March 22, 2026
Remember all the time honored warnings your parents used to give you when you were young? “Don’t run with scissors or a knife in your hand”, “Don’t play in the street” or “Don’t talk to strangers”. Well, one of the warnings you get on cruises, when you go off on small boats for activities, is “Please keep your hands inside the boat”. Now I know why. I’ll fill you in on that in a bit.
Today was the first full day of activity since boarding the ship. We passed into the canal the previous night, an experience I’ll cover in another post. This has been a very busy trip, and it has been hard to keep up with writing new posts. Lo siento. After passing through the locks, the ship passed into Gatun Lake, which was created during the development of the canals – at the time (early 1900’s), it was the largest man-made lake. It’s still huge – check out a map of Panama and you’ll see for yourself. The boat anchored in a quiet bay, which gave us most of the day to explore along the islands and rainforest national parks around us. In the morning, I opted for a visit/hike to the Soberania National Park, which is a haven for bird watchers. We had a 30 minute ride in Pangas (small boats) to get there, which was fast and fun – you get to pass huge LNG and container ships, making their transit through the lake portion of the canal. The lake is also a tourist attraction, so their are a lot of small boats buzzing around, and this particular morning, a bunch of dragon boat teams out practicing.
There is of course history behind the big crane in one of the photos – it was purchased from Germany before WWII – it was built for maintaining U-Boats. It is sort of a museum piece, but they don’t know what to do with it. The railroad bridge we went under also has a lot of history – it crosses the main river which feeds the lake, and is part of the line which crosses coast-to-coast. When the water in the lake gets to high, even the Pangas can’t go underneath (unless everyone ducks).
We headed to Gamboa, which for a long time was a thriving town when the US owned the canal, but is now a ghost town with just few businesses keeping the lights on. But it does get some tourist traffic for the rainforest park – birders, hikers and even some cyclists. Our groups were headed first to a large observation tower where you can climb 170 or steps to an observation deck above the forest canopy. Yeah, another spiral staircase, just like the Moaning Cavern. It was fun and a good test of my heart, but we did not see much in the way of wildlife.
After descending, I opted to return back to the other attraction for the morning – a hummingbird viewing station. Now that was more like it. There are quite a few species of hummers in the rainforest, but this time of year, fewer show up at the feeders since all the plants are flowering. Too much too earth. But, a bunch of them still buzz over to the visitor center for an easy meal. It was amazing to see so many hummingbirds dividing around the feeders – there are literally swarms of hummers flying around, and they had little button feeders if you wanted to have them feed out of your hand. Which of course I did. I had two hummers and about 6 wasps on my hand. I quickly abandoned that effort. I wasted a lot of shots on the feeders, but focused on the birds when they sat in the trees. I managed to capture some incredible images, probably better than what I got from the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum last year. The hummingbird pictured below is a White Necked Jacobin. There were two other species, but I did not get any good photos of them.
That was about it for the morning excursion (that word has new meaning of late…no bombs involved). I think we were all soggy from the humidity, but it was a really beautiful and enjoyable experience in the jungle.
The afternoon off-ship activity was a bit easier on the body – boat rides around what are referred to as the Monkey Islands….for obvious reasons. There are large numbers of four different species of monkeys on the islands. Duh. The rain forests all over Panama and Central America have a variety of resident wildlife, including monkeys. When the river valley was flooded to create the Gatun Lake, all the peaks of high hills became islands, each with family groups of monkeys. There is lots to eat, so the monkeys stayed and the populations pretty much stay in their isolated world (although they do swim).
We went off on the Pangas again and just cruised close to shore, looking for movement in the trees. And there was a. Lot of that. The Mantled Howler Monkeys are the easiest to spot, and we found one family group that provided some good photo opportunities. We had seen (and heard them) in the morning – their sound was used to create the T-Rex roars in Jurassic Park. You can hear them from far away.
The next ones we spotted were these cute little monkeys (Geoffrey’s Tamarin), right along the shore. Here’s the rest of the story I teased about. The naturalist invited me up to the bow of the boat, so I could photograph the little beasties better. As I moved in, I grabbed the side of the boat, not realizing that the driver was intending to just ram the boat into the trees. My hand became a bumper between the boat and a tree. Fortunately, I screamed (more like a very loud curse) and the driver backed off before my fingers were crushed. Not much damage done – it hurt a lot, but only my little finger was bruised, and a small amount of blood from a cut. I kept on taking photographs for the monkeys…..it was worth the pain. The naturalist was more upset than I was.
We kept on cruising after that, and spotted another species of monkeys (White-Throated Capuchin Monkey) a Snail Kite that posed for us, an Anhinga drying it’s wings, a small alligator and some incredible tiny bats (cover photo).
I spent an hour or two reviewing and curating a few of the photos – I could leave today and be very satisfied with the results. High hopes for the rest of the trip. And I’ll keep my hands in the boat from now on.
Peace
The Traveling Widower 