After a few days of delighting in the cats, coffee and colonial treasures of Panama City it was time for us to head North to begin our hunt for the Resplendent Quetzal. Not hunting in the traditional sense of course as the only shooting we planned on doing is with a camera, but hunting for it none the less! To find him we had to head deep into the misty, mysterious cloud forests around Boquete, Panama and getting there was not easy! We had naively planned this trip based on my incorrect assumption that Panama was small. It isn't. The journey into the forests was extremely long and uncomfortable and took us 10 hours! We had to travel by coach from Panama City to David where we changed and got the chicken bus (more on that later) onto Boquete. During the journey the sun was beating down on us through the bus window excasperated by the fact there was only one tiny tiny curtain window to provide relief (this made us very hot and cranky!), Amanda spent most of the journey in a tug of war with the people in front for the curtain and the shade it provided. A battle Amanda won by tying the curtain to the window pane with a hairband (I love Amanda so much!!!! :D). Unfortunately our relief was short lived as the people in front retaliated by slamming there seats back as far as they could so they were basically sleeping in our laps, making us even more uncomfortable and cranky... we should have just let them have the curtain.
even this old picnic bench I broke was more comfortable than the bus!
Boquete is located next to the Volcan Baru, Panamas only volcano and highest peak. The Volcan Baru National Park surrounds the town and is the reason why we were there as it offers fabulous hiking as well as incredible bio diversity and the chance to maybe spot the resplendent quetzal.. The Resplendant Quetzal (god of the air) is Central Americas most beautiful and iconic bird, it is the national bird of Guatemala although due to habitat loss it is now easier to spot it in Panama and Costa Rica than Guatemala. It should be really easy to spot anywhere due to its bright green colour but within the shadows of the cloud forests can be almost impossible to see. Even in captivity the Resplendant Quetzal is hard to find as it cannot be found in zoos as when the Quetzal's are put in cages they kill themselves. So certainly it is not an easy bird to see anywhere. The question is did we manage to find one?
The first trail we hiked was the Senderos Los Quetzales. It ran for about 13km from Cerra Punta to Boquete through the Volcan Baru national park and the most beautiful scenery I have ever seen in my life. It was also our best opportunity of spotting the Quetzal. We hired a local guide for this hike, his name was Gabriel and he is a descendant of the local Ngome tribe so he knew the forest really well which certainly increased our chances of spotting some wildlife while decreasing our chances of getting lost while we were at it. The hike began with a steep climb up into the cloud forest where the path started to narrow and the jungle started to close in. It was a really spooky feeling walking in the clouds, it is so damp there is moss covering everything and the mist is so thick it is almost like a thick fog. It is almost impossible to see any wildlife because of the thick mist but the noise from the jungle is incredible, you can hear all manner of birds and frogs and monkeys and god knows what else, it is almost as loud as Lunas Castle! Luckily we had our guide who had X Ray vision to pick out the birds, if it wasn't for Gabriel I think the cow at the beginning of the hike would have been it for wildlife.
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| A Volcanic hummingbird |
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| A Cow! We managed to spot this guy without gabriel's help! |
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| Do you like my new beard! |
I found it thrilling searching for the birds in the jungle, with Gabriel by our side we saw so much! At the beginning of the hike when Amanda and I had finished posing with the cow Gabriel pointed to the post next to it where a beautiful little volcanic hummingbird was perched, Amanda and I were completely oblivious to it! When we reached the cloud forest the first bird we encountered a lot more birds like the Red Trogan and the Orange Bellied Trogan who are both in the same family as the Quetzal and almost as pretty as him except that they lack his long tail feathers. We were then introduced to the Black Faced Soitaire and his somewhat controversial call. Amanda thought it was a lovely tune like someone blowing really slowly down a pipe whereas I thought it sounded like that cringeworthy noise of someone scratching their nails down a blackboard! Ugh! We headed on deeper into the jungle and heard a kind of deep gurgling noise which caused Gabriel to stop in his tracks and had Amanda and I to worry at what was round the corner... was it a mountain lion? Bigfoot perhaps? After standing dead still for twenty seconds Gabriel suddenly went darting off into the undergrowth and reappeared a couple of seconds later holding this tiny little lizard. He proceeded to show us its glands where the noise was coming from (as you'll see in the picture, the lizard loved this.... hehe) before releasing it and sending it zipping off back into the undergrowth to sing some more. How he caught something so small and so fast Ill never know!
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| A lizard having fun |
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| Gabriel having fun! |
By now we had started descending out of the cloud forest and the foliage had started thinning out yet there was still no quetzal. Although this was a disappointment we couldn't be upset as we had still had an incredible day and Gabriel had excelled himself, he had caught a snake for us and we spotted numerous more bird species including some toucanets, hummingbirds and a Bell Bird that looks a lot like Davey Jones form Pirated of the Carribean. We also stumbled across a dead porcupine on the trail with its spines strewn all over the place which Gabriel said had been attacked by a mountain lion! He then proceeded to prove it by showing us the lions tracks leading back into the jungle and some of his poop, apparently the Mountain Lions like to use the trail to traverse the jungle as it is easier than trekking through the undergrowth... I am pleased that Gabriel did not manage to catch a mountain lion for us as well!
With just a kilometer to go there was still no Quetzal. Gabriel had been making bird calls in the hopes of coaxing one out throughout the trail but he had given up on it by this point and it seemed like our luck was out. We were starting to recount on all the things we had seen heard on this incredible day in the jungle when all of a sudden Gabriel whispers Quetzal! Quetzal! Quetzal! Over there! After a lot of squinting and pointing sure enough there she was! Sh was about 20 meters away and looked even more resplendent than her name would suggest. We were chuffed but had barely a moment to take her in before Gabriel was beckoning to us to follow him and we went shooting off into the undergrowth in search of the male. After tripping and entangling ourselves in the endless vines finally there he was! Merely a stones throw away. He looked magnificent, a beautiful turquoise colour with a striking red belly and some rather fetching tail feathers. We must have stood there watching him for about half an hour, he was flitting about in the top of the canopy to show us his long tail feathers and posing on the branches, clearly showing off for his admirers down below! I don't consider myself a twitcher but this was a moment I will never forget. I found it exhilarating trekking through the forest keeping a beedy eye open for new species and seeing the Quetzal was the icing on the cake. We had a such a marvelous and memorable day!!!!!
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| A Resplendent Quetzal!! |
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| Isn't he handsome! |
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| The end of a incredible day. |
Our holiday in Panama was planned around Amandas 'golden (31 on the 31st) birthday, we were supposed to climb the Volcan Baru and be at the summit on the morning of the 31st to watch the sunrise as it is one of the only places you can see both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans at the same time. It would have involved hiking up the Volcano (8 miles and many thousands of feet of climbing) to get there and then hiking back down the same way. We were both a little apprehensive about taking on such a challenge and so it was a bit of a relief to both of us when my knee popped a couple of weeks before we were due to leave, giving us the excuse we needed to change our plans! Instead on Amandas birthday we hiked the three waterfalls trail, it was supposed to be a easy hike taking in 3 beautiful waterfalls along the way and although the waterfalls were indeed magnificent the hike was up and down all the way and we spent more time sliding around on our backsides than we did on our feet, certainly not easy! The whole hike was completed to the tune of the howler monkeys howling overhead which was also pretty cool! Once we were done Amanda enjoyed spending the rest of her birthday losing to me at Carcassonne, some things never change!
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| Birthday Breakfast |
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| A 'easy' hike |
On our last day in Boquete we hiked the pipeline trail, this was a wonderful hike (really it was a stroll) following a rusty old pipe for a few miles before you reach a magnificent cascading waterfall. We didn't take a guide on this hike so unfortunately our wildlife encounters were limited to a chicken and a dog at the entrance so we clearly have a long we to go before we can consider ourselves fully fledged twitchers! At least we did not get lost, it turns out even I can manage to follow a pipe!
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| 1000 year old tree |
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| Praying the taxi will come to get us........ |
I got a bit excitable on our way back to Panama City. We had to board the chicken bus which turned out to be a old American school bus! I thought it was really cool and as I had never been on one before so I started taking a million pictures of it while Amanda pretended not to know me.
Interestingly they use old yellow school buses a lot in Central America. In parts of Guatemala City where the literacy rate is quite low they paint them all sorts of bright colours (different colours for different routes) so the locals can tell where the bus is going without having to have the ability to read the destination on the front! Unfortunately my enthusiasm for the buses started to wane as we got closer to Panama City and it's infamous traffic and our bus became ensnared in a 100 kilometer traffic jam! Surely a record! It took hours for us to get back and finally we arrived at our new, quiet hotel (not Lunas and not a hostel!) at 11pm at night. The journey overall was about 200 miles, the distance from London to Leeds but it took us 14 hours. Luckily there was a wonderful craft brewery at the end of the street where we got to eat for the first time in 15 hours, drink some tasty brews and catch the end of the superbowl (lucky us!).
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| The jungle certainly has a spooky quality to it, not a place I would like to get lost! |
An interesting little tid bit to finish on. In 2014 two Dutch girls went out hiking in Boquete on the Pianista trail (a there and back trail) up to the continental divide and they never came back. The alarm was raised when the dog they went hiking with returned to their host family alone, a massive manhunt ensued but no trace of the girls was found. A couple of years later their backpack showed up miles off the trail in a largely uninhabited region only used by the local Ngome tribe, they have footpaths criss crossing throughout the jungle that are really easy to get lost on, even the guides won't go walking there alone. When they found the backpack it still had in it 80 dollars, their phones and a camera. The camera had a whole load of pictures of them looking happy on the trail (just like me and Amanda) followed by some pictures later that day of them looking not so happy and then no pictures for 10 days when the camera took 80 indecipherable pictures in a just couple of hours. The girls had tried to use the phones to call emergency services but to no avail as there was no signal in the jungle. Since then they have found some bone fragments belonging to the girls and a boot with a foot still in it (yuck). Having walked the trails I can see how easy it would be to become very lost and very disorientated out there in the jungle Yet Conspiracy theorists seem sure that something sinister happened to them, why would they have left the trail? Why did the camera take all the pictures 10 days later etc etc? There is a great article about it here .....
....... I am convinced they just got hopelessly lost in the jungle. What do you think?
