Home Sweet Gamboa

Well, I promised a fuller description of my job and life in Panama, so here goes:

The project I'm working with is one that's been around for like thirty years or something like that, so it's pretty well established and has seen a lot of interns come through over the decades. Our PI, Mike Ryan, is really famous in the world of animal behavior for this extended work, but this summer he's working on scanning various populations in Panama and Costa Rica for the presence of chytrid fungus, so we don't actually see him that much.

The job they have set aside for interns is fairly simple: every night we go out and collect pairs of mating frogs, then bring them back the the lab and run them in various tests. Collection involves driving around the back roads of Gamboa to various sites around 7:45 PM, then scanning the banks of puddles and small streams for amplexed pairs. Each one gets plopped in a tupperware for the trip back to the lab, then stuck in a cooler until they're tested. This is the fun part of the night, since it's when we're out and can see animals and stuff. Unfortunately, frogs breed in the same places mosquitoes do, so some of our sites have them really bad. They're also gigantic and at times my headlight just shows a flood of giant bugs around me in a swarm.

The cooler is mainly for sound-reduction; the testing room itself is kept around 27 degrees Celcius, which is outside temperature (pretty warm) and designed to keep the frogs as comfy as possible. Tests involve playing recorded frog calls and synthesized calls from speakers in various locations around a soundproof chamber and seeing which ones the females of the pair will go to after being separated from their males. Which ones they choose show various aspects of their understanding of the calls, what makes the calls attractive, how they choose mates, etc. The experiments are really quite clever and, after 35 years or so, have been refined to ask very finely detailed questions. After the phonotaxis experiments in the chamber are completed, we toe-clip all the tested females and take them back to the places we found them, wash all the tupperwares out, and usually end around 5-6 AM.

Recently, the moon has been very bright at night so there have been fewer frogs out and the number we've been testing has been lower. We also spent a few days constructing soundproof boxes for some different experiments, which also involved working during the day for a change. That project is still technically being finished up and yesterday morning we arrived at the lab to discover that it was barricaded by a swarm of wasps which had been attracted to the fumes of some painter/primer being used on the doors to the boxes. Well, I guess that's jungle life for you!

Another aspect of jungle life is seeing a huge variety of animal life, even right in our backyard. Twice now while I've been in the kitchen I've seen troops of Geoffrey's Tamarins bounding through the trees behind our house. This is one of them:

Although there's only maybe six or seven primate species which can be found around Gamboa, they often show up in interesting places, such as around the necks of ladies in the small grocery store here. Turns out she works for the local zoo and nurtures orphaned animal babies, like this baby spider monkey, who was taken in after her mother was shot for bushmeat.

The other night while we were out collecting frogs, we spotted this tamandua, or lesser anteater, climbing a small tree by the side of the road. (Unfortunately, most of my night photographs are pretty bad, especially since they're all taken with my small camera and generally with only the light of my headlamp for illumination.)

There's also a ridiculous variety of bird life here, including everything from the black-bellied whistling duck...

...to the blue-crowned motmot. See how its tail looks like it has a little circle attached to the normal part of the tail? Apparently, they sculpt their own tail by pulling out little bits along the length to give it that special appearance.

The same amount of variety can be found with insects. A lot of them are really interesting, like this large golden beetle I stumbled across outside of the lab the other night. It was maybe half the size of my hand.

A few days later I saw a grub that was itself maybe three inches long and will probably turn into something very much like that beetle.

Here's something I always wanted to see: a caecilian! Like frogs and salamanders, it's an amphibian, but it mostly lives underground or in leaf litter and is generally only above ground when it rains enough to saturate the soil. One of my roommates found this one dead on the sidewalk not too far from the house, which was pretty lucky.

I'll leave you with one more terrible night photograph, this one of a nine-banded armadillo. I've seen them a couple of times now, but this one was conveniently snuffling right outside of the lab.

There are also a huge number of species that I haven't gotten photos of, including some really awesome ones. I generally leave my camera in the truck while we're out collecting because it gets in the way of my working, but it means that I am only able to photograph things like the tamandua, which stick around long enough for me to run back to the car and retrieve it. Last night was a great wildlife night and I saw both a paca, which is a spotted rodent about a foot high, and a Panamanian night-monkey, which is a really rare find. I got a great view of both, but especially the night-monkey, which was just hopping through some low trees, so it's definitely a shame I didn't have the camera on me, but it was great just to see them nonetheless. Among the other things I've not gotten photos of are a capybara, an opossum, a baby iguana, red-eyed tree frogs, a multitude of other frogs, some snakes, most of the area's birds, bats, numerous gigantic water spiders that I've had to wade around while searching for frogs, the leafcutter ants which form a virtual carpet in some places, and no doubt a variety of others that I've forgotten. There are also a number of interesting things that I've heard but not seen, like an owl and a troop of howler monkeys. Hopefully I'll continue to get more photos to put up here, though!

For now, here are some shots of my current house:

Here's my bedroom, which I share with a gal working on endophytic fungi. My bed's on the left:

Living room:

Kitchen:

The light makes it look greenish, but that's just a reflection of all the foliage outside. I also should definitely have taken a photo of the outside of the house, so you could see the backyard and cement stilts that the house is built on to deter termites. All the buildings here are built in a very particular style... American colonial plus an extra story of elevation. I don't know how effective the elevation is at reducing termites (our lab building, for example, is getting fumigated for them on Tuesday), but they certainly aren't effective at keeping out ants, which swarm over ever surface in our poor kitchen and are starting on the bathroom. They're harmless, though, and ended up as just another extra ingredient in my last box of cereal, since I didn't do a very good job of keeping them out of it. It's just part of living here, along with making spaghetti in a metal coffee pot and slicing cheese with a vegetable peeler. Honestly, our half rough-shod, half American life is really quite charming, though, and I'm enjoying life in the jungle. More later!

New Life in Gamboa

Well, I've made it to my new home in Gamboa, Panama, where I'll be for the next two and a half months working with a branch of the Smithsonian Institution and the lab of Dr. Mike Ryan (UT Austin) on a project looking at communication in túngara frogs. I'll get to a description of my actual job in a minute, but let me give you some broader observations of the country.

My first impression of Panama was that it was expensive. I got to the airport at 8 AM and my project's PI, also my ride into town, was scheduled to get in at noon, so I decided to run out and swap my Claro SIM card before he got there so I would have a phone to use while here. The first unexpected cost associated with this endeavor was the cost of storing my luggage—a full $5/bag times three bags (too many Ecuadorian blankets!). The second unexpected cost was the taxi. I asked the taxi service with a counter inside where they thought the nearest Claro store was and they said Metro Mall, about 15 minutes away. How much for a 15-minute cab ride? $15 and no haggling. 15 dollars?! In Quito, $15 will buy you an hour of cab time. I balked and went outside to solicit an independent cabbie, who offered $25. Well damn. I went for $15 and we took off. I told the guy what I was looking for and it turns out, you don't have to actually go to a Claro store to get a SIM card, you can just stop at any old sketchy grocery store. So we ran into a sketchy grocery store and the cabbie ran in to grab a SIM card for me. In total, ride, luggage, and card cost me $35. Then upon returning to the airport, I decided to explore and found a counter selling the cards right there which would have saved me both the luggage and cab fees...

There's a reason Panama is so expensive, which is that it's a lot more developed than Ecuador. After Quito, I wasn't expecting the high-rise buildings downtown in Panama City to be so sleek and new and match so well, but there they are, gleaming elegantly above the water as you glide into town on one of the country's modern, attractive bridges. Apparently, most of the city was built in the last 20 years, with, our PI alleges, a substantial amount of cash coming from foreign drug money. Even the road out to Gamboa, in the middle of the countryside, is incredibly well-maintained and clean, and even though people keep insisting to me that everyone drives like a maniac in Panama, I have yet to really see it. Like Ecuador, the economy is dollarized, so that the official currency, the Balboa, has exactly the same value as the dollar. I'd expected to see mostly Balboas in circulation here, but even though prices are generally written with "B/.", actual Balboa coins are surprisingly hard to come by, with most of the cash on hand being US dollars.

Gamboa, where I'm working, is located in the middle of Soberanía National Park, a chunk of rainforest along the shores of the Panama Canal. We spend substantial time driving along the canal and get to watch a lot of ships go past, some of which are unbelievably huge. The other two things which bring a lot of people to the town are the rainforest resort, which brings a lot of wealthy tourists, and the research station, which brings a lot of sneaky scientists to mooch pool access and wifi off the resort. We also look for frogs in some of the puddles by their facilities. It's a charming little town, with one ATM and about three food carts comprising the restaurant scene. Gatun Lake comprises part of the Canal in the map below and my home is on the "Ridge."

Here's a behemoth on the Canal, viewed from the truck window on the way back from town. There is no way to get a sense of the magnitude of this ship from this photo, but it was like 600 ft long, packed 13 cargo containers deep from side to side.

There is also a really remarkable amount of wildlife visible in the area for it being so heavily used by visitors. Agoutis, which are adorable tailless creatures that prance instead of walking, dance their way shyly through the lawns and low underbrush that surround our houses, parrots squawk overhead and roost noisily in the trees at dawn and dusk, and ants can be found on just about every surface, so that cooking inside feels remarkably like cooking outside. A few nights ago, we saw a kinkajou while out looking for frogs and last night we saw an armadillo. I've also heard a slew of tales about capybara sightings, which are apparently quite common here, and jaguar/ocelot sightings, which, while substantially rarer, are not unheard of. A few days ago, my roommate spotted a giant crocodile chowing on a dead manatee.

An agouti:

The kinkajou. It's blurry, but it's in the top half of the photo, wrapped around the tree trunk.

Of course, the wildlife I spend the most time looking at is the tiny túngara frog, which we search for every night. Our goal is to find pairs in amplexus, the mating posture, and then to bring them back to the lab so that we can test the females for their responses to synthetic mating calls in a sound chamber. Because the frogs are awake at night, I'm awake at night. Work starts at 7:30 PM sharp and we're generally back home around 6 AM. It's a long shift and changing my sleep schedule has not been as easy as I expected, so I haven't done much other than work, sleep patchily, and try to figure out how to scrape together meal-like arrangements of food for myself. I'm hoping to have more time to explore both Gamboa and Panama City, though, and I'm trying to build up time off to go to Costa Rica. I'll post more later, but today, I've blown essentially all my sleeping time blogging and getting caught up on Game of Thrones, so I need to get home and try for one more hour before work.

Vacation Month

I don't think I ever really wrote about all the things I've been up to since leaving Quito at the end of the semester. But it's been a whirlwind, and I should at least pretend to be making an effort to update this poor blog, so here's going to be the quick version. (Keep in mind that the "quick version" of a steady stream of awesomeness for a whole month is still going to be incredibly long.) If you haven't heard, the main event is that I traveled Ecuador and Peru with one of the gals from my program in Galapagos, and it was been incredible!

Our first stop was the little town of Canoa on the Ecuadorian coast. When my friend announced that she wanted to go to the beach again, my first thought was, 'The beach? We just spent three months in Galapagos doing nothing but the beach!' But I was down for anything, so off we went on an overnight bus from a station in Quito so ominous that all travelers get patted down for hidden weapons before entering the vehicle, and in the end, of course, I was the one who didn't want to leave.

For one thing, I liked the beach in Canoa better than the ones in Galapagos. In Galapagos, the beaches tend to be smaller and mobbed with people, but in Canoa, the beach stretched on in a straight line for innumerable kilometers, and at the evening's lowest tide, you could walk out for hundreds of meters before encountering the surf and looking back at the distant lights of town...

We also encountered some of the world's nicest people in Canoa. My favorites were a pair of young fishermen who took me out shrimp-fishing with them one day so I could see how it was done, since the practice is still fairly traditional in Canoa. Every evening, all the fisherman roll their boats on logs up the beach and in the morning, they roll them back out to sea again to cast their nets for the day.

The owner of the boat I went out on owns four nets, and he does a lot of intense work as part of his fishing lifestyle. Every morning and every evening, in addition to moving the boat up and down the beach, the nets, floats, and motor have to be shuttled back and forth from his house every morning...

... by hand. He's about 5'3" tall, and that motor is probably 600 lbs.

An hour or so's bus ride away from Canoa is a slightly larger city called Bahía, where we went one day for a dual purpose. My traveling companion wanted to visit Isla Corazon, a mangrove island which was shaped like a heart back in the eighties but due to extensive tree growth has now elongated into just another random blob on the map, yet still manages to use its name and a lot of old photos on the internet to rake in tourists for an overpriced tour. Our fisherman companion needed to pick up some fiberglass and resin to patch a small hole in his boat, but he was down to show us gringas one of the city's lesser-known secrets: a Galapagos giant tortoise named Manuel who now resides on the grounds of an elementary school.

They don't just let you walk up and pet them in Galapagos.

Canoa was probably my favorite place to visit in Ecuador because the lifestyle was so relaxed and the people so happy. The locals just hung around, surfed, fished, and walked on the beach, and that was enough to continuously delight them... I wish my life were that simple!

After Canoa, we went south to Puerto Lopez, where my traveling companion assisted one of her professors from Galápagos with a diving research project. I spent the time hanging around the town, canvassing it for interesting graffiti and investigating the beaches for exciting dead things. (I found an awesome dead eel which I carried around for a while!)

Some finds:

 Awesome dead remora fish, with my shoe for scale. I never knew they were so big!

"The whores to power, our sons, have already failed us. Signed, the mother of Colón." The people of Puerto Lopez are not happy with their current political situation and Colón, apparently one of their councilmembers, has received a truly remarkable amount of flak on the city walls.

After an afternoon spent in the cute but very touristy town of Montañita, we headed to Guayaquil to catch our 27-hour bus to Lima, Peru. I expected that those 27 hours would be it for the long-haul bus rides, but as it turned out, we were in for yet another almost-day-long leg when we went from Lima to Cuzco later that night. Why? Well, unlike in Ecuador, where a recent economic boom from the rising prices of oil have allowed the construction of slick new roads across the country, there aren't straight highways. Instead, the road winds tortuously around every bump and valley in the earth, twisting back on itself in convulsions of switchbacks that took forever to navigate around.

For example, here's the section of road we were traversing when I woke up in the morning:

Gas stations were at least ten hours apart and petroleum in Peru isn't subsidized, meaning that while in Ecuador gas is generally around $1.50/gal, here it can reach as high as S/.20 ($8.00)/gal for high-octane blends. (On the plus side, biofuel is available for less at nearly every station.)

Peru is also noticeably poorer than Ecuador, in part perhaps because of its lack of petroleum fortunes. Outside of the tourist centers, the standard of living was noticeably lower than in Ecuador. Along the desert road stretching down to Lima, tiny ramshackle houses constructed of a single layer of woven reeds were common and cinderblock shantytowns, occasionally with absurdly optimistic names like "Valley of God", dotted the side of the road, appearing seemingly at random in the desert.

It's tough to tell in my shoddy out-the-window photographs, but the first one shows part of a fairly long complex of cinderblock structures and the second shows structures built primarily out of woven plant material.

The starkness of Peru's coastal desert also struck me, particularly after leaving the verdant countryside of Ecuador. In Peru, only a little bit south, the landscape is dramatically different, both along the coast, where the Atacama desert stretches north from Chile to turn the rolling hills to dust, and in the highlands, where mountains jut up shoulder to shoulder, jostling for space. The intricate crevices and pinched hills, generally without vegetation of any decent height, give each hill and mountain the impression of being minutely detailed in a fashion that the peaks of Ecuador lack. As we wound our way between them, I was struck by the fields of crops planted precariously on the steep surfaces, subsistence farms owned by the residents of the clusters of low cinderblock or mud-brick houses which popped out of the side of the road suddenly every few kilometers. Our traveling companions along that highway consisted of other tour buses and stooped residents of the low houses, plodding uphill bent over from the size and weight of the huge bundles of harvested crops they had strapped to their backs in wraps of multi-colored blankets.

Peruvian free public transportation:

That all being said (and despite the occasional heavy mists like in the above picture), the views from the bus were absolutely stunning. For example:

Upon arrival in Cuzco, I found yet another city to fall in love with. The wealthy, touristy district of Cuzco, centered on the famous Plaza de Armas, has been built up with foreign money to a bustling hub packed with shops, restaurants, tour agencies, and bars, but still retaining a feel of antiquity, with cobblestone streets, cathedrals, and even the occasional patch of original seamless Inca stonework. It was beautiful, and even though I spent way too much money on souvenirs and food, I would have loved to stay longer in the charmed historical atmosphere.

Then again, in addition to the charming historical atmosphere, there are the incredibly creepy mannequins that seem to appear suddenly from between racks of tourist-oriented alpaca sweaters like something out of a horror movie.

 ...And the thrillingly unnerving food items available in the San Pedro Market, like these burro snouts, which are used to make soup. Also available are whole cow hearts, whole-but-skinned cow heads, cow stomach, and basically every other part of the animal, all ready to be taken home and used for dinner.

Surrounding Cuzco are a number of ancient ruins, which were unfortunately quite expensive to enter. Eventually I spent 130 soles (about $50.00) to get a tourist ticket, which allowed me to enter Sachsayhuamán (right outside of Cuzco; just say "sexy woman" and you're pretty close) and several other ruins in the Sacred Valley in a package deal.

The zig-zag walls of Sachsayhuamán, the lightning temple. The stonework is the perfect-fit style of the Incas' most sacred spaces, and the stones have been fit together in such a way that they buttress one another at the corners.

I also visited an interesting set of tunnels behind Sachsayhuamán where the Incas used to stash mummies and offer sacrifices. (I asked my guide if they were human sacrifices, which earned me a weird look and the reply that they were, in fact, sacrifices of crops.) The highlight of that tour was the Temple of Rebirth, really just a pitch-black cave tunnel barely wide enough for a human to squeeze through, which ended with a fairly-vertical climb up a rock face to an exit hole in the ceiling.

Apparently the traverse is meant to symbolize the soul's journey through the underworld before its ascent to more heavenly resting places among the snow-covered mountain peaks.

Among the interesting pieces of Andean mythology that I picked up during my stay was a story from my guide to Sachsayhuamán, a university professor who makes a little extra by giving tours of various historical sites in Peru on the weekends or during school breaks. Apparently, in order to make it to the official resting places among the nevados, or snow-covered mountain peaks, first the soul had to cross an underground river of blood. Unfortunately, humans can't see in the dark, so to make it across the river, they needed a loyal dog companion to guide them to crossing points. Falling in meant consigning oneself to an eternity of spiritual vagrancy and malevolence, so one had to be sure their dog was willing to do them the favor, and thus, dog abuse in Andean civilizations was eliminated.

Of course the main reason for our trip to Cuzco was to see Machu Picchu, and we decided to make it a trip to remember by hiking the Salkantay trek, a five-day journey culminating in a visit to the ancient city. We left in the freezing Cuzco pre-dawn on a Monday morning, before beginning our trek in the tiny town of Mollepata. We spent the first day hiking a winding path through a long valley, before camping at the foot of two massive, majestic nevados.

The camp lacked electricity, but our rustic candlelit dinner and the moonlight reflecting off the snowcaps made us glad of it.

Day 2 I woke up with food poisoning, so I opted to take a horse over the most difficult part of the climb. Fortunately, by early afternoon I'd apparently managed to rid most of it from my system because I felt better in the afternoon and was able to finish our walk through some gorgeous alpine meadows. And it certainly didn't ruin the views at the top:

The next day we trekked down through some rainforest, making camp in the tiny village of Santa Teresa, from where we took a bus to some hot springs. Day 4 saw the group splitting into a group doing ziplining and a group walking to the next town. I hadn't much cash left, so I walked it, but it was hot going along a shadeless dirt road, so eventually I broke and hitched a ride to the next meeting point with my last five soles. After that, we had about three hours left of walking, but it was along some railroad tracks, flat and mostly shaded, and wasn't too bad. At the end of the day's trek, we ended up in Aguas Calientes, also called Machu Picchu Pueblo, the tourist town at the base of Machu Picchu's mountain. It's a nice enough town, but literally the entire thing exists purely to cater to tourists, so nothing is cheap and the street musicians, while nice to listen to, are a bit tacky and overdone. After walking around a little bit and getting dinner, we got to bed early because the next day, we were up to hike to Machu Picchu before sunrise.

There's two ways to get to the ruined city: by bus or by a series of just under 2000 stone steps cut into the side of the mountain. After a four day hike, they probably figured we were just gluttons for punishment, because we got to take the stairs.

The gates to the trudge open at five AM and it took me about an hour to make it all the way to the top, after which I was so drenched in sweat it looked like I had gotten caught in a downpour. I had missed the sunrise when I got there (although I got some great views on the way up) and the line to get in had been flooded with bus-takers to the point of being hundreds of people long, so I spent a few minutes loitering in the entrance area to the city. I only had one bottle of water with me, but a new one cost eight soles at the top ($3.25 ish) so I decided to just pay one sol for the bathroom and use a purification tablet instead. Once inside the gates, we got to return to our favorite activity ever, climbing stairs. Machu Picchu is just a city of stairs. If you love running stadiums, you'll love Machu Picchu. And if there's anything I can safely say about the Incas after that experience, it's that they must have had quads of steel.

Machu Picchu is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. On all sides is a steep drop-off and an amazing view, and the mist rolling over the hills of the city early in the morning is incredibly beautiful. The stonework is also quite lovely, although I was a little surprised to note that the famous perfectly-flush building technique was actually used fairly minimally throughout the city, and generally only in the most sacred spaces.

 

Like in most of South America, safety is more of a suggestion than a rule, and though they had blocked off restricted areas with small ropes, there was nothing to keep people from walking right off the side of the mountain.

Our return to Cuzco brought us a few more days of noodling around the city before we departed on yet another overnight bus for Puno. From Puno, we visited Lake Titicaca, yet another incredibly gorgeous locale. On the lake live a number of people in small communities on floating islands constructed out of the reeds which are abundant there. I was entranced by the simple lifestyle of these people: fishing, harvesting reeds to build houses and for food, occasionally hosting tourists. Again, I have found someplace I would love to live forever. I was ready to just move onto a reed island and never leave.

After Puno, we made a brief stop in Arequipa, where we spent a day relaxing at a nice hotel and wandering around the colonial city, then left for Nazca, where we took a flight over the famous Nazca lines. Surprisingly, the lines are quite difficult to see from the air. They're actually smaller-looking than I expected and have less contrast with the desert sand than their postcard representations, and I would have missed all but one or two of them if not for our pilot's very specific instructions about how to view them and insistence that they were "right there!"

 One of the more contrasted ones:

What the shapes look like with my lens fully zoomed out. Can you find the "spider"? (You can click on it to blow it up.)

Nope? Here it is!

At times, I ended up resorting to just snapping photos of the desert floor randomly, in the hopes of just landing on the lines. I generally didn't, but I did manage to snap photos of a ton of other interesting shapes and designs which aren't among the uber-symmetrical or otherwise intriguing animals and plants that are listed off for tourists. Almost none of them were things I saw while flying; most I only noticed while reviewing my photos later, even if they were dead in the center of my shot, like these:

After the cute town of Nazca, it was on to the bustle of the giant city of Lima, from where we took a plane to Quito in the evening, arriving just in time to catch the pouring rain. Then, about 24 hours later, I left town in the middle of the night to catch a plane for Panama City. Currently, I'm in Gamboa, Panama, working, although that's a blog post for another hour. For now, let it suffice to say that I miss Ecuador and Peru terribly and would love nothing more than to return after graduation... I feel like I still have so many loose ends there and people and places that I want to see...