2019/04 Panama trip - Night drive 1 |
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After dinner, our night walk turned out to be a night drive. We had our headlights on and sat in the back of the smaller birdmobile with Igua and his hand held spotlight. 
Sloths show up easily with a spotlight and we found the strap-hanging two-toed sloth just outside the gate and then another tree with both two and three toed sloths in the upper branches. Harder to see and photograph was an anteater, also in the tree tops; I’d not known that anteaters climbed trees. This one was a young tamandua.
Our driver Eduardo took us slowly down the hill. At one point he stopped and showed us the bullet ant which he’d seen drop out of the trees onto his windshield. As we’d been leaning on the cab roof a few feet behind we counted that as a lucky miss!
Down on the main road we were a hazard, with other traffic having to swerve around us, but nobody honked; the locals must be used to it. We found a cat, but a domestic cat not a jaguar. Just as well as it looked mad at being interrupted in its hunt. On our way back up the hill we caught a glimpse of an olingo, a mammal similar to an Australian possum.
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Night tour (1.23) |
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Sandie had been in pain from her legs ever since the climb at the Discovery Tower, but this night they were particularly bad. They felt freezing cold so we guessed that there was some kind of circulatory problem. Wrapping me around her legs to warm them up was ineffective. She was in so much pain that we discussed leaving the next day. With the kind of trips we do and our age, we quite expect to have to be carried out of somewhere. Maybe this was the end of our travels. But, to Sandie’s surprise, a simple pain killer was enough to take the edge off and allow her to sleep. Something else to be investigated when we got back.