Day Three. 18 September 2007.
Our departure from Gamboa to the regional airport was early so that we could catch the 8:15am flight, the earliest of the day—which apparently meant that it could leave at 8:15 or anytime thereafter. By taking the earliest flight, padding our itinerary, and hoping for the best, we were able to get to the city of Davíd in the Chiriquí highlands later that morning. We then climbed into a small 25-person bus with our carry-on luggage. Our large baggage rode separately, piled high in the back of a 4×4.
We got to our next hotel, Los Quetzales, before noon. Los Quetzales is named for the Resplendent Quetzal, a bird with brilliant green plumage and tail feathers several feet long. It can be found throughout Panama in certain times of the year, but if you’re lucky and have a good bird guide, you might see them in Chiriquí year-round. (Spoiler: we had a good bird guide, but weren’t lucky).
Los Quetzales was a modest hotel near the town of Cerro Punta built to look like—seriously—a Swiss château. Our rooms were tiny, just room enough for a double bed, a twin bed, a small wardrobe, and sink. (I took the twin bed since I can sleep anywhere if I’m tired enough). The attached bathroom had only a toilet and shower, with barely enough room to turn around in. The linens were clean but the bedspreads were faded and didn’t match. It was kind of nice to be in a place that didn’t feel like a hotel, even if the pervasive humidity burrowed deep into our sheets.
Lunch was buffet style and followed by more café con leche. Several hummingbird feeders hung directly outside the window—and so many hummingbirds! My dad always had hummingbird feeders, but I’ve never seen any whirring little birds like these. Magnificent Hummingbirds, dark-colored but easily twice the size of typical hummingbirds, chased off smaller, more brilliantly colored birds. Roberto, our local guide whom we’d met that morning, could hardly eat he was so busy naming the birds and answering questions about them. Roberto, I think, knows everything: how to identify the tiniest hummingbird and whether it’s territorial or friendly, green-eared or ruby-throated.
Our Panamanian colleagues joined us for lunch, and afterwards, we all we went to Parque Internacional La Amistad (PILA). La Amistad is a binational park straddling Panama and Costa Rica, and is a whopping five times larger than Yellowstone. Although two of Panama’s seven indigenous tribes live within the depths of the park, it is for the most part uninhabited and unexplored. To get there, we took our bus about a mile down the road from Los Quetzales. There, the road became less a road and more a beaten path of large rocks. We had to take two 4×4s and an SUV to make it up the steep, rocky paths. (I wasn’t feeling very adventurous, so I rode in the SUV rather than take my chances on getting pitched from the bed of a 4×4. Also during this ride I told the story of jaq being pitched, inside a cardboard box, from the bed of an El Camino when she was a kid).
Once at PILA, we talked some more with the Panamanian conservationists. Although the majority of PILA is wild and pristine, the buffer zones are in great danger. Panamanian law allowed farmers already living within the boundaries of PILA (which was formed in the late 1980s) to keep their farmland. This wouldn’t be a problem if slash-and-burn agriculture wasn’t so widely practiced, if farmers weren’t relying so heavily on pesticides, if they weren’t planting crops up steep hillsides, contributing to erosion. One thing Organization and its partners are trying to do is teach those farmers how to better their crops (and their livelihoods) without wreaking such destruction on the lands. Since Panamanian laws aren’t necessarily being enforced, there’s really very little to protect the land against farmers who further denude the landscape with each crop.
We only took a 15-minute hike into the wilds of PILA—not because we were tired or out of time, but because only a tiny portion has any semblance of trails. We met Señor Buendía, a fit, upright man who looked to be in his early 40s, who was preparing for a 22-day hike into PILA to monitor and police it. He had just recovered from a serious leg injury incurred on a recent PILA hike, in which he had to be airlifted out of the dense forest. So dense is this forest that on his 22-day hike, Sr. Buendía would not pass through the same place twice—and he was just staying on the Panamanian side of the park.
The hike itself, although barely penetrating into the forest, felt wild, even with the occasional bridge or terraced footholds. The forest canopy left us in greater darkness than I had expected, but the plants and trees were brilliant and bright. The light beneath the canopy is like that brief time immediately before a tornado, when everything is very still and somehow looks greener. Everything inside the rainforest was comically oversized—umbrella-sized leaves, red bromeliads sprouting off tree trunks, the sound, but not sight, of birds around us.
To be continued…
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