Sleeping Porch in Panama
south of the loop
Leafcutter Ants Near Pipeline Road, Panama
Extreme closeup:
Panama: Day Three, Afternoon
Day Three. 18 September 2007.
Wow, am I only on day three? I think I could keep writing about this trip forever. (I shouldn’t tempt fate, because once I have to start writing and revising this for work, I really will be writing about this forever).
After our brief hike into PILA, we headed partway back down the steep, rocky path to a small building painted the same dark yellow and green as the scattered park signs and rangers’ buildings. When we had passed this building on our way up, the woman driving our SUV (who works for one of Organization’s partners in Cerro Punta) rode the brake long enough to wave and say hello to the women standing outside. One of the Spanish speakers in our car asked if she knew lots of people in the area. “Sí,” she said. “Muchos.”
The building seemed larger from the road than it really was. When we got closer, I saw that the large front porch was deceiving. Only a small interior kitchen was tucked behind it, and through a window, I could see several women preparing food.
There were about 20 of us, and we filled up all the picnic-style benches on the covered porch. The woman asked us, “Chocolate o café?” I chose café con leche and waited. The women brought out platters of the hot chocolate and coffee, plus a small plate of savory treats: meatballs (I passed on those), some sort of corn fritter, and fry bread. I probably don’t want to know what any of their secret ingredients were because damn were they tasty!
While we ate, Felipe, the project manager for PILA, introduced us to the women who formed this cooperative, known as ASAELA. These women, who seemed to range in age from thirtysomething to sixtysomething, used to be known in town as “the crazy women.” When one of them got the idea to start this small restaurant for hikers, backpackers, and locals, nobody believed they had a prayer. What’s remarkable isn’t just that they have succeeded, but that they are now respected by their peers and other townspeople. In a tiny Latin American village where gender roles are still deeply defined, these women are an anomaly, a handful of entrepreneurs who have dreamt big. Our translator pointed out, too, that they have engaged their husbands in the business; the implication was that these men had laughed at their wives’ dreams without doing much to help, but now they are also deeply engaged.
The women of ASAELA aren’t just about a restaurant—they are stewards of PILA, care enormously for their environment, both natural and built, and they have a small office in Cerro Punta where they run a number of community educational efforts. And they’re still dreaming big: they want to learn English, become bird guides, and build a hostel for backpackers. And nobody calls them the crazy women anymore.
Panama: Day Three, Morning
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…
We Interrupt this Travelogue for a Sob Story
I forgot to mention a very sad thing that happened as soon as I hit Panama: my digital camera broke. I’d taken my mom’s digital camera with me, because it holds 500+ high quality pictures (as opposed to my camera, which is three times larger but holds only 50 high quality pictures). Something was wrong with the battery, however, and it wouldn’t hold a charge. It was kind of heartbreaking. I did have my old manual camera with me, but I hadn’t used it in years, and I only had a zoom lens with me (and limited film). So there’s not much diversity in these pictures, but until I get copies of my colleagues’ pics, it’s all I’ve got. I should get more pictures early next week. In the meantime: a few Panama pics.
Panama: Day Two, Afternoon
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…
Panama: Day Two, Morning
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…
