And Costa Rica - Thoughts On Both
The Panama Railroad ~ Panama City To Colon
The Chiriqui Highlands - R&R