Luzero, Toby and Pedron visit a teak plantation

To help out a friend who is interested in one of the many teak plantations in western Panama a week ago we took Luzero, Toby and Pedron for a ride. Early in the morning they got loaded onto the back of a Toyota Hilux pickup truck and driven about 15 km from the farm to the entrance of a plantation near Canitas.

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The entrance to the plantation was a bit overgrown. It’s always a good idea to carry a machete when going out into the woods. Our horses are used by now to the sound it makes when someone is swinging the blade over their heads. They wait for the rider to open the path a bit and then advance a few step where the process starts again. Here you can see Luis cutting away stuff so that it gets easier for the others to get through.

It’s not that there were no path. It’s not that thick. It’s more about making it more secure and avoid scratches. There are some very nasty plants that have some kind of teeth or sharp edges. If one doesn’t cut away all that stuff one would be bleeding a bit all over the arms.

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After a while going uphill we reached a nice lookout point where we saw many hectareas of planted teak in almost every direction. Between 10 or 15 years much of this land has been wasteland before people started to plant teak.

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On the other side the plantation is bordered by a large rice field. Looks quite nice :-)

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The plantation has quite a few nice trees. As you can see Luis likes them. Look at how he puts his arms around one. The teak tree in the picture probably measures about one meter in cirumference.

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Our trip has not been without incident. Unfortunately one of our horses slipped and had a small accident. I’ll tell more about this next.

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