Panama 2022 - Week 11
- 9 hours ago
- 4 min read
02/12/22 – Day 71
C is a keen mammalogist, so KL and I joined him at 4:00am for a dawn walk in the forest. The forest at night is a strange and frankly creepy place. Everywhere you look there are bright dots, like light reflecting off a water drop. But instead of water, the light is reflecting off of spiders' eyes, bouncing the light of your torch back at you. We saw a few mammals including a Pacca, which appeared out of the darkness as two glowing eyes. The birds started singing around 6:00am, but under the canopy, it was still too dark to see anything.
We were back in time for breakfast, then I headed straight back out into the forest to transplant seedlings, along a very similar route to the early morning walk. The afternoon was a write-off, spent napping, watching TV and calling home.
03/12/22 – Day 72
For reasons that will become apparent, today was the worst day of the trip for me. We took the boat to the other side of the island to do another two transplants. We were back by lunch and spent the early afternoon disposing of all of the Jacaranda pods and emptying the soil from the seed trays. Just as we were finishing this job, I had a migraine, so the rest of the afternoon was spent in the dark in my room. Fortunately, it passed relatively quickly and without too much disruption.
04/12/22 – Day 73
Our last full day on the island. We are all just pushing through to the end now. This is probably reflected in my writing. At the start of the trip, I like to think my entries were filled with voluptuous sentences forming elegant prose, whereas now it’s more like we went here, we did this, we saw this.
Anyway, I went on my own down the Thomas Barbour trail to collect my trap camera and the mesh from the exclusion cages. We can’t leave the mesh on as the leaf build-up will shade out the seedlings and ruin the experiment. Along the path where I'd captured the Ocelot videos previously, I spotted some paw prints. I'd managed to catch the culprit on film, but even without the camera, the evidence of Ocelots was all around.
The afternoon was spent tidying and packing, ready for our departure tomorrow.
05/12/22 – Day 74
This is it. We leave the island in two hours on the 3:40pm boat. It’s an odd feeling. We’re all tired and done with island and forest life, but it's also sad to be leaving. It’s a truly extraordinary place, but home is calling. Having said that, there's supposed to be a cold snap when we land, which will be a shock to the system. Currently, we have to put on a jumper when the lab air-con drops the temperature to 24°C, so December in England isn't going to be fun.
I took a final hike in the forest this morning, down to Drayton and back to collect the last of the mesh. It wasn’t a very eventful walk, but it was nice to be in the forest on my own one last time.
After lunch, we finished off the final bits of packing and tidying as we killed time for the last couple of hours on the island. At 3:25pm we heard the boat’s horn, indicating that it was time to leave. The island had a parting shot for us, with a torrential downpour as we boarded. It was a 30-minute boat trip followed by an hour-long taxi ride to the hotel. Initially, our driver took us to the wrong hotel, same chain, wrong location. After arrival and check-in, we ate in the hotel restaurant and turned in for the night.
06/12/22 – Day 75
Despite having the option to lie in, I woke at 5:30 am and could not get back to sleep. After an hour of trying, I gave up and took my binoculars for a walk outside the hotel. I met the others for breakfast at around 8am, after which we went for a dip in the hotel pool.
We went to Caso Viajo for lunch and found an amazing café selling Panamanian dishes alongside unbelievably good chocolate and lemon tarts. After lunch, we visited the Canal Museum, which gave a good history of not just the Canal, but the history of Panama and its politics. We mooched about and went shopping for souvenirs until dinner, ending up at a very nice restaurant. Many places are super posh, aimed at rich bankers, but we managed to find some much nicer, more rustic places with better atmospheres. The meal included birthday cocktails for EJ which we’d promised her last week. A very enjoyable day.
07/12/22 – Day 76
The final day. Once again I was awake at 5:30am and bird watching by 6:30am. This time PC managed to sleep in properly, so it was just me and EJ for breakfast and a morning dip. Paddy did emerge to join us a little later.
For our final morning, we headed to the STRI wildlife centre at Punta Culebra which has an amphibian house and lots of little aquariums. This was a small but excellent attraction. Crab-eating raccoons were all over the place, sunbathing on rocks and walking past the signs imploring tourists not to feed them. I’d never seen a raccoon before, so this was a novel treat for me, though they are clearly a nuisance for the staff there.
We had lunch in a nearby restaurant, watching pelicans fishing. It was then back to the hotel to pick up our bags before heading to the airport and saying goodbye to Panama. We boarded in 30°C heat and disembarked 10 hours later to a cold (3°C) and wet Dutch morning. From there, after a few hours in the airport, it was a 40-minute flight to Heathrow, an hour bus to Reading station and a fifteen-minute taxi home. In total, about 20 hours of travel, bringing my Panama adventure to an end.
The Adventure Continues in 2023...