Dear Reader, our fourth and final day in Panama got off to quite a start. As I mentioned yesterday, Gamboa Rainforest Resort offers quite a number of excursions – a birdwatching trek, a ski lift-style ride for 1.5 km above the roof of the rainforest (which we obviously would have been done had it not been closed for maintenance for another 2 weeks), excursions around the canal, a dugout canoe trip to visit one of the local indigenous tribes, and our choice as the best combination of mildly adventuresome + TBJ-friendly, a boat trip to “monkey island” to see whatever wildlife we could see. If you know me at all, dear reader, you know two things about this – first, a boat trip to see wildlife in a rainforest is not something that I’m going to pass up, and second, that I’ve got a well earned fear of monkeys (with the scar and tattoo to prove it), meaning that this should be interesting.
As it happened, it wasn’t just interesting, but super awesome in some rather unexpected ways. The first of these was that getting to Monkey Island involved a 30 minute boat ride down the Canal itself, which turned out to be a sort of unexpected highlight of the trip. Seeing the Canal from a boat is kind of shocking because you realize that for the most part, the actual excavation work simply stitched together existing rivers and lakes and did some dredging to deepen those waterways. The reason this is shocking is that you’re tooling around what feels like whatever the local big recreational river or lake may be in some little 16 foot fishing boat, go around a bend, and find yourself next to one of those giant Panamax vessels I described in yesterday’s entry. For those of you from Atlanta, this would be like tooling around Lake Lanier and suddenly finding yourself next to the Bank of America building turned over on its side and puttering down to Cocktail Cove – just strange. By way of example, this is one of the ships that we passed.
This being a trip with Your Blogger, Tiger Mom and TBJ, we did not end the journey without adventure as relatively early in the trip when the wake of one of these behemoths did something to the boat that caused our driver (pilot? captain?) to pull over to shore and try to arrange for another boat to come finish the journey with us. Unfortunately he couldn’t get a signal on his cell phone (in the rainforest – go figure), but after a bit of analysis our guy decided we could go on as long as we didn’t go too fast. Seemed reasonable, so that’s what we did. And thank God we did, as the first target island paid major dividends: a three-toed sloth sighting! Dear Reader, your Blogger has been to Central and South America several times, all of them in high-sloth environments, but has never seen one of these amazing beasts until today. What’s more, the little guy was actually moving, climbing up a branch to get to some of the tender new leaves that he hadn’t already eaten. It’s odd to think of sloths living on an island in the middle of the Panama Canal (especially an island called “Sloth Island”), but apparently most of these islands developed when the Canal was finally flooded in its entirety, so many of these little islands have thriving populations of particular kinds of species. Locals and canal workers also apparently rescue animals from the waters quite frequently and try to deposit them on an island with an appropriate population – something I find quite nice.
After Sloth Island we had another 15 minute boat ride to Monkey Island, where we hoped to see several little capuchin monkeys native to the area. Upon arrival our pilot made a monkey call and shortly thereafter 7 or 8 of the little guys came swinging over to check us out. In some ways these are cute little creatures as they’re really active and seem to have very human-like characteristics. On the other hand, and maybe I’m predisposed to the view given past experience, they looked like mean little bastards to me and when they opened their mouths I didn’t see a cute grin, but a mouthful of nasty little fangs ready to rip into an unsuspecting ankle. Being curious creatures some of them climbed out branches to within a few feet of the boat, which kicked in a purely instinctive protective instinct with respect to TBJ and I started planning how to fend off the waves of monkey assaults I was sure were to come. Fortunately we all respected the detente and we were able to enjoy the wildlife without my having to go all Bernie Goetz on some poor little monkeys.
On the other side of Monkey Island was a much smaller little island that seemed pretty quiet until we motored over to it and saw dozens – literally dozens – of baby crocodiles. You hear the word “baby” and that suggests a certain degree of cuteness that is entirely absent in crocodiles of any size – these guys looked like highly efficient killing machines, in miniature, and that’s exactly what they were. Even though they were probably only 10-12 inches long, our guide and pilot were both pretty wary and discouraged my suggestion that we try to pet the little guys. OK, they were pretty cute, even if the ones that survived the coming fratricidal death match will grow into apex predators in one of the most hostile jungles on earth.
The cool think about today is that we had had all of these experiences and were back at the resort by 10:30, which left the entire rest of the day for relaxing, chilling, and otherwise vacating. As with yesterday, this was excellent, but not of much interest to anyone other than the fact that after an absolutely torrential downpour that once again put the “rain” in “rainforest”, our buddies the capybara family came out to play again. I swear these are some of the cutest creatures around, as are their cousins the abouti, a smaller version of the capybara that tends to be a lot more active during the day. These creatures are basically big fat, slow, ground-based squirrels – we loved them. The agouti were all over the place when we took an evening walk around the resort, but somehow I managed to restrain myself from chasing them – I have a feeling that I’m about 2 years away from TBJ ensuring that no restraint is used in similar situations in the future.
Since we had to get from Gamboa to the airport for an 8:30 flight we called it a night early, set a wake up call for 4:30, hit the road by 5:00 AM, made it to the airport by 6:00 (in which must be record time), and called it a trip. As I write this TBJ is trying to eat an airplane napkin, so I’m going to sign off and see how I can help him with this, so until next time, I hope your life is well and your travels are smooth.
the Evil Little Bastard is so cute