Paaa-nama!
We spent Christmas in and around Panama City with our Brooklyn friends Tim and Libby and their boys Charlie and Max. Breaking tradition with our overlander camping lifestyle, we holed up in the Radisson Summit hotel just north of Panama City. The Radisson has a good thing going on. It effectively sits on a bull’s eye surrounded by the Parque Nacional Soberanía, the Panama Canal and Panama City.
Rainforest
Panama does not have the same reputation for wilderness and wildlife that Costa Rica does, which is unfair. Better known for its canal and for the banks and casinos of Panama City, the country beyond the city limits is lightly populated and heavily forested. It possesses the largest marine conservation areas of the Americas, thanks to a peculiar history. Formerly a prison colony, Isla Coiba went long untouched by any development. When the prison closed, the island and its surrounding waters were turned into an enormous national park.
The Parque Nacional la Soberanía boasts 525 bird species and 105 mammal species, including several varieties of monkeys, sloths and coatis. These would have been cool to see and especially to show the kids. However, as our gondola rose through the forest canopy the clouds fell and by the time we had climbed to the top of a tower lookout, the storm was in full force. The sky warred with the forest floor and we could barely hear ourselves over the artillery fire raindrops. The storm-riven jungle was still beautiful to behold, even if it wasn’t the beauty that we had expected.
The Radisson itself boasted a short trail through the Soberanía, which we explored during a weather window shortly after experiencing why they call it a rainforest. Humid air enveloped us as we picked our way over leaf cutter ant paths that criss-crossed our trail. Spiny palm trees grew in the midst of larger cousins, whose trunks and branches swelled with ant and termite mounds. Liverworts provided the forest floor with a pleasant carpet of soft green. The trail terminated at train tracks and to the boys’ delight, a train passed just before we turned back, a thunderous mass of red-painted metal, hurtling through the jungle.
So There’s This Canal
No trip to Panama City would be complete without paying their iconic canal a visit. It truly is a wonder of engineering and we were rightly awed at seeing the locks in action.
The City
Panama City was largely a blank slate for us. It had hung in our minds as merely a holding zone, a place to wait and make plans for the sexier-sounding South America, while arranging our car shipment around the Darién Gap. When we thought of it, we pictured something large and sterile, lacking in culture and charm, a Central American Midtown. As with many other places on this voyage, we were pleasantly wrong.
Panama City felt very liveable. Cafes and restaurants dotted the streets. Middle eastern food appeared popular, which was a refreshing change from the oil-laden chicken/rice/beans combo we had grown quickly accustomed to throughout Central America. The colonial area of Casco Viejo was as charming and pretty as could be hoped for, but felt no less comfortable than many other neighborhoods scattered throughout the city (one neighborhood being a notable exception. Thanks, Google.). Despite a cosmopolitan bustle, people gave the impression of being rather relaxed, which had a relaxing effect on us in turn.
The city boasts a metropolitan park that in many ways puts Central Park to shame. Sorry, my beloved New York, but I have to be honest here. El Parque Natural Metropolitano is an artery of ancient rainforest intruding into the city’s flesh.
A short hiking trail just scratches the surface of the verdant organ. Some birds could be seen and many more could be heard rustling through the leaves and brambles only just out of reach but so far from view. An agouti, an animal that looks like the result of an experiment involving a rat and a rabbit, ambled unhurriedly across a field between two trailheads. A pond offered up a veritable village of turtles and one jesus lizard, who moved too quickly to be photographed.
Half a Museum and a Room Full of Frogs
Panama City’s southernmost point consists of three small islands now connected to each other and to the mainland by a road over a man-made isthmus. The Causeway Islands originally served as points for fortifications to guard against an attack on the Canal. The attack never came and they now serve as a location for leisure activities, a museum of natural history and a biological research lab run by the Smithsonian.
The Museum of Biodiversity (el Biomuseo) sounded like a great idea. Designed by Frank Gehry, it claimed to feature giant mock-up creatures, sure to delight Charlie and Max (and me!), numerous exhibitions and an aquarium stuffed with things we probably wouldn’t even see on a lucky dive.
I have no doubt that the Biomuseo will be great when it’s finished, but at the moment, it consists of a video room and an exhibition on rocks, with bonus features consisting of two aquariums full of empty water and a gift shop. The museum’s website is a little coy about describing their current state of affairs. Fortunately, the Smithsonian was right up the road.
The Smithsonian’s labs at Punta Culebra are far superior to my own former research lab in many, if not all ways:
- Inside-outside workspace.
- They have a shark in a tank.
- Tree full of sloths.
- Formerly used by pirates.
- People actually pay to visit their labs.
- I once wrote a paper called “An Efficient and Scalable Method for Using RNA-Seq as a Primary Output in High Throughput Drug Screens”. Literally no one read it*. They recently wrote “Reasons Not to Lick a Toad”. I read it twice.
Doubling your lab as a tourist attraction is proof that marine biologists are smarter than systems biologists (I was the latter). Their site contains several tanks full of fun sea creatures from the surrounding waters. The tree full of sloths was interesting, since we had previously learned that sloths were very solitary creatures than never shared tree space. Jordan mentioned this to one of the biologists and asked why these sloths were different. The biologist just shrugged and said “oh I don’t know. I guess sometimes they do things different.” Biologists are the best.
My favorite by miles was the frog room. I like frogs. If you find yourself hiking with me and I suddenly duck into the bushes and you’re like oh shit, we’re under fire, no, I’ve just caught a frog. The southern reaches of Central America are a veritable frog heaven, dense with beautiful and multicolored species.
The fire alarm went off twice during our transit through the frog room. Fortunately, I spent the last six(ish) years working in a building which had a faulty fire alarm that went off several times a day for months. This experience gave me near-superhuman fire alarm reflexes. Before anyone could even register what was happening, I displayed no reaction whatsoever to the alarm and deftly snapped a couple pictures of frogs.
I will die in a fire.
We eventually tore ourselves away from the frogs, turtles, iguanas, sloths and neon rainbow marine animals and returned to the city. The next day would start early, with a ferry to Isla Contadora, where we planned to spend New Year’s Eve. We fell into soft hotel beds and into neon dreams that would carry us into the dawn.
*I’m not using “literally” in the millennial sense of simply being dramatic. The paper in question was my graduate thesis and I had some doubts going in, as to whether anyone would read it. I thanked whisky in the acknowledgments section and peppered the text with some Tom Hanks quotes from Field of Dreams (it’s a great movie). For my “Future Directions” section, I told one of my advisors that I only had two really plausible ideas. He told me that I should write in four and expect to have one of them rejected. I only had two really plausible ideas, so idea number three evolved from a former post-doc’s rejected grant proposal and idea number four was inspired by a sci-fi movie. My published thesis contains four “Future Directions” ideas.