Living the Good Life: Panama

Hey Guys!
Next stop, Panama City. It was a lot like any other massive metropolis, full of skyscrapers and traffic. It was pretty at night, but once the next day dawned we headed out for the jungle. We stopped at the Panama Canal along the way to see the locks. We just caught a boat going through the system.

The basic principle behind the Canal is really quite simple. There are locks on the Pacific side, locks on the Caribbean and a lake in between. The lake was artificially created by a dam, and it is 26 m above sea level. So to get in, the boats go through three locks to gradually raise the level. They then sail through the lake, and then use three locks on the other side to drop back to sea level. It all works on gravity, but there are train engines on rails flanking the ships that pull them through the locks. It takes about 8-10 hours to get through, and it isn’t cheap. The most expensive tariffs are over $800,000!

A boat making its way through
The thing I was most excited for, more than the Canal itself, was the rainforest it cut through. When the Panama Canal was built (1903-1914), it cut through some of the most virgin rainforest on the globe, and there is still a lot of really interesting wildlife to see here. The main draw are all the birds, beautiful and colourful. We found a place to stay with a real character of an old man, Don Mateo. He had a house that backed out on to a garden and then jungle, and we stayed in a little cabana out in the garden.

These were some agouti hanging around looking for food.

The turquoise crested mot-mot, which also happens to be the national bird of Nicaragua. Check out those tail feathers, they groom them to look like that themselves!

Don Mateo called this the ‘gato solo’ It was like a raccoon

Trying to get bird pics

Woodpecker

Here we are the next morning, walking out in the jungle at dawn. At the start of the Second World War, the United States built a supply road into a remote part of the Canal in case the Japanese bombed their existing lines. The road kind of leads to nowhere now, so there is no traffic to scare away the wildlife. It just makes for a great opportunity to walk through the jungle and watch for whatever pops out.

Can you see the brown frog hiding in there?

Old bridges crossing the jungle streams. Just stable enough to get across 😉

Just us and the jungle

Seeing the micro-fauna was really cool

But nobody does ‘macro’ like the jungle!

Can you see the monkey flying through in the middle of the shot?

Leaf-cutter ants traversing through the jungle. They chew little sections of leaves, carry them back to a pile and then a fungus grows on them, which they feed on. Nature is crazy!

As we emerged from the jungle, we saw an ocean liner going through the waterway. It was a weird feeling coming out of the bush onto the Panama Canal, one of the most famous waterways in the world.