A man, a plan, a canal – Panama!
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On January 9th, I left my cats in the care of two nice guys from Ireland and flew to Panama City, for reasons that will become obvious in a few minutes.
Panama City consists of a bunch of new condos and businessy hotels, all conveniently located right in the middle of a slum where I was told many times not to go. At my hotel desk, they said, “You can walk to the right, but don’t turn left." I didn’t turn left.
Next day I went for a walk in the rainforest and then stopped at the Panama Canal. Panama used to be part of Columbia, until the French negotiated to build a canal there in the 1880s. Unfortunately, 22,000 French troops died of Yellow Fever before the project was scrapped. Then a Frenchman brought in the US, who finished the canal in 1915. The “man with a plan" was Teddy Roosevelt, who first wiped out the disease-carrying mosquitoes before putting Americans to work.
The canal is over 48 miles long, and about 80 feet above sea level (depending on the tides). It’s entirely run by fresh water. Each ship passage requires 100 million gallons of fresh water that comes down from the hills and gets stored in a system of dams they have set up to provide enough water during the dry season. The canal provides about 120 passages every 24 hours – that’s over 10 billion gallons of fresh water per day, dropped by clouds onto the mountains, making much of the operation “solar powered."
How does it work? Ships enter a series of locks, fresh water enters the locks and causes the ships to rise, then they pass through various canyons, some of which were blasted out of solid rock. At the other end, the fresh water is released, lowering the ship down to sea level. One interesting fact is that salt water is denser than fresh water, so the final lock is at equilibrium when the ship is about 3" above sea level. As the doors open, the ship gets a little help out to sea.
How much do you think it costs to get a cruise ship through the canal? Take a guess. Keep in mind that the trip around South America is an extra 7800 miles, and that from 1515 to 1915 there was a roadway and a system of pulled carts that moved items from one ship to another. Most modern-day cruise ships are built to the PANAMAX specifications (the largest ship the canal can handle), and the trip takes 8 hours. For a large cruise ship, the charge is around $200,000!
Click on the image and it will pop up the photo album in a new window so you can see both side-by-side.
Costa Rica
As I went through immigration and had my passport stamped, I smiled. This was my 50th country. Had I not gone to Panama first, I’d have returned to the US with only 49 countries under my belt, and that just wouldn’t do.
I met my father, Dan, at the San Jose Marriott, just in time to have a nice dinner and get to sleep by 11pm. One interesting fact about Costa Rica is that it is on the far eastern edge of the Central Time Zone. In fact, Costa Rica actually pushes the time zone eastward. Consequently, the sun rises around 5:15am and sets around 5:45pm. Everyone here wakes up very early and goes to bed early.
Here’s a great map showing the world’s time zones clearly
How did this patchwork come about? At the Washington Conference in 1884, the world decided to create the standard “time zones" we know today. But political and educational boundaries pushed these logical vertical stripes into some strange shapes. In addition, six countries have time that is 30 minutes offset from the rest of the world, and one country measures time at 5 hours and 45 minutes ahead of Greenwich Mean Time!
Quiz
Which North American time zone is 30 minutes off from standard?
Which country is 45 minutes off from standard?
(answers below)
Speaking of time, I picked up this touch-screen watch for my trip. I used the compass often, and the altimeter came in handy several times:
I like travel watches, and this is probably the best one I own (and the cheapest). If you want one, go to ebay, where you can get a good deal.
The Osa Peninsula
My father and I were interested in seeing nature, not condos. So we decided to spend most of our time on the Osa Peninsula, a half-hour airplane ride from San Jose. We arrived on the same plane, jeep, and boat as a lovely Canadian couple, Peter and Jerry. They were bird watchers, and soon we were learning to recognize the calls of blue-crested mot mots, various tanagers and ant birds, and of course the ubiquitous red-legged honeycreepers and slaty-tailed trogons. But when we saw our first chestnut-mandibled toucan, all our jaws dropped. We didn’t see many toucans on the trip, but they are magnificent birds, dressed in tuxedo black with beautiful yellow beaks.
We also saw a lot of manakins – small low-to-midstory birds that have some interesting traits. The males preside over a small area of forest that they never leave. Different species have different colored heads to attract dull-colored females, who stop by to see what they have to offer, comparing them to other local males. Because the male must be recognized to be successful, he must have a brightly plumed head. And it turns out that each color variant (white, blue, red, orange) has a head whose color reflects exactly the wavelength of light that stands out most sharply in its particular environment.
We had come to see the Corcovado reserve, one of the most important primary-forest reserves in Central America and a Unesco World Heritage Site. Since much of Central America has been logged in the past 100 years, there are few primary forests left, and the difference is striking.
In the primary forest, giant trees dominate. There are hundreds of species of trees, many of them slow growers that are quite old. One species of tree grows for one hundred years, flowers once, and then dies within a few years. Many trees have struck bargains with various species of ants, providing food and shelter in exchange for protection. Others are not so lucky – their leaves provide food for leaf-cutter ants, which can have more than a million individuals defoliating a single tree. We saw these ants marching by the tens of thousands, easy to spot by the small bits of green leaf marching vigorously alongside the trail.
In the primary forest, you never see the sun. Most species live in the canopy, from 200 to 400 feet above the ground. Walking is fairly easy, because there isn’t enough light to promote fast-growing trees or undergrowth. Giant strangler figs start as vines hanging down from a branch but soon envelop their host, coalescing into a burrito wrapper that kills the tree and leaves a 300-foot hollow giant with roots spreading for more than 40 meters along the surface. Many of these trees are 300 – 600 years old, explaining why you can’t see them in areas that have condominiums.
Most of Central America was logged and mined in the 20th century, resulting in secondary forest in most places. In the secondary forest, tall fast-growing trees can be 30 years old and near the end of their lifespans. The undergrowth is thick, providing more protection for rodents and small birds. Secondary forests are often dominated by just a few species. Contrary to the primary forest, you see the same “invader" tree species over and over again.
My father and I saw many huge trees on a ridge hike through the primary forest. This was a tough hike, with lots of vertical. My father is 72 and in excellent shape. He handled the uphill portion with ease, and after his fall the rest of the downhill was easy. The fall was very scary, particularly for me. I was walking behind him when he caught his foot on a root and toppled over. He fell onto his side, and I thought, oh, no, a hip fracture. But then he kept going, falling onto his shoulder (great, a shoulder injury), and then he pitched down a short steep embankment. He slid a few feet and did a full-tilt headplant into a log. I feared the worst – a broken neck. Before I could get to him, he stood up and said he was okay. It was a miracle. Then he put his foot on the log and showed us that the log was so rotted that it was as soft as a sponge. In fact, the rotting leaves and soft earth had cushioned his fall the entire way. Whew! After this scare, we all walked with our eyes more down than up.
This was a big day for both of us. My father became the oldest person to hike the ridge trail, and I became the guy with the oldest father to hike the ridge trail. We celebrated by sharing some icy cold soft drinks and a view of some humpback whales playing on the coast. Later that afternoon, we watched a sloth munch leaves in a tree near our room.
That evening, we went down to the beach to watch a group of volunteers release newly-hatched leatherback and green sea turtles. They let them out of the buckets and used soft red lights to guide the little flipping turtles toward the ocean, where they were swept out to sea.
The next day, we hiked into Corcovado near the beach. The southern end of the park is home to 1200 pairs of Scarlet McCaws – beautiful giant red parrots that mate for life and fly together in search of their favorite food, a wild almond. These birds fly very close to each other, often doing acrobatic stunts together. It looks like they are playing. It looks like they are in love. We saw many of them on the trees along the beach. Their numbers have recovered from the 70s and 80s, when poachers took them to sell as pets.
This was a very fruitful walk. We saw many coatimundis – diurnal raccoons that paid no attention as we watched them dig for crabs. We saw a beautiful tayra, which is a sleek black weasel relative that climbs trees and hunts for rats. We also saw a Great Curassow, an unusual large black bird with many colors.
This walk was also fruitful for the ticks in the area. I found one on my leg and managed to get it out. The next night, I found another one happily slurping blood out of my ass. The ticks are very small (about the size of the head of a pin), and this one I managed to rip off, leaving the head in my butt. I went to sleep, and the next morning I put antibiotic ointment on it so it wouldn’t get infected. I metabolized the head into my bloodstream with no ill effects (rain-forest ticks carry no human diseases).
The Bug Lady
Perhaps the coolest thing we did on the Osa Peninsula was to take a 2-hour walk with the Bug Lady. For starters, the Bug Lady is a very cute grad-student girl who’s spent much of the last five years in costa rica studying insects and their association with various indigenous cultures. And she really knows about bugs. We went on a night walk with her, and she taught us a very cool trick. If you hold your flashlight right near your eyes, you can see the eyeshine of all the creatures in the forest. So, for example, we were standing on some grass and when we held our flashlights near our eyes and looked out we were astonished to see thousands of spider eyes looking back at us. There was a spider for about every ten square inches of grass!
A spider has bright blue-green eye reflection, and they’re so small that it just looks like a bright pinpoint of light. A moth has an orange or yellow eye shine. Many birds have yellow, and most mammals have either yellow or red. (I remember driving along a mountain road once and stopped because a bear was walking across the road. He stopped and looked at me for several minutes, and in my headlights his eyes shown bright ice blue.) In fact, humans are one of the few creatures that don’t have eye-shine. Try it with your pets tonight, and remember to try it on your lawn this summer (unless you don’t want to know how many spiders are living there).
The walk was really educational. We saw a whip scorpion, which is looks like a regular spider. We saw a real scorpion, which was small by Aix-en-Provence standards. We learned that daddy longlegs have just recently been reclassified as not being spiders at all! We saw a beautiful praying mantis that had just shed its skin and was drying. It was sitting on a leaf opposite its own skin; it looked like a reflection in a mirror. We saw walking sticks and katydids that had amazing camouflage. I would be happy to go back and walk with the bug lady any time – if you go to Costa Rica, you should go to the Osa Peninsula, stay at the LaPaloma Lodge, and go on a night tour with her.
Arenal
The big show in Costa Rica started in 1968, when a large sleeping volcano suddenly woke up, creating a huge tourist attraction called the “Volcan Arenal." It’s the most active volcano in the western hemisphere – constantly burping hot molten rock out of the top and sending it crashing down the side of the cone. It’s practically always erupting, steam and gases spewing from the top and lava flowing down the side. The best time to see it is at night, when you can see red-hot rock cascading about 500 meters down from the summit. It’s dramatic, consistent, and easy to see – unless it happens to be cloudy, which is often the case. Fortunately for us, we had a crystal clear view the entire time. Like most others, we sat by the pool or in front of our little room just staring up and watching the glowing red magma, listening to the cacophonous thunder peals coming from the top. A mighty mountain indeed, and a tourist trap that has turned the cow pastures into money-making enterprises for the locals. We had budgeted an evening and a morning at Arenal, because I didn’t want to see very many tour buses on our trip. So we saw the volcano, packed our bags, and headed for more rainforests.
Monte Verde
We went to the Monte Verde area, with several interesting parks and preserves. The elevation was about 1500m above sea level. The forests and animals here may look similar to those on the coast, but in fact they are quite different. Here is where most of the world’s orchids thrive, and it’s orchids I want to talk about.
If you know me, you know I’m a student of reproductive biology. I read books like Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation. And if you’re going to study reproductive strategies, sooner or later you’re going to discover the family orchidae.
There are over 30,000 varieties of orchid in the world, and each one has a specific insect or bird – or even mammal! -- that it uses to have sex with other orchids. Even though Ecuador is the orchid capital of the world, Costa Rica has a wide variety, as we learned in a visit to the small but amazing orchid garden in Santa Elena.
I loved this garden. Our guide was a long-haired unshowered French guy, mid 20s, very enthusiastic about orchids. He loved showing us all the amazing plants they have there. He gave us magnifying glasses so we could see the world’s smallest orchid, which pretends to be a very small female fly, hoping to attract a male fly to have sex with it. He answered most of my questions about pollination (which the woman at the other orchid place couldn’t do). He showed us a flower of a species of orchid that had just bloomed, and they were all excited because they confirmed that this was a new species not documented before, and they just figured it out while we were there because the flower had just bloomed. How cool is that?
Orchids grow on six continents, in all different climates. All orchids are both male and female in every flower. Orchids use four different strategies for spreading pollen:
Nutrition. Some orchids make nectar to offer to butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, and bats. (There is a species of orchid that grows in Monte Verde that looks like it’s probably pollinated by fruit bats that it attracts to its sweet nectar, but no one has ever seen the bat do its thing. They are trying to get photos so they can be the first to publish proof of bat pollination.) The pollinator arrives for a drink, deposits the pollen it's carrying onto the orchid’s ovary, then gets covered in more pollen balls on its way out. If you think about it, the flower has to be very carefully designed to first receive pollen, then give pollen on the way out. Furthermore, the pollen must stay stuck on the insect as it flies around, then must release easily when it gets to the next flower. The orchid does this through the magic of chemical and physical mechanisms, most of which are custom-tailored to its particular insect. After the pollen has connected with the ovary, the flower is no longer useful and the plant turns its energy to making seeds.
Pseudonutrition. Who needs to go to all that trouble of making nectar when you can fool an insect into thinking there’s nectar in the bottom of your bucket? Many orchids tempt their insects with sweet smells but the insects learn too late that the well is dry. Since they provide no nutrition to the insect, we can say that the plants need the insect but the insect does not need the plant.
Pseudoantagonism. Some orchids provoke certain insects to attack their natural enemies simply by presenting a shape that looks like the enemy. The attack causes the insect to first lose its pollen load and then be covered in new pollen as it realizes the enemy was just another dumb flower. The flower must resist the shaking of the wind or being hit by a bird, but when the right insect attacks, it showers the insect with pollen.
Pseudocopulation is the specialty of many orchids. By presenting the image of a female insect on its lip, the flower entices a male to drop by for a quicky. Fantastically, many orchids actually release the exact pheromone molecules that the female insect would release, drawing the male insect from far away to copulate with a leaf in the shape of a mate. The orchid doesn’t release a pheromone-like molecule that is a general attractant. The orchid actually makes and folds the one protein whose shape fits into the receptor glands of the male -- the only possible molecule that could do the job so precisely -- and it’s a different protein for every different species of insect. Again, the orchid is totally dependent on the insect (usually a wasp or a moth in this case), but the insect, as far as we know, is not dependent on the plant.
However, there are a few orchids that make a special molecule that the male wasp, after trying to have sex with the plant, gets on him. He flies away from the plant carrying both pollen and this special “after shave" molecule, and female wasps of this species will only mate with a male who has this molecule on him. So in that way, a few species are dependent on the plant. Why this species of wasp evolved this way is still a mystery.
For all their efforts at fooling insects, these orchid strategies rarely work – only a small percentage of orchids successfully pollenate. To compensate, orchid seed pods contain over a million microscopic seeds that are dispersed on the wind. They are so light that they can easily drift to the top of the tallest trees to settle down and make a new home. And that's why you can see hundreds of orchids as you stand on one of the tourist bridges mid-canopy looking at the amazing display of life in the rainforest.
Enough of orchid reproduction. I also went on a great evening walk with a local naturalist (the night walks turned out to be some of the best activities I did). We went into the Children’s Eternal Rainforest (children from Sweden and all over the world raised the money to buy the forest permanently), and we saw tree snakes hunting, birds sleeping, a porcupine sleeping in a tree, and the biggest tarantula I’ve ever seen. It was bigger than my hand, black and orange. Once we got it out of its hole it went scuttling all over the place (it’s blind), and that was very exciting.
We spent a few days in Monte Verde and loved it. Our choice of spending most of our time on the Osa Peninsula, one night at the volcano, and two nights at Monte Verde worked out really well. We never got to see the famous resplendent quetzal bird that Monte Verde is known for, but we came back tanned, in shape, and full of stories. That’s what happens when you live the pura vida in Costa Rica.
Resources for Travelers
Book all your tours through Travel Excellence/
We stayed here:
LaPaloma Lodge
Luna Lodge
Iguana Lodge
In Arenal:
Arenal Natural Lodge
In Monte Verde
Monte Verde hotels
Establo hotel
About Orchids
Orchid basics
Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, on orchid pollination
Answers to Quiz:
Newfoundland is one hour and 30 minutes ahead of Eastern Standard time
Nepal is off GMT by 5 hours and 45 minutes
