Heart of Darkness

OK, maybe that title's a bit of an exagerration, but my first trip into the jungle, to take pictures of the vegetation, was still an eye opening experience. One day while I was still sick, Ben left me alone on the island for a few hours with very little food or water, and no insect repellent, probably hoping i would die. Although i needed a great deal of water due to being sick i wished more for insect repellent. I didn't have a problem with any ticks or large flying insects, but these sneaky little no-see-um type insects ate me up. Returning home i had dozens of bites on each of my appendages.


Although the rocky sunset picture is getting a lot of attention, this is my personal favorite from the trip. It looks great at a large size.

Inside the jungle it is ungodly humid, and I sweated more on that island than anywhere I’ve ever been. My equipment kept sliding out of my hands because I was sweating so much. There are insects crawling around on almost everything. You don’t really notice it until you stop and try to find somewhere to sit or kneel (as i often was doing) while you rummage around in a pack. Then you see huge frightening spiders wearing gloves, cute leaf cutter ants, and everything in between. I was reminded of Survivorman (the Costa Rica episode). It's pretty much exactly like that, except Costa Rica is a bit drier with the appearance of cacti as part of the flora. What i remembered about that particular episode, was how Les seemed close to freaking out once he saw how the the whole ground started crawling around at night. After that he moved to the beach.



As the days went by, the weather was almost too good. Ben got obsessed with sunset pictures, for which you need at least a few clouds. Each day we stayed on the island until shortly after the sun was gone so we could be sure not to miss a good sunset image.



One of those evenings, about 15 minutes after sunset, Ben had been boating at a high speed through some rather rough seas for the size of his boat. I didn’t like it because the last time I had been in that exact type of situation I ended up with two broken teeth (during a violent thunderstorm in a canyon of Lake Powell). At some point Jerrod exclaimed that there was an awful lot of water in the back of the boat. I turned around to see every single item behind me floating as if in a bathtub. Ben immediately cut the power, which caused a big wave to wash all those floating objects forward to the front of the boat, knocking against everything. As the wave settled the boat suddenlylooked halfway underwater. We even had to turn the engine off because it was mostly submerged. Acting very quickly, Jarrod emptied out some small coolers and began furiously bailing. I looked around. It was getting dark at this point. The rolling waves were half black, their shoulders midnight blue with highlights of peach and vermilion flickering across their crests as they rolled by.



The boat had a swimming pool of sloshing water in it. Water was threatening to come over the back. Although Jerrod was bailing very quickly, it was still taking an impossibly long time for the water level to go down. I began eyeballing the uninhabited islands that were nearby, stars appearing over the trees. I was seriously frightened for a minute or two, but then it hit me that I was not on a sinking boat in Alaska, where I would surely die. No, I was “luckily” on a sinking boat next to the equator, and even if I was too weak to swim half a mile to the nearest island I could float around in a life jacket all night and not get hypothermia. Whew! I felt so much better after that revelation.


One of the nearby islands with a very nice beach.


As you move in from the beach the trees grow horizontally towards the sea and sun. Some of the branches were half buried in the sand.

From there the trees change to a more vertical orientation and you come across a variety of palms.

The engine no longer wanted to run, but by moving slowly, and with frequent breaks for bailing to keep the engine above the water, we eventually made it to the dock under the cover of darkness (there were no lights on the boat). After showering and some dinner we returned to the dock to try and figure out what the problem was. Ben claimed he just had a poor bilge pump, but every one's got a bad bilge pump and I’d never seen so much water accumulate so continuously in a boat.




Once deeper inside the palm type plants disappear and a high jungle canopy emerges with old growth prehistoric looking trees.

The hosts of the lodge came down to offer assistance and in a little time it seemed clear that the water was coming from inside the hull. The boat was indeed sinking and needed to be removed from the water. We all walked up the dock then down to the pebble beach, and dragged Ben’s boat out of the water. I couldn't help notice how, even as they waded out into the ocean with flashlights, the number of stars in the sky was astounding for a place so humid.

Since it was low tide Ben and Jerrod had to take turns waking up every hour to go down and pull the boat farther on shore. The next morning we took it to a nearby mechanic. Once out of the water it was easy to see that the hull was cracked. From that point on we had to rely entirely on Cesar for our transportation. Cesar is the son of one of the local lodge owners. He grew up in Bermuda, went to college in Florida and is now living a pretty alternative lifestyle as a young man in the back country of Panama. He had a nice boat and if just dropping us off for an hour at at time he spent his time offshore fishing. As you can see below it was pretty roomy.

In addition to sunset pictures, Ben wanted some pictures of the Howler Monkeys that live on Palenque. I wanted to see some too, and even though we could hear them we didn't have any luck actually finding any until the end of the very last day. We spent quite some time looking for them in the high forest but the ones we eventually found were far out on a peninsula ridge top above the beach.



Some of these monkeys may have had no human contact until a few months ago. They were very upset about our presence and began aggressive posturing and howling. Silly monkeys, we weren't scared at all, and that fact deeply disturbed them. Although we never acted the least bit aggressive or antagonistic, they were visibly worried and became shy, climbing higher into the trees.







We were on a newly cut trail on a narrow high ridge, and the tree they were in was rooted on the side of the steep hill. Although this made it easier for us to see into the higher branches of the tree, it also meant i was limited to moving just forward or backward a few feet on the trail. Every time i got a view of them they would try to move behind something else so i couldn't see them directly.

We found them so late in the day that, like everything else, i had very little time, to try and get a shot before Jerrod made us head back to the boat to leave. It was very cool though, especially since we saw a baby monkey with it's mother. Also, although it doesn't show in the pictures, they were situated on a hill right over the beach. They had a great view of the ocean from where they were, and it was fun to imagine that they might sometimes venture down to the water.


The monkeys were on that distant ridge at the far left.

Palenque was a great adventure for me. I'm grateful for the opportunity to have been a tiny part of it. It's the closest to the equator i've ever been, the first time i've seen wild monkeys up close, the first time i've been in a country whose residents consider themselves closer to being Brazilian in culture than Latin American. In the coming years a world class resort will slowly take shape on the island and i look forward to going back sometime when it it completed.

The developer, Amble, has grand plans for the island. You can find far more details about the resort and the islands wildlife, history and the area in general at The Resort at Isla Palenque.


For me, this was the end of a wild adventure, but for Ben, Gerrod and Cesar it was just the end of a typical day of work.

Isla Palenque

Palenque is over 200 miles from Panama City. The island at over 400 acres has 5 miles of shoreline and 3 beaches. It has a variety of terrain, with a lot of nice equatorial jungle canopy, palm groves, brine swamps, a few large hills and some kind of open grassland from some small farms that happened years ago. People lived on it in Pre-Columbian times and possibly even earlier than that. Today, the island supports a rich array of wildlife in the surrounding ocean as well as on land, including monkeys and jungle cats.


In this image we are flying towards Palenque over the small island at the far right in the next photo. However, this image was taken earlier in the morning.

The Northwest area of the country is already a popular tourist destination for the Panamanians. The coastline explodes into an archipelago of small tropical islands with beautiful beaches. From those islands one can look back toward land and see high mountains obscured by clouds in the distance. Often times sweating in the boat, i would gaze up at those mountains and wish i was there instead. I found that surprising. There i was, in a tropical paradise, wishing i could go up into the cold mountains, where you could die from hypothermia. Ahh that would be great. I guess Alaska has definitely changed my tolerances over the years, especially considering that i grew up in a climate not too far removed from tropical.


You can see half of Panama from this altitude. Palenque is in the center. In the distance high volcanoes that make up the spine of the country are hidden in clouds.


And in this image we are looking back at that smaller island at the far right in the photo above. Additionally, this is the same beach pictured in the title photo. The rocks in the bottom of this photo are the ones that stretch out into the water in the center of the first picture. The water level is different in the two images. Confused yet?

One day we did visit the mountains, very briefly. We drove up to Boquete, a mountain town (only about 35 miles from Costa Rica) famous for it's coffee. During the drive up we went through a very gradual rise, across flat expansive fields of high grass with black stone walls.

Boquete is famous for it's nice climate, and it's coffee. This windy hilltop was the first time i'd felt comfortable in a week.

Homes on the road up into the mountains. Notice the variety of coloring in the foliage.

Yo, this is the river. It runs down from the mountains and destroys all the bridges so you have to go a different way. I mean, it REALLY destroys the bridges. The cliff on the right side was hexagonal basalt. I like this river. It's angry but not so big in the dry season.

At some point i put everything together and realized that the entire region was created through volcanics. The islands out in the ocean appeared be be volcanic rock, possibly remnants of old flows from the land (although i did find some old pillow lava, created underwater). The large fields were from a massive flow pouring from the higher summits, and the cliffs around Boquete were also basalt. It's no coincidence that above Boquete is the highest point in Panama, Volcan Baru. From the dormant volcano's summit it is possible to see both the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea. That's pretty cool.

Two of the many other islands. This one had cool wind blown trees on it with underlying rock that was volcanic in origin.

Ben is briefing the engineers on how the marina must be made of solid gold. I could tell they were good engineers when one of them mentioned that simply gold plating the shells of a bunch of tied together sea turtles would be cheaper, as sea turtles are a renewable resource.


The morning view from our breakfast table. You can see the long dock in the middle. We arrived and left at the long dock and had to walk up the steep hillside to get to the lodge. If you forgot something it sucked. But it's a nice view!

The view in the evening. This must have been while the engineers were visiting because after that we never got back until well after sunset.

I should mention that while i was in Panama i was terribly ill until the last day of the trip. I somehow manage to get sick every time i go to the tropics, but this time i managed to catch something on the flight from Seattle to Houston. By dinner of my first day in the city, i knew i was already screwed. I ended up with one of the worst colds i've ever had. The fact that it was actually making me nauseous and unable to eat, and causing cold sweats with goosebumps in the middle of the jungle, makes me think i either had a cold and then also came down with some other typical tropical illness, or i was the first person from the US to get swine flu. My first two days of going out to the island i was in the deepest part of this sickness. Fortunately we were spending most of our time on those days boating around with some engineers who were looking at the possible locations for a marina on the island.


A river delta that has formed in a sandbar, temporarily connecting Palenque to a larger island next to it. A large tropical storm could eradicate the area on the right.

I learned that Palenque was not entirely uninhabited. On one side of the island lives an old man and his wife. Menique has lived on the island since his youth, when he arrived to work as a servant for an old woman named Catalina. Menique was now something like 60 years old, but he's as badass as Charles Bronson.


Looks to me like a nice place to hang out. If there was a resort here, people would probably come.


Looking the other direction the beach continues on for a long distance after this rocky outcrop. We were at this beach nearly every day, as there was a work camp in the jungle here. Notice that some trees still lose their leaves in winter, even at the equator.

On the other side of the tree close to sunset. Cesar waits for us in the boat.

He lives in a kind of a shack house and I don't think that he can read or write, and is also uneducated about the outside world. If you showed him a computer he would have absolutely no idea what is, but he can survive on that island no problem. He fishes, grows a few crops and kills feral pigs which he then hangs up, skins, and eats. One day not so long ago he decided he needed a wife, so he got into his boat and went off to some town where he visited the bar. He returned soon after with a 30 year old wife. I'm telling you, he is badass.




Dozens of the islands in the archipelago are reachable by boat from Palenque.

A high tide island.

A big tree that hung off the cliffs on the beach. It hinted at what was in the jungle.

Although a resort is to be built on the island, part of the agreement on the use of the land was to allow Menique and his family to continue to live as they do. It is all they've ever known. Ben pays him to look over the crews of workers that were, at the time i was there, clearing out trails across the island. Apparently people listen to him. Maybe he threatens to cut their throats.

This was the smallest helicopter i've ever been in. I loved it. It was very maneuverable and light.

I almost forgot. The first photo on this page is an entry in the World in Focus photo contest. It's already in the top ten of the Peoples Choice contest, so if you feel like it head on over and vote. If i win that portion of the contest, i'll get a small.... Duffle Bag!!! You know how hard those are to come by????

Palenque has nice sunsets. The end of a days work.

Next time we head into the jungle....

Panama

As one flies into Panama City, one is struck by the skyline. Far removed from other Latin American cities that i've seen, Panama's is littered with tall, densely packed skyscrapers more reminiscent of the larger coastal cities of Brazil. Floating offshore from this skyline is a huge armada of large ships, anchored and waiting sometimes up to a month for their turn to pass through the Panama Canal. From the air the scene gives off the impression of a world class metropolis. Indeed, it already ranks number 57 in the world based on the number of completed high rises and it seems like half the skyline is currently still under construction. On the ground the city is more mundane. The skyscrapers look shoddily constructed, and stand incredibly close to one another, sometimes so close that a resident of one building might be able to pass something by hand to a resident in a neighboring building.




A great number of these buildings are under construction.

I had the opportunity to go to Panama to do some work for a friend, taking pictures of an island that is the location of a soon to be built eco-resort. We stayed in an old historic area of the city that was half in ruins. Casco Viejo (also called San Felipe or Casco Antiguo) has been designated a Unesco World Heritage Site. At this point many buildings are mere shells with nothing beyond the outer facade, but a few residents remain in old decrepit structures. New reconstruction going on all over the neighborhood, with nice results on finished streets. The presidential palace is also in the neighborhood.






This old church tower was on the opposite of a public square from where i was staying, so i saw it a lot.


These clam shells were used on several old buildings and might have looked pretty neat in the sun when they still had their silver lining.


Much of Casco Viejo consists of colonial ruins, like these, which were literally the back half of our apartment building.




Some buildings are still lived in.

Walking around I was at first put off by the plentiful, machine gun toting police/soldiers that stand at every other corner, but after I saw the alternative, I began to appreciate their presence. Only a few blocks from the area where it’s safe to walk around is the most desperate urban slum I’ve ever personally seen. The people of El Chorrillo live in extreme poverty, and just driving through it was a surreal experience, especially at night when it was jam packed full of people. I sat next to a man on my return flight who told me the first time he had gone into that area, to take pictures, he had been choked into unconsciousness by muggers and was woken up by a guard, who admonished him for being in the area. I'd have to agree with the guard, it's not sensible to go there. During the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, much of the Chorrillo neighborhood, which had been old wooden buildings from the 1900's burned to the ground and were eventually replaced with concrete buildings.

Pictures taken out the car window in El Chorrillo. Other images of El Chorillo can be found here.

Panama is going though a growth boom. As such, a lot of crazy stuff is happening. During one meeting I had to attend, a group of scumbag lawyers groveled for an hour in front of us, nervous and paranoid although dressed to the hilt in expensive Panamanian suits. One of the things they were worried about was that they suspected an old uneducated woman whom they had been stealing money from had been kidnapped by a rival lawyer. As the topics moved on another lawyer in the group mentioned how he had corrupt government contacts who could help us smuggle gold artifacts off of a valuable archaeological site. I couldn't believe what i was hearing. During this long conversation in a public square, an African man walked up and introduced himself as someone my associate knew. He boldly warned us not to trust the lawyers, who laughed nervously and looked side to side, literally. The African then went to another table where he produced a photographer who began to make a visual record of our meeting.

Eventually the lawyers left, and were immediately replaced by the African, accompanied by a Swiss man, who was supposedly acting as an interpreter for the African. Though he claimed not to be able to speak English well, the reactions of his face to our words spoke otherwise. Who and what this guy claimed to be is irrelevant. What he was in reality was a kind of Nigerian con artist who was pretty straightforward about threatening us with extortion. Eventually we walked away from the meeting through several streets and took a cab to the other side of the city, in order to meet more pleasant company and discuss what had happened.

This place had really good sorbet/ice cream. These were all flavors of tropical fruits.

My friend Ben had us on a tight schedule, so i was only in the city briefly for two evenings (never even going downtown), but one thing we did manage to do was to go to an old palace that had been bombed during the 1989 invasion. It sits on the coast and is battered by waves. We didn't know at the time that it was a major scene in the movie Quantum of Solace. In retrospect, that explains some of the strange things we noticed while looking around, especially the fact that it was remarkable clean on the upper floors. One staircase had weird foamy pads on each stair, something i thought was extremely weird and couldn't explain. It actually made walking up or down the stairs more difficult.




We were able to find a way in from underneath. We had to walk through a dark and0 stinky drug addict area to get up to the main floors.

Two months later i saw the movie (which wasn't very good) and was glued to the screen when i saw the scene using the palace. It's a scene outside at night with "party" lights all over the place and a kind of dance going on, if i remember correctly. They used the location really well, and all of a sudden everything made sense when i saw Bond or someone take a fall down those very stairs. Also, upstairs we were shocked at the extremely shoddy construction of some of the stone railing. At the time i was wondering if that's how palaces are built in a third world country. The movie explained that too, when i saw someones head get smashed into that railing, cracking it or something. In hindsight our confusion was funny.


The main patio, with the skate rail. Right behind both sides of me was the ocean with the distant skyline. A very cool location to skate.


The main floor was a major skating hangout. The kids had improvised some kind of skateboard vehicle with an old workbench.


This rail, and all the rails up here excepting the outside ones, were movie props. They looked great but were actually hollow wire mesh.

The building is very intriguing as you see it walking down the street but maybe looks a little intimidating because there are a bunch of "no good" (by definition) teenage skateboarders in side, totally unsupervised and very devoted to the task of being teenagers. Additionally, there is no way to get in from the front, except by going down to a small beach, standing on top of an upright board and hoisting yourself up into a dark opening in the wall. Although i saw plenty of "no-good" teenagers popping out of that hole, Ben claimed it was physically impossible to go the opposite direction, so we had to find another way. Walking around to the back side we found a large, much easier opening underneath by the waves. That lower area is no place to hang out, unless you like heroin, and for-real no-gooders. One guy that looked like drug addicted former pirate wanted to know what we were doing in his house. He spoke english and sounded American. Maybe a leftover from the invasion. Maybe he was the guy who bombed it originally, so he felt it was "his" house.

Upstairs though, were lots of children and teenagers having fun. That's right, first floor: darkness and drug addicts, second floor: children and entertainment. Somehow someone had put in a skate rail, and the older kids were making good use of it. If i could have spoken to them conditions were right to get a cool picture of one of them flying through the air in a dramatic pose over the the ocean and the skyline in the background. Could have been a very cool looking skater shot but they looked like they would have preferred that we not be there at all, which seemed like a natural reaction to me. The children though, were excited to have some weird looking people stop by. They started showing off their improvised skateboard vehicle they had engineered. A few of them followed us around as we explored the upper levels.


These two kids in particular were pretty excited about us being there and started following us around. We couldn't talk to each other but when i showed them what their picture looked like they were thrilled and began to strike poses.

I didn't actually get to do much in Panama City. It may seem like a vacation, but we had actual work to do, and our busy schedule allowed for only two evenings in the city. Unfortunately i never even had the time to go look downtown where all those high rises were. I did however, drink the best mojito i've ever had, with real sugarcane.




Really a nice view upstairs before it was bombed.