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December 30, 2005
Paddling the Rio Peje Bobo
The Rio Peje Bobo was recommended to us by Hector Sanchez, of Chirriqui River Rafting.... he had been wanting to check it out and had not found the time. As far as we know, it had never been paddled.
It
flows roughly parallel to the Highway between David and Chirriqui
Grande. One access point is the Sarso Punta Pena, a hanging footbridge.
The river has small rapids here, nothing to exciting. We walked across
the bridge and upstream for about two hours, to the community of
Oriente.Oriente consists of a number of houses and lots of grass, to the joy of the horses tied up everywhere. In the middle of the grassy town center is-- a pay phone. I used it to make a couple of urgent calls. Because I could.
We
put in about 10 minutes further up the river, right above the
confluence with a significant tributary from the right. The water was
beautiful, clear, and very warm (about 28 degrees). At the low flow we
paddled, most of it was class II; at higher flows, there could be some
interesting class III rapids. It took about two hours to get back to
Punta Pena, going slowly.
From
Sarso Punta Pena, we paddled on to the next bridge; at this point, the
river is called Rio Guarumo and is quite wide. There was one nice
playspot along the way, at higher flows, it could be a lot of fun.
The takeout bridge was a great place to bathe; there were some interesting fishies in the water that liked to nibble on people's legs. Cute.
A very nice Colombian guy is starting a pineapple plantation near the bridge. He had someone watch the boats for us, while we went back to Miramar to get our stuff, and then we took off towards David.
Posted by rick at December 30, 2005 08:20 PM