south of the loop

Day Two. 17 September 2007.

After birding, I had breakfast (and many cups of coffee) at Gamboa with my colleagues, and then I had the rest of the day to myself. The remainder of people were to arrive between 2 and 3pm that afternoon, with the first group session to start at 5pm. Having run 20 miles the day before I left, I felt pretty justified in kicking back and not doing anything. I went for a swim in the pool beneath palm trees and waterfalls. I showered and took a nap in the hammock on my sleeping porch. I got a massage at the hotel spa. Paradiso.

I met my roommate later that afternoon, a lovely British woman who works in the worldwide office. The introductory session began at 5pm, which was basically an overview of the Panama conservation program. Panama is a literal bridge between North and South America, and, as such, it holds several important ecosystems and copious wildlife. For example, the Darién region contains some of Panama’s wildest lands, thousands of acres of pristine forest land. The Darién lies on the eastern part of Panama and borders Colombia. There are diseases that have never made it through this dense forest—hoof and mouth disease, which doesn’t exist north of Colombia, and several strains of malaria. To destroy that forest wouldn’t just impact a few species of rare birds or mammals, it could have potentially devastating results for humans, too. I’d never thought of forest in human terms, and I’m fascinated that there’s a forest so dense it protects, in a sense, all of North America.

After dinner, another session before bed. There were the requisite icebreakers, including one where we had to write down a little-known fact about ourselves on a piece of paper, which would then be read aloud at the end of the week so we could guess who was who. I couldn’t decide what to put down. Obviously there are tons of quirky things about me—check out the “100 Things About Me” tab above—but I wasn’t sure how much I wanted these people to know about me. So I wrote down that my cats were named for characters from a Western B-movie from the 1940s… foolishly thinking I could go a week without talking about my cats. I did try not to talk about them. They just sort of come up.

The next morning, we were to leave Gamboa bright and early (this is a recurring theme throughout the week) for the regional airport, where we would fly to Davíd and then take a bus to the town of Cerro Punta.

To be continued…

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Day Two. 17 September 2007.

My alarm went off at 5:45, and I stumbled onto the sleeping porch to do some yoga, trying to unravel the kinks and stitches my body was harboring after a long day of travel. I got dressed, grabbed the borrowed pair of binoculars I’d packed in my carry-on bag, and headed downstairs to see what this birding business was all about. We were supposed to meet downstairs at the ungodly hour of 6:30am, so I hoped it would be worth not sleeping in for.

There was a bushy-eyebrowed guy in the lobby carrying a telescope and dressed in khaki safari-ready vest. I introduced myself. I’d guessed right—this was our bird guide, Hernan, who was supposedly the best birder in the country. We waited for the rest of the early arrivers to come downstairs and piled into Hernan’s silver Honda CR-V. I knew this was going to be good when Hernan pointed to the sky as we walked across the parking lot, noting the plentiful Red-lored Amazon parrots flying above. We drove to a place known as Pipeline Road. Pipeline Road, now a famed birdwatching location, was named for the now-decrepit pipeline that runs along it, that I believe was built during World War II.

We got to a clearing at Pipeline Road and got out of the car with our gear. Hernan immediately went into action, setting up his telescope and focusing it in one quick movement. I put my eye to the scope. Holy shit—toucans. Keel-billed toucans, actually, and several of them! Hernan told us that they are the national bird of Belize, and described the marks that distinguish keel-bills from other toucans (it has to do with the colors on their beaks). We spent a couple hours trekking down Pipeline Road with Hernan moving ahead of us, sensitive to every movement. With his guidance, I saw white-tailed trogons, black-throated trogons, slaty-tailed trogons, a lineated woodpecker, a crimson-crested woodpecker, checker-throated antwrens, white-flanked antwrens, dot-winged antwrens, blue-crowned manakins, a Philadelphia vireo, lesser greenlets, olive-sided flycatchers, and yellow-rumped caciques. All of this in about two hours. Hernan mimicked bird calls, seducing them toward us so we could see them. He had an eerie sense for when and where the bird would land, and set up his telescope almost instantly. The birds there are difficult to see because of the forest canopy, but when you do! They’re so brightly colored, so different from anything I’m used to. Es increible.

Hernan also pointed out other things happening around us. He saw a tiny frog, barely the size of my thumbnail, hopping along side of the road. He heard the howler monkeys in the distance (they elicited a WOW! from me every time they spoke. I mean… howler monkeys!!! My colleagues were most amused with me and my constant stream of excitement). He pointed out the enormous nest—easily twice the size of a standard office cubicle—of something called a leafcutter ant. I’m not much of a bug person, but it was pretty incredible—huge ants with crablike pinchers walking in neat lines over fallen tree limbs, creating a huge pile of dirt that was swarming and vibrating with life. Two of my colleagues held a warrior ant—who rather amusingly shook his pinchers at me—as well as a pile of the moving dirt. I did neither, although I did succeed in not screaming like a big girl, a success in and of itself. There are boundaries to my sense of wonderment, you know.

And this only brings me to about 8:30 in the morning. To be continued…

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I spent all of last week in Panama on an employee training trip for work. We got to know some of our international colleagues, the myriad challenges they face, and the people and ecosystems they support. Rather than spending time waxing eloquent, I’m trying to get everything into writing while it’s still fresh. I’ll have to do a write up later for work purposes, and presumably they’ll want something well-written, so stay tuned.

Day One. 16 September 2007.

I flew into Tocumen International Airport on Sunday, September 16, arriving at nearly 9:00pm local time (which is, thankfully, also local time in Chicago) after a full day of travel. (You have to fly either through Miami or Houston to get to Panama—I went through Miami—and, with the requisite three-hour layover, my whole trip was a good nine hours.) I got my bag and walked downstairs, where a crush of people were all flooding into customs at once. It took nearly an hour to get through customs, and since I’d somehow forgotten to bring a pen with me (and they think I’m a writer!), I had to borrow one from the nice Swiss woman in front of me—three different times. There were customs forms, $5 tourist card applications, the works. But for all this, they didn’t care much when I walked through customs, and off I went. I met one of my colleagues who had arrived about an hour before me, and we split a prearranged shuttle to our hotel at the Gamboa Resort, about 45 minutes away. My colleague happened to speak quite good Spanish, so he kept up a conversation with Mari, our driver, about the local wildlife, about Noriega, about her family. I could catch bits and pieces of it, but it’s been a good 10 years since I used any Spanish whatsoever, so I couldn’t make too much sense out of it.

We arrived at Gamboa Resort, which is, frankly, a little over the top—Spanish colonial architecture rises from the jungle amidst a small neighborhood of historic homes, and although Gamboa promises to set you (comfortably, of course) right in the midst of nature, apparently they aren’t really all that eco-sensitive, even going as far as promoting their wildlife tours with pictures of animals that don’t actually live in Panama. Whoops?

The bellhop showed me to my room, which featured a sleeping porch. A sleeping porch! With a hammock! He suggested not using it because of the mosquitoes, but it was still a little tempting. But I decided I didn’t want to be eaten alive on my first night in Latin America, so I fell into a dead slumber inside on my bed, but not before setting my alarm for 5:45 the next morning. I was told upon arrival that our tour guide had arranged an optional bird watching tour for the early arrivers the following morning. I’ve never been birding before, and still find it awkward to use as a verb, but when I was younger, I always loved identifying the birds that came to my dad’s birdfeeders. The colleague with whom I shared the shuttle with highly recommended it, and I figured I didn’t have any other plans, so I decided to suffer another early morning in the name of birding.

to be continued…

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