Wildcat!

Happy Easter from Panama! We´ve covered a fair bit of ground over the past eight days, from a tent camp in the jungle on Costa Rica´s Osa Peninsula to a cabin in a cloud forest and a cottage in the western highlands of Panama. And today, we arrived in the Bocas del Toro archipelago on the Caribbean side of Panama.

It´s been an exhilarating week, starting with our three-night stay at the Corcovado Lodge Tent Camp on Costa Rica´s Osa Peninsula. The lodge deserves its own blog post, so I´ll write about Panama in a second post (with pictures, hopefully).

After telling everyone we were going to rough it in the Osa Peninsula´s Corcovado National Park (where we´d have to cross a river at low tide to avoid the hungry hammerhead sharks and vicious crocodiles and where voracious peccaries could rip us to shreds if we didn´t climb snake-infested trees), we felt a wee bit sheepish when we arrived at the tent camp and were promptly treated to plantain ceviche and coconut ice cream.

OK, so we didn´t really rough it and we didn´t hike through the whole park - fully booked by the time we called in our reservations - but we still hiked a fair bit, saw plenty of birds and wildlife and had a great three-night stay on the park border between the jungle and the crashing waves of the Pacific. The tent camp, a half-hour walk down a pristine beach from the airstrip, consists of 16 fairly comfortable but basic blue-tarp tents on wooden platforms overlooking the ocean, and much bigger thatched-roof huts housing the dining, bathroom and bar facilities.

Even before our four-seater landed on a gravel runway by the beach, two scarlet macaws seemed to welcome us by flying in tandem formation below the plane. And once at the camp, a hike up into part of the jungle revealed racoon-like coatamundis, tons of spider monkeys and bright green poison-dart frogs.

None of which, however, can compare to the puma we saw sauntering across the trail in front of us while on a guided hike through part of the national park. With our guide´s help, we were able to spot the puma again, hiding from us in some undergrowth only 25 feet from the trail. It gave me the shivers to train the binoculars on the vegetation and see the cat staring straight back at me. We wisely kept our distance but were never threatened, and you could almost see the exasperated look on the cat´s face: "When will you people ever leave?"

Actually, the only potential danger we faced during our stay, apart from possibly melting from the humidity or over-indulging in rum with fresh pineapple juice, was when we inadvertently interrupted a troop of white-faced capuchin monkeys. As we approached them on the trail, they scrambled down to overhanging vines, bared their sharp-looking teeth and assumed an aggressive "None shall pass!" posture.

A standoff ensued. Or rather, they glared at us and we meekly backed away and sat down. When it became clear they weren´t about to let us by, we detoured down to the beach and passed them without incident.

The park, which now encompasses a former banana plantation and an abandoned gold mining community, features a few odd sights like an overgrown miners´ cemetery and a rusting shipwreck on the beach. Otherwise, the jungle has rebounded nicely, with an amazing variety of trees, plants, birds and wildlife. And every night, the sunset over the park´s sea of green seemed determined to outdo its previous effort.

Admittedly, we saw no sharks, crocodiles, or even any snakes. But it was a great adventure just the same.