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Penn & Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 12

10/24/2016

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A sloth in our yard

Late June 2016

Time seems not to exist. Days melt into weeks and I lose track of when we are. I usually don’t know what day of the week it is or what day of the month it is. Therefore, I’ve stopped using exact dates for headings.

I’m going to write about a bunch of miscellaneous stuff today. It may or may not tie it, but it’s what’s happenin’.

Let’s start with the sloths. We were driving over to Rosemary and Courtney’s. As we came up the hill towards the gate, there was a bundle of fur laying in the road. It didn’t move as we approached.

Dawn was driving, so she stopped the truck and I jumped out. I thought the poor thing had been hit by a truck and was suffering. I wanted to help.

As I got close to the victim I recognized it as a sloth. These are kinda cute mammals that weight about thirty or forty pounds with long legs and claws. They usually live in the trees, but do come down for water or to cross roads. They are incredibly slow animals. I don’t understand how their species has lasted this long. I expect that the jaguars would have no trouble catching them.

Our sloth was obviously not hurt. It just lay there and stared at me. I realized that sloths take their own sweet time crossing the road, so I got back in the truck and we
drove around it.

When we told Courtney about it, he says that they’ll let you pick them up. He was driving down the road and found a sloth right in the middle of the road. Courtney was in a hurry, so he got out and picked it up under its arms. The sloth spread out its arms like it was flying.

This was a momma sloth with a baby on her back. The baby spread its arms out and pretended to fly too.

We have seen sloths in the trees in our yards. They don’t seem to move much, just hang onto the tree and eat a few leaves.

Jim and Frances rent out their house as an AirB&B. They had guests coming and Dawn volunteered to help them clean the place.

After a long day cleaning, she dragged herself into the truck and started up the driveway. When the house was well out of sight, she came upon a sloth in the drive. Remember, Jim’s driveway is really just a path between the trees. There is no shoulder, no way to go around the sloth.

Dawn took it out of gear and waited for the sloth to cross. She sat for fifteen minutes watching the creature slowly make its way across. Then it was thirty minutes. She was tired and hot and wanted to get home. Finally, the sloth made it to the other side and she could drive on.

All of this brings us to the question: Why did the sloth cross the road?

Answer: He had an hour to kill.

Monkey business

Since I’m writing about small mammals, I might as well throw in monkeys too.

I have seen two species of monkeys here, the howler monkey and the capuchin. I have heard some of the long time residents call the capuchin monkeys white face monkeys but my Panama wild life book says they’re capuchins.

The capuchins are smaller and very agile. They move through our trees in troops of twenty or thirty. They don’t make a lot of noise, but we have a row of trees just on the edge of the beach that they use as a highway to move from one side of the property to the other. These are cute little guys. You want to grab one and cuddle it and keep it for a pet. As a matter of fact, this species is often captured and brought to the U.S. for pets.

You don’t want to get near when they are traveling though. They defecate in their hands and fling their feces at you.

As I said, the monkeys use our trees for their super-highway. We sit in our chairs on the deck, sipping a Margarita and watch the circus go past.

The howler monkeys are another story. A little larger than the capuchins and with dark faces, they are LOUD. There’s a reason they’re named HOWLER monkeys. These guys sit in the trees around the house and absolutely blast us.

I don’t know of any other animal that is louder (except maybe rock musicians, or possibly an elephant trumpeting). Their cry is something between the roar of a lion and a 747 taking off. Sometimes they make a sound that sounds like a dog whining. Sometimes they open up and howl. When this goes on for hours, it can be quite annoying.

The other morning, I awoke to the howl of monkeys. I lay there and listened to them, but didn’t bother to get up. Dawn says that there were about forty or fifty of them transiting our yard. She sat and watched them for about a half hour before they were all gone. Enough about monkeys.

Let’s talk about the local fruit (and I don’t mean at the night clubs). Wes and Joyce have lime, mango and cacao trees planted in their yard. They also have pineapple (piña) bushes and watermelons.

The piñas they grow tend to be small, but very tasty. Likewise, the watermelons don’t get very big. I don’t know if this is because of the climate and soil or because of the animals eating them before they get large.

We pick limes from the tree at least once a week. Dawn has started making homemade Margarita mix and it’s yummy.

Speaking of yummy, Cesar brought us a ripe cacao the other day. He broke it open and showed us how to eat the insides and spit out the seeds. It was very sweet, something like a cross between the sweetness of a pineapple and the texture of paste. You pull a seed from the fruit and suck the sweet meat off if it, then discard the seed.

We didn’t put two and two together until this morning. I was working on this piece and forgot what the name of the fruit was. Cesar dropped by and I asked him. When he told me it was a cacao the light bulb went off over my head. The seeds are chocolate. You dry them, then roast them and grind them to make chocolate. Duh!

The monkey super-highway

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Penn & Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 11

10/10/2016

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Our private beach

Sometime after June 9th 2016 (I can no longer keep track of the day of the week)

It’s time to talk about our beach. I’ve already described the house and the park-like gardens. I’ve also said that the beach is about fifty feet from the base of our front steps.

We go down to the beach nearly every day. Dawn takes the dogs on walks once or twice a day and sometimes she even pries me away from my computer to join her.

We have four hundred and fifty feet of beach front on our lot. (The whole lot is thirteen acres) The beach itself is several miles long and totally private. To the west is a head land and point that blocks further passage on the beach. To the east another points marks the end of the beach. We often skinny dip here because there are no other people around

We have light tan colored sand. Not like the white sandy beaches I was used to from Hawaii or Mexico. The sand is fine and as you walk along the beach, you sink in about ankle deep. Near the water, where it is wet, you sink in even further.

I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect it’s because the coral here is the same light tan color.

I know that in Hawaii, the white sand is because the fish eat the coral and pass the sand. The coral there is white.

The jungle comes right down to the beach. Palms of all kinds, teak, sea grape and mahogany trees line the coastline with about twenty or thirty feet of beach between them and the ocean. There is a little drift wood, but nothing like we’re used to in the Pacific Northwest.

Tides this close to the equator are not much to talk about, maybe two or three feet. However, we are facing the open Caribbean Sea, so we get waves crashing ashore. Sometimes the sea is calm and you can easily walk out until you can’t touch bottom. Sometimes the sea is angry and you have to dive into the waves to get off the beach. The sound of the surf crashing on the shore is a constant. There is no silence in this jungle. At night, we watch a DVD on the TV and huddle close to hear the sound track over the roar of the breakers. Sometimes I think it’s going to drive me crazy, sometimes I don’t even notice it. The other day I was driving into town and just stopped on the road and turned off the engine in the middle of the jungle to hear some quiet.

Turtle tracks on the beach

Several species of turtles nest on our beach. First there are the leatherbacks, then the hawksbills, the green and loggerheads. The females take turns coming ashore to lay their eggs with the leatherbacks coming in first, then the green etc.

Dawn and Heidi discovered several turtle nests on the beach and Joyce carefully records their coming and going. The mama turtle leaves the sea under the full moon with the highest tides and climbs up the beach to lay her eggs in a nest above the high water mark then returns to the sea. The eggs are warmed by the sun and eventually hatch at the same time. A single turtle may lay as many as one hundred and sixty eggs. Several females will lay their eggs in close by locations so that when thousands of baby turtles hatch, some of them have a chance of making it to the sea.

Naturally, predators are waiting for the eggs to hatch. Some even eat the eggs. The worst of the bunch is a species called homo sapiens. We have poachers here. Even though the turtles are protected by law, there is no police presence to guard them. The honest people don’t eat them and the dishonest ones ignore the law.

These people have been eating turtles and their eggs since time began. Every year the turtles return to the beaches where they were born to lay their eggs. The cycle continued. Then modern man came along.

First it was the pirates, whalers and explorers. Turtles were great sources of protein and taste a lot like pork. The shells were prized for making jewelry.

Soon, a worse type of pirate hounded the turtles. The capitalists organized expeditions to hunt the creatures and finally, their factories and ships produced so much pollution that their feeding grounds became deserts.

Now the turtles hang on by their flippers. The natives here don’t seem to understand the concept of yesterday and tomorrow. They only live in today. Today, there are plentiful turtles on their beaches so they hunt them, not realizing that they are on the brink of extinction around the world.

One day, Heidi was out walking when two men came down our beach. One had a machete and the other a bundle of sticks.

“What are you doing here?” Heidi asked.

“Oh, we’re from the government. We’re surveying the turtles. We find the nests and mark them, then when the turtles hatch, we count them.”

Seemed harmless enough. Until we told Gundela about it.

“Poachers!” she screamed. “Those sons of bitches are marking the nests so they can come back and steal the eggs.”

Sure enough the next morning, the nests had been dug up and a few broken turtle eggs littered the beach.

Heidi and Dawn now went to Def-Con 2. Dawn built a scarecrow and asked me to tie a hangman’s noose for her. She hung the scarecrow above the turtle nests and lighted a tiki-torch.

Heidi was swimming when two guys were marking turtle nests. She confronted them and told them to leave. Remember, the average Panamanian man is about five foot six. Heidi came out of the water in her bikini looking like Ursala Andress in Doctor No. It was this Valkyrie who is a martial arts expert and two little brown men. They decided that discretion is the better part of valor and cleared out.

Turtle nest on our beach

Another day, Dawn was walking along the beach when two pangas showed up with two men apiece in them. She ran back to the house and got Wes’s BB gun. I gotta tell you, this BB gun is so realistic looking that if you pointed it at a cop, he’d shoot you.

It looks like a big, bad automatic pistol.

With her weapon in hand, she returned to the beach where the pangas were approaching the shore. She aimed the gun at them and they did a quick one-eighty. Then she stayed, stuck the gun in her waistband and played with the dogs until they lost interest and left.

All of this was before we learned that the poachers in the pangas carry guns. I guess they didn’t want to get into a gun fight over a bunch of eggs.

On Sunday, Jim and Frances invited us up to the tree house for a good ole Texas-style barbeque. We call it the tree house because the lower floor is a kitchen, dining area and lounge. It reminds me of a Key West bar. In the center of the big room is a large tree. Upon careful inspection, I could tell that the tree didn’t grow there. A group of Boy Scouts built the house as part of a tree house competition. They brought the tree in to lend style to the house, but we now call it the tree house. Looking up at the house from the beach, it truly looks like a modern tree house, overhanging the steep hill.

Jim and Frances rent out the house on AirBNB.

The driveway down to their house reminds me of a carnival ride. It is barely wide enough for one vehicle. The forest reaches out and grabs at you as you drive down. It is steep and is just ruts in the dirt. When it rains, the footing is so bad that you have to have 4-wheel drive to get down.

While we were lounging around, watching Frances cook, waiting for the other guests to arrive, Jim and Dawn took the dogs for a walk. They have a pack of four or five dogs, I can never tell because they’re constantly moving around and all look alike. Add our two dogs and you have my worst nightmare.

Peanut sniffs out a turtle nest

They had only been gone for a few minutes when Jim came huffing back up to the house.

“All hands on deck. I need help freeing a stranded turtle.”

I pulled on my sandals and headed down to the beach. Frances stopped to grab a camera.

The path to the beach was no better than their driveway. I clung to vines and small palm trees as I edged my way along small cliffs until I finally arrived at the scene of the crime.

Dawn was standing down in a cluster of green rocks with driftwood piled on them.

“Where’s the turtle?” I asked.

“Right there.” Dawn pointed.

I didn’t see no stinkin’ turtle. I stepped down into the rocks to get a closer look.

“Watch out!” she shouted. “You’re going to step on the turtle.”

Sure enough, if I looked carefully, I could see that one of the big rocks was indeed a hawksbill turtle. She was wedged between two rocks that were covered with driftwood to a height of about three feet. No way was she going to climb over that.
Not only that, she couldn’t turn around. Apparently turtles can’t back up, so she was stuck.

She was about three feet long and maybe two and a half feet across. When we lifted her, I guessed that she weighed about two hundred pounds.

Jim and Frances arrived. There wasn’t room for all of us to work around the turtle so Frances chronicled the event on her camera. You can see the video on my home page.

Jim took one side of the big beast, I took the other and Dawn lifted her tail end. We tried to lift her and she panicked. She tried to crawl forward and jammed my hand against a rock. It hurt. Come to think of it, it still does. It swelled up like a golf ball, a purple golf ball that is. But not until after we rescued her.

She had wedged herself so far forward under the driftwood that we couldn’t lift her. Jim and I pulled her back into the clear, then we lifted the squirming, fighting reptile up to the first rock. She wanted out of there. She tried to get over the driftwood, to no avail.

“Lift, NOW!” Jim yelled.

I got a handhold and between the two of us, we got her up on the driftwood. As soon as her center of gravity was over the log, she slipped from our hands, down the rocks and into the sea. We stood and watched to make sure she made it, but never saw her again. She must have swum out into her home under water.

We all felt very full of ourselves, saving this magnificent animal. No single person could have lifted and moved her. But as a team, we did it.

Peanut waits for turtles to come ashore

Yesterday, Dawn saved a baby turtle. She was walking on the beach with Peanut and Little Bit when Peanut smelled something under the sand. She started digging and before long, came out of the hole with a small turtle in her mouth. Peanut trotted over to Dawn and dropped the turtle.

Dawn had been told that you don’t pick up baby turtles. We later found out that the babies need to walk in the sand so they memorize their beach. The turtles always return to the beach where they were born. Dawn did as told, lifted the turtle and carried him into the water. She let him go and watched him swim away.

Afterwards, she looked in the hole Peanut had dug. At the bottom she found the shell with a hole in it where the turtle had hatched.

I mentioned earlier that when the baby turtles hatch, they make a mad dash for the sea to escape predators. Gulls, pelicans and other sea birds love to feast on baby turtles. Small mammals, snakes, etc. like to join the fiesta.

The egg laying season is in full swing. For the last couple of days, as we approach the full moon, we’re seeing all kinds of turtle tracks in the sand and nests on our beach.

Turtle tracks look like tractor tire tracks. There is the center area where the sand is flattened by the turtle’s shell. Then, outside of the shell track, are the tracks left by their flippers as they propel themselves forward. The track ends where they decide to build their nests, then there is another set of tracks where they make their way back to the sea.

The nests are depressions about four feet in diameter in the sand where the mama lays her eggs. Then she covers them and heads back to the open ocean, never to see her offspring again.

Yesterday, Dawn was totally excited. We had a set of turtle tracks leading up to the path where we walk down to the sea. I couldn’t find any trace of a nest, so we decided that this must be a false nest.

The mama turtles sometimes come up onto the beach and leave their tracks to confuse predators. Then they go back into the water and come ashore again in another place to lay their eggs.

This morning we had a couple of sets of tracks right in front of the house. There is a nest in our path that leads down to the beach. Dawn can’t wait for the eggs to hatch and see the babies head for the sea.

Last night, since it was one day before the full moon, we took flash lights and walked down to the beach to watch for turtles coming ashore. We waited too long. We saw a couple of turtle tracks and new nests, but it was about an hour after high tide. I didn’t realize that turtles could read tide charts. Apparently they come ashore when the tide is at its highest so that they can plant their eggs high above the high-water mark.

I’m sure we’ll have more turtle adventures as the months pass by, but that’s it for now.

Turtles aren’t the only wild life here. Stay tuned, on my next blog I’ll tell you how to avoid having shit flung at you by a howler monkey.

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Penn & Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 10

10/6/2016

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Our beach house

Day Eighteen, Sunday June 9th 2016 (for about two weeks)

Heidi goes home today. She was paranoid about missing her plane, so we arrived in town at nine am for her noon flight.

We dropped by the airport so Heidi could check that her flight was on schedule and check her bags. Remember, this airport is like something out of Romancing the Stone. There are eight parking places and no security preventing you from entering the boarding gate part of the terminal. As a matter of fact, there is only the boarding gate part of the terminal, no fancy chain restaurants, bars or executive clubs.

The terminal is a one story building with a bad yellow paint job. Apparently in the last election, there was a ballot measure to collect funds to improve the airport. After the measure passed, the terminal was given a new coat of yellow paint.

A month or so later, a work crew came along and painted white primer over about twenty percent of the surface. Then all worked stopped. No one knows where the millions of dollars allocated to the improvements went.

Oh, well. That’s Panama.

When you enter the terminal, the room for deplaning passengers is right in front of you. To the right is a “ticket counter.” Next is the one boarding gate and further down the building is a waiting area with about fifty or so chairs. Not a problem, no plane with more than fifty passengers is ever going to land here.

Since we had three hours to kill before her departure, Miss Heidi wanted to go shopping for gifts to take home to her friends.

We drove about five blocks to an open lot with several open-air stands set up selling the local artisans’ wares. Heidi and Dawn plowed through the stalls and I got bored and stood by the truck. Heidi argued price with the vendors, even if the price was only one dollar, she had to get
a better bargain. Eventually she collected several choice items.

Dawn refused to buy anything there. The prices for the items, made in China, were higher than she’d pay for the same thing in San Diego. Cravat tourista.

After the excruciating shopping adventure was over, we found a place to have brunch, then headed back to the airport.

One more word about Panamanian security: you know how you run your bags through an X-ray machine before they’re loaded on a plane in the U.S.? It’s kinda the same here, except two nice young ladies open your bags and go through them looking for contraband.

I suppose this isn’t too big a thing, unless they pull out your frilly underwear and other assorted personal toys that you don’t want anyone seeing.

This is the part that takes the longest. Since our security guards go through each bag by hand, the line builds up. With an X-ray machine, the bag would go through in a few seconds. By hand, the search can take five minutes or more, depending on how interesting your baggage is or how big an ass you make out of yourself with the guards.

Finally we got Heidi checked in and left the airport. We stopped at the mini-super for a few grocery items, then headed home.

Bocas airport (just kidding)

FREEDOM!!! We were in our luxurious jungle hideout by ourselves. Nothing to do now but sit back, relax and enjoy our freedom, right?

When we got home, Dawn stopped in the basement to check the load of laundry she left washing. The utility sinks were full and water was overflowing onto the floor. Our plumbing was stopped up.

I traced the stoppage from the kitchen to the septic tank and determined that it was in the laundry room. It was so far down the line that we needed a plumber’s snake to get to it. Of course, we didn’t have any such tool.

Our neighbor, Gundela, stopped by to check on us and went through all of the same checks I’d just done and pronounced that our pipes were stopped up. Duh!

We stopped by the neighbors on the other side, Rosemary and Courtney. Courtney seemed like a very knowledgeable, get-things-done sort of guy. He didn’t have any bright ideas. I asked if there was a plumber on the island I could call.

After they stopped laughing they informed me that the nearest plumber is in David, on the mainland. It’s a four-hour drive from David to the ferry landing, then an hour ferry trip across to our little island. From the airport, it was another forty-five minute drive to our house. Either that or we could fly him out for the one hundred dollars airfare each way.

I called Wes. He said that they’d had that problem before, he thought it was caused by fat being washed down the drain, then congealing in the pipes. The solution was to pour boiling water down the drain, then use the plumber’s helper to force it down.

Okay, easy enough. Wait a minute! The hot water heater wouldn’t light.

We spent a day or two gathering useless suggestions from the neighbors, then went into town for something. When we got back, the sink was empty and the drain was running clean. We boiled a kettle of water and dumped it down the drain.

If flowed easily.

Now the hot water heater problem. Wes suggested that we get Jim, from the next house (about a mile away) to our east.

We drove over to talk to Jim and Frances. That isn’t as easy as it sounds. The driveway to Jim’s place is more like a burro trail. Bushes and trees bang against the truck. Pot holes could swallow your vehicle. When it rained, the mud was knee deep. We needed to put the truck into 4-wheel drive to get through.

Jim said gave me a few suggestions, then said if I couldn’t get it going again, to let him know and he’d take a look at it.

Jim is the island’s solar electricity and flash water heater expert.

If you haven’t heard of a flash water heater (and unless you live on a boat, you probably haven’t) it is a gas fired water heater with no holding tank. The water enters the tank cold and exits it hot. No fuss, no muss, no bother. It’s really a good idea, since you don’t have any large holding tank to rust out and explode in your basement or garage. Besides, it provides an endless stream of hot water. As long as you have water and gas (propane in our case) you have hot water.

Unless your igniter dies.

Our private beach

I tried all of Jim’s suggestions and nothing worked. I finally drove back over to his house to tell him we needed his help. You understand that I couldn’t just call him. There is no cell service on this side of the island.

We have two basic means of communication here. The coconut telegraph and a personal visit. There is a heavy iron gate to discourage tourist from driving down our road. People leave notes taped to the gate for others all the time.

Of course, everyone who goes through the gate stops to read the note, whether it’s meant for them or not, so everyone knows your business. I don’t know how the word travels so fast, but by the time you get home from posting the note, someone drops by to ask you about it. (Well, maybe it takes a little longer, but you get the point.)

The other method of communicating is face-to-face. You climb into your truck, drive to their house and have a conversation with them.

So to Jim’s house I went. He said he’d be by in the morning. That makes two days without hot water. I saw no point in trying to rush him; it wouldn’t have done any good. We’re on Panama time here.

The next day Jim and Frances dropped by. While Frances and Dawn gossiped, Jim tore the hot water heater apart. The problem was the igniter. It wouldn’t light the gas.

It’s a simple part to replace, if you can find one.

Jim left, saying he’d track down a new igniter for us.

A couple of days later, he dropped by to let us know he’d found a source. The new igniter cost two hundred and seventy-five dollars. The whole heater had only cost about three hundred dollars to begin with.

This was a decision for Wes. I drove over to Juanie’s to call him. No answer. They are driving around the United States in a motor home and are frequently out of cell phone range. I left him a text message.

Two or three days later, he got the message, contacted Jim and discussed the issue. In another couple of days, he let us know that he’d ordered a new water heater from David. It would arrive on Friday.

Toby is our fairy god mother. She runs a service in David that shops for you. You need a new water heater, call Toby. You want to order toilet paper or beef tenderloin, call Toby. She even sent her people to pay our parking ticket in Almirante, on the mainland.

Wes has an account with her. He sends her money, she keeps track of his balance and when it’s low, he sends her more.

When we needed auto parts, we called Toby. There wasn’t enough money in the account to cover it. After several discussions, we figured out how to handle it. We hid five hundred dollars in a magazine, then put it in an envelope. You are not allowed to ship cash on an airplane. We took the envelope to the airport and shipped it to David, where Toby picked it up. You wouldn’t do that in the States.

On Friday, I drove into town to meet the truck and bring the heater home. Then I drove over to Jim’s to let him know it was here.

“I should be able to stop by on Sunday,” he told me.

Sure enough, he showed up on Sunday and installed the new heater.

It only took us two weeks to get the problem solved. That’s two weeks of boiling water to do the dishes and taking cold showers. Oh, well. It’s Panama.

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Penn & Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 12

Penn & Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 11

Penn & Dawn's Panamanian Adventure - Part 10

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