Our day of Savegre Valley bird photography had two main parts. First we would do some hummingbird photography at a nearby garden, and in the afternoon we would stake out a wild avocado tree hoping to see the resplendant quetzal. The days started beside the Savegre River, where the sound of water rushing over rocks […]
An 8 a.m. start almost felt like a sleep-in. The goal for today was bird photography at San Gerardo de Dota, specifically, the Batsu Gardens in the Savegre Valley. Breakfast was pretty underwhelming, although maybe that was because we couldn’t stop thinking about the Denny’s next door. It was kind of funny when another hotel […]
We woke to rain on our final morning. We’d lucked out with weather and this was actually the first rain during our entire stay. The rain stopped just as we walked up to the restaurant for breakfast, which felt like polite timing from the weather gods. Today was all about getting from Bocas del Toro […]
The plan for our final full day at Tranquilo Bay Nature Lodge was an excursion through the Changuinola Canal in Bocas del Toro. The canal winds through mangroves, wetlands, and lowland rainforest, forming a quiet waterway that links remote forest habitats with Panama’s Caribbean coast. The region itself grew during the early twentieth-century banana boom, […]
After the long day on the mainland, today was supposed to be slower. For birding, that means breakfast at 6:30 instead of 5am. I would have been happy watching the capuchin monkeys in the trees around the lodge, but there were birds to see so it was back to the dock. The water that morning […]
The plan for our birding day trip from Bocas del Toro, as it had been explained to us the night before, was fairly loose. We would take a boat to the mainland and spend the day moving through several different ecosystems in search of birds. Breakfast was at 5:30 a.m., which meant the lodge was […]
For our final morning at the Canopy Tower, we returned to Pipeline Road. This time, though, the plan involved climbing an observation tower to view the rainforest canopy. The climb itself turned out to be easier than I expected. The tower swayed a little in the wind, which felt mildly unsettling, but not enough to […]
We woke to the sound of heavy rain. Not the brief tropical kind that blows through in twenty minutes, but the sort of steady downpour that settles over the rainforest and refuses to leave. Water hammered the roof hard enough that spending the morning in the open-backed birdmobile sounded considerably less adventurous than it had […]
Our transition from Antarctica to the Canopy Tower started with almost no sleep in Buenos Aires, followed by an email from Avianca informing us that our connecting flight had been cancelled. The replacement itinerary helpfully rebooked us for December 3. But it was November 29. Were we about to embark on an unplanned trip to […]
From our position in Charlotte Bay, the journey back to Ushuaia would take a little more than two days. The first day delivered the version of the Drake Passage people love talking about: the Drake Lake. Calm seas, gentle movement, and enough stability to spend time wandering the ship without bracing yourself against walls. The […]