Our hotel offered a “jungle walk” on the grounds behind the hotel. Rick and I tried twice to take it but it was cancelled because of the heavy rain we’d had the day before. I couldn’t understand why they would cancel because of rain. That is, I didn’t understand until I finally took the walk. Then I understood just fine.
Somehow I had envisioned a somewhat flat walk on a decent trail around the base of the hill/mountain behind the hotel. I should have known that in Panama nothing is flat. It’s either up the side of a mountain or flights of stairs.
Walks were offered at 10:00 a.m. or 3:00 p.m. Claire and I decided to try for the 3:00 p.m. walk after our walk on the beach. Weather permitting, of course, and in Panama at this time of year we soon learned that the sky can open up and pour rain at just about any time of day, but mostly in the afternoon. We got lucky because when we showed up pool side to meet our guide he told us we would go ahead and do the walk even though the sky looked a bit threatening. We told him our main goal was to see a sloth in its native habitat and hoped that would be possible. We doused ourselves with insect repellent, grabbed a couple of water bottles and off we went.
My first clue should have been the machete our guide was carrying. Hmmm ... is he going to have to chop our way through the jungle?
The trail started up (of course) over rain-slick rotting vegetation. Now I see why the trail could become treacherous from being too slippery. At least it had dried out enough from yesterday’s downpour to make hiking easier but you still had to watch where you were walking. The mosquitoes were thick once we entered the jungle. It was very hot and very humid. Within minutes of walking I was drenched with sweat. My clothes were sticking to me and my hair was plastered to my head. I could feel the heat in my face and knew that it had turned bright red from the heat and exertion. Claire and I both looked at each other and decided it was a good thing no one else could see us just then. Yikes. At one point our guide offered me more bug spray and I said I didn’t think I needed it, that they were leaving me alone. He and Claire both started laughing and swatted away a mosquito that had just landed on my cheek. I put more on after that.
Before we had gone very far our guide stopped and was looking into the dense vegetation on the side of the trail. Sloth! he said and started swinging his machete, making a trail through the tangle of plants. Claire and I looked at each other, shrugged, and followed him. I was starting to feel like I was in some kind of Indiana Jones movie. He continued to chop at the plants, but no sloth. A few minutes later, close to the same spot, we found this: fast asleep, high up in the tree—a sloth at last. Can you find it?
Our guide shook the tree until we thought it would pull itself out by the roots and still the sloth slept on, oblivious to his shaking perch. There was no waking this guy up from his nap. If you have trouble seeing it in the photo above, I’ve highlighted it in the next photo. You can see it isn’t even hanging on to the tree with one arm, which is flung outward. You can see the nails on its front leg and also on the back leg that is wrapped around the branch. That was one dead-to-the-world sloth.
It rained a little bit but it didn’t matter because we were already wet from sweat. I had to put my camera under my shirt at one point but it was only a drizzle.
A lone pineapple plant!
The trail got very steep at one point and I had to force myself to go on. I have been battling rib and stomach muscle injuries since the winter and had not been getting any type of exercise at all while I tried to get everything to heal. So, I was out of shape and afraid to make anything worse. I could feel every steep step in my gut. Do you realize how much you depend on your stomach muscles to climb?
Further up the trail and close to the top of the mountain our guide found another sloth. This time he was able to get it to move by smacking the trees with his machete, and as the sloth changed trees we had a great view of it. This series of photos shows pretty much how slow it was moving as each frame is a move.
It finally found a spot where it could settle back in and continue its nap!
Cute! I had always heard sloths were dirty and smelly animals but this particular sloth looked very clean. Just look at the length of all that hair! They are a lot bigger than I expected too. This one when all stretched out was probably as long as I am tall.
We saw a few more along the trail, but just as gray looking balls hanging in trees. All the sloths were saw were of the two-toed variety, our as our guide called them “white-faced.” He told us the three-toed sloths have a dark face and can be very aggressive when disturbed. I wondered how aggressive could a sloth really get?
Claire was out in front at one point and saw a small, brown animal run across the trail—twice! I didn’t see it and neither did our guide but he said he was pretty sure what it was. We didn’t recognize what he was trying to tell us it was though. Mystery animal. We saw lots of vultures sitting in trees and ant hills full of fire ants. We didn’t see any snakes or scorpions or any other kind of creepy crawly things. A group of monkeys with babies on their backs were a welcome sight. Can you see the baby hanging on?
From time to time our guide would use his machete on plants and vines that had started to encroach into the trail. It doesn’t take long for the jungle to start reclaiming its territory.
There were several nice view points along the way overlooking our hotel far below and one to the distant skyline of Panama City. I have no idea why I didn’t take a photo of the view, but after going through my photos I didn’t find any. I think I just got tired of switching between the telephoto and my normal lens.
We also saw several morpho butterflies along the trail. Sorry, no photos as they were there one minute and gone the next. Kind of like being visited by a medium-sized blue bird—they are huge. Absolutely gorgeous! You almost felt as if you had been blessed after they flew by.
We heard a noise kind of similar to a frog croaking and our guide stopped us to have a listen to what he said was a toucan! Such a strange sound! We never did get a look at it before it flew off. Too bad. I’d loved to have seen one.
There were some strange and very large trees along the way like these orange-barked ones. Our guide called them “stomach trees.” When he thumped on the tree with his fist you could hear that it was hollow. The natives used them for making dugout canoes. They had a strange root structure too, like gnarly fingers gripping the ground.
The walk took almost two hours and I can tell you we were ready to hit the showers! We cleaned up our mud-spattered shoes and legs at an outside faucet before entering the hotel grounds, tipped our guide for being such a great sloth-wrangler, and headed to our rooms. I can tell you that air conditioning and a cool shower have never felt so good! Hiking in the tropics is not a glamorous thing. Would I do it again? You bet!
Pool temperature upon checking first thing this morning: 70 degrees. It’s struggling more than usual this year because of the filter glitch last week and not having been covered up by the (new) solar blanket. Today and tomorrow’s daytime temperatures are supposed to soar into the 90’s and dip down to only the 70 degree mark overnight, so that will surely help boost the water temperature. We need to take that first swim before Rick leaves for Shanghai on Friday! Maybe our first swim will be a skinny-dipping night swim this year ...
Last night the fireflies were out in force. Over the past week we only saw a few feeble flashing lights in the grass, but last night they seemed to be everywhere. As you know, they are one of my favorite things. We saw one bat swooping around too, which is a good sign. I keep hoping to see as many as we had the first two years we lived here but that may not be possible. I don’t know where their numbers stand or if the white-nose fungus that was plaguing them is still a problem.
It’s obvious that we have a pesky bear in the neighborhood. On Sunday when Rick was washing Mia in the driveway, Finn (the neighbor’s dog across the street) started barking like crazy. We looked up to catch a glimpse of a bear in their woods. He decided to not come down and visit us and turned around and went up the hill in back of Kim’s house. Yesterday morning we awoke to our trash all over the street (and Kim’s too). Like I said, pesky bear. One that likes to knock over trees and sleep on them and turn over garbage cans. I have yet to get a good look at this bear!
Our house remodeling is coming along but still not finished. My sister arrives next week and will be the first one to try out the new bathroom. Hopefully the paint will be dry by then ... (Just kidding, sis!)
The wild rose bushes have gone really wild this year. They are everywhere along our little road!
And they smell wonderful! This one is trying to take over a tree and it looks like it’s having great success.
The concord grapes that are growing wild along the road are coming along nicely. Last year it was so dry they became raisins right on the vine. Hopefully this year we can at least grab a handful while walking the dogs.
Fingers crossed for swimming soon!
More vacation blogging coming up next time!
The pool was opened yesterday. Temperature upon opening: 60 degrees F. brrrr. All seemed to be well until a few hours later when I noticed water spraying up on the deck from somewhere. Uh oh. It was coming out of the top of the pool’s water filter like a sprinkler! So, I had to turn the pump off and wait for Dennis, our pool person, to come and take a look.
Turns out that our filter is about 20 years old or so and they don’t make replacement tops or parts for it anymore. Just our luck. Things seem to be more challenging this year what with Johnny’s issues and all. We knew it was getting pretty old so it’s not really too unexpected. Tomorrow we’ll have the new filter installed and be up and running to get the pool in condition.
This morning I got out the skimmer because I could see several little toads in the water. Two were still swimming and two were doing the dead man’s float. I rescued them all and am proud to say that after they sat around and regained their body temperatures back they all hopped off. Not such a happy ending for the chipmunk that I also had to fish out of the water. Poor little guy! They are used to running across the pool cover so he must have been taken by surprise to find it was missing.
Finally I have put together this blog entry on our walk around the rim of a “somewhat” dormant volcano’s rim. It’s going to be a long one so I hope you’re in a comfortable position to read. You might also want to grab a drink of your choice and settle in.
Volcán Mombacho sets a beautiful backdrop for the city of Granada. It also gave Lake Nicaragua Las Isletas, a 365-island archipelago formed by its volcanic eruption of over 10,000 years ago. Its lower slopes are home to thousands of coffee trees, while its upper slopes are covered with a protected reserve of a lush cloud forest. The last event for the volcano was when it’s second rim, which held a very large lake, collapsed and swept away an entire village downslope from it.
Here is Mombacho as seen from Granada’s main square. You might want to refer back to this photo as we go along.
When we showed up at the tour office promptly at 8:30 a.m., we learned that the man behind the desk in the office was going to be our personal guide. We were the only ones going on the tour—personalized service at its best! We hopped into the four-wheel-drive vehicle and sat down on one of the bench seats that ran on either side of the back. Our guide asked us if minded picking up a few passengers on our way that needed a ride. We stopped at a small convenience kind of store and added several women (one carrying a small child) and a large container of water and a few other miscellaneous things.
Our guide chatted away telling us about the many different people that make up Nicaragua. I had no idea that in the northern parts of Nicaragua the people are of German and Polish descent and they even have incorporated the polka into their music. He also talked about the political side of things as they are right now and we got the impression he didn’t agree with it. It sounds shaky to me.
We bumped and jounced our way up a tiny one lane road until we got to the park entrance where we picked up a few more passengers. By this time we had no more room for anyone else to join us. I had no idea where these people were going since we kept passing small outcroppings of houses without doors or glass in the windows. The road was paved with paving stones except for a few spots where it was dirt. Bounce, bounce. Jolt, jolt; climbing all the time. Coffee trees looked like they were growing wild in with all the other natural vegetation. (It wasn’t until further on in our trip when we took a coffee tour in Boquete that I realized this is how coffee is really grown. Not in straight rows like a vineyard.)
We arrived at the house pictured below which we were told was a coffee plantation; hence all the coffee trees we’d seen on the way up. Now all the people we had given a ride up the mountain to made sense—they all worked on the plantation!
Inside we had a complimentary cup of coffee straight from their “fields.” Delicious!
While we sipped our coffee we took in the view from roughly half-way up the volcano. The weather had certainly changed from what it was down below and the difference was refreshingly cool.
Even though in this photo these look like basketball or tennis courts, this is actually where the coffee beans are spread out to dry, weather permitting.
After our coffee is was time to head on up to the top. The going from here on would be steep and mostly on a 45-degree incline, winding around switchbacks. We crawled up the road in low gear and Rick and I had to hold on to our seat or find ourselves sliding to the back of the vehicle and possibly straight out the back door! I couldn’t take a photo because I didn’t dare take my hands away from holding myself back. Right about then we could have used all those extra bodies we had just dropped off at the plantation to help us stay in place! It’s a good thing the road is only one-way and everyone radios to the top when they start up.
We arrived at the ranger station at the top about 15 minutes and a world apart later. Up here the wind was blowing and it was cloudy and cool. At times the clouds obscured the view as they scudded across the tops of the peaks. Eerie. Our guide told us it was always like this up there, but too bad it was windier than normal because the monkeys tend to go down into the crater to escape the wind. There are two trails at the top and we would take the shorter, less difficult one—Sendero el Crater, about an hour and half trek around the volcano’s 4,411-foot-high rim.
The first thing we noticed were all the bromeliads in the trees. They must be beautiful when they are all in bloom.
Our guide told us that they can be very detrimental to the tree’s health as they can become so numerous on the tree that their sheer weight will bring the tree down. This one has quite a few as you can see!
The trail had several view points. Here you can see Las Isletas (the islands created during the eruption) far down below.
Lush jungle! You can see how the crater just drops off, and trust me you want to stay well away from the edge!
The air was like liquid. It felt like a mist on our exposed limbs. (Or was that just the glow of sweat?) Forget about trying to keep my hair from frizzing and curling! The trees pretty much drip moisture all the time. Moss covers most surfaces.
Plants that we consider “house” plants are everywhere only three times the size! Here is an “Adam’s Rib” that is about to bloom.
We didn’t see any birds or monkeys on the trail. The vegetation is so dense it would be hard to spot anything unless it walked right out in front of you, which is just what a scorpion did with me. I didn’t even see it and Rick (who was behind me) told me to watch out! that I had almost stepped on it. It was about five or six inches long. Yikes. The trail at first went mostly down, through dark, dense jungle.
And through an old lava chute.
At times the clouds covered everything creating an eerie feel to the landscape.
There were a couple of pretty orchids blooming along the way.
The trail finally came out into a much different and drier climate. The view was spectacular!
Here is a closer look at what all those orange flowers are. They are tiny orchids that our guide called “hummingbird” orchids because that’s what they look like when you hold the petals together. I doubt that is their real name, but that is what the locals call them. I had a hard time getting a good photo because of the wind.
Also in this area of the volcano’s rim are several fumaroles putting out a lot of steam. Our guide referred to this volcano as “dormant,” meaning I guess that it has not erupted for a very very long time, but anything that can put out steam like that is not “dormant” in my book! When I stuck my arm into this fumarole in the side of a hill it felt like a sauna! The photo is a little blurry due to the steam that was pouring out of it. It’s a strange feeling to stick your arm into something like that, connected to the bowels of the earth.
What comes down must eventually go back up!
After arriving back at the ranger station, we hopped back in our four-wheel-drive vehicle along with what looked like lunch for a crew of people. Were they providing us with lunch? No, darn it! Not our lunch ...
We hadn’t gotten very far on the steep one-way road when a strange sound stopped our driver in his tracks. Howler monkeys! he proclaimed. We got out of the vehicle as quickly as we could and looked up in the trees to see a band of howler monkeys on the move. There must have been at least twenty of them. I scrambled to change lenses since we could not stop for long. These were the best shots I could get since they were constantly in motion and back-lit, but at least they are something. And no, monkeys are not shy about their private parts.
Seeing the howler monkeys was a perfect ending to a great walk in a cloud forest around the rim of a somewhat-dormant volcano with a knowledgeable guide. How many people sign up for a tour and end up having the guide to themselves? The next day he was back in the office again! And oh, I almost forgot. The lunch was dropped off at the coffee plantation and with some workmen at the park entrance gate. It looked pretty good I must admit ...
