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.