Dear everyone
As you can see from the address we are still at Pedro Miguel and have decided to spend Christmas in Panama. We are leaving the boat here and going west to the mountains, where we will spend 3 nights in a hotel in the rain forest where the room rate includes guided nature walks and open air hot springs! On Christmas Day we are planning to walk the 8km “Sendero Los Quetzales”, reputedly one of Panama’s most beautiful trails, before we return to Pedro Miguel on the 26th. The 27th will see us on our way to Miami for a 3 day boat bits shopping trip. Our Christmas present to Island Way is 2 large solar panels to help keep her batteries charged up! We will spend New Year’s Eve here at Pedro Miguel Boat Club. The manager Jim and his wife Heather are Scottish and are organising a Hogmanay party complete with Scottish dancing - there was no way we could miss that! So our final emergence into the Pacific will be early in 2002 and we won’t forget to let you have the date so that you can all sit glued to your PCs and watch our progress on www.pancanal.com!!
Meanwhile we wish you all a very Happy Christmas and a terrific New Year. We thought we’d end our year of newsletters with a couple of “Christmas Stories” - the first a tale of night time adventures and wildlife encounters on Island Way and the second a tale that restores one’s faith in human nature after a year when it has been tested to the limit by events in the USA. It’s nice to be reminded that most people are fundamentally kind and honest - a truth that we encounter in every country we visit.
Much love to you all - John and Barbara
PS We are sending a separate email with some photographs. Hope they don’t cause you any problems with downloading.
About 40 minutes later B heard a slight rustle, then a thump and joyfully woke J, positive that we had caught our intruder. Armed with cullender, we went racing back to find it but there was nothing on the sticky pad and nothing anywhere else. So, back to bed, but first to the loo from which loud Barbara shrieks emerge - there's a tail sticking out from behind the shower curtain. Cullender in hand, with Barbara now standing on the loo, J squeezes in shutting the door behind him, while Barbara uses a towel to block any other potential exit routes. J sees the tail, and with one quick flourish of the cullender the creature is trapped. Success! - but what next?! Well a baking tray slid under the cullender enabled us to trap it completely and we then debated the next move. If it had swum to the boat and come aboard via the anchor chain it was no good just throwing it overboard. Neither of us had the stomach to hold it under water till it drowned - so eventually we decided to wait till morning and then take it and release it in a field by the mainland airstrip where there were no houses. We stuck a pan over the cullender with another pan of water to weigh it down (just in case it was a particularly strong rat or mouse) and at 0330 finally went back to bed! Soon after sunrise we dinghied over to the airfield. We still hadn't seen our intruder at this stage, as the holes in the cullender were too small to look through, so we took the video camera along so that we could film the release and then examine the pictures of our captive afterwards. Camera rolling, Barbara carefully opened the side of the cullender farthest from her and whipped it up in the air expecting to see a streak of grey as our captive raced to freedom. But no - as she lifted the cullender he rolled on his back, grabbed his tail in tiny human like hands and glared desperately up at us with enormous black eyes. It wasn't a rat - it looked more like a tiny bush baby! We were stunned initially and then realised that he was in agony from the brilliant sun shining straight into those enormous nocturnal eyes. We carried him into the shade and rolled him onto his feet where he recovered a little but was clearly still terrified and uncomfortable. Eventually we found a dark spot deep in the leaves of a small palm tree and there he finally calmed down and peered out at us while we took some more film of him!
Later in the morning we went to the village and showed the film to the school teacher in charge of the library. He told us our visitor was a Zarigueya - a small nocturnal marsupial that lives in the rainforest and feeds on insects, small animals and fruit. They have a long prehensile tail which they use to cling to branches and small 5 fingered hands with sticky palms to help them climb. He was the most adorable looking creature imaginable - and we were so thankful that we hadn't drowned him in the night! (Photo in the photo e-mail!)
The mystery now, which will probably never be solved, is how on earth he came to be on the boat In J's rucksack on his flight back from Panama City the day before? In the dinghy after our trip up the nearby river? Kuna children from the village playing a prank? Who knows? Needless to say, we heaved a big sigh of relief that we do not have a rat/mouse infestation!
Grace kept smiling - I know he’ll bring it back, she said. We all nodded encouragement but many of us doubted. Wednesday came and went. Grace kept smiling but was looking a little pale. She contacted the Canadian Embassy and was told that she would have to file a police report (cost $65) and then pay another $65 each for the passports to be reissued. Thursday lunchtime Grace finally gave in. She took the half hour bus ride into town to file the police report, only to be told that it couldn’t be done unless Richard was with her since his passport was also lost. She headed back to Pedro Miguel.
The smile was still there but the pressure was definitely telling. Then there was the noise of a horn outside the gate. Yes - of course - there was the taxi! The driver produced the rucksack and told her that he’d found it a few minutes after he left the club, but hadn’t thought it was anything important so he’d waited till he was back in the area before returning it! He hadn’t even opened it. The average taxi ride in Panama costs just $1 or $2. That bag could have made a big difference to his Christmas - but it didn’t. Instead it’s made a difference to all of ours. And Grace and Richard have a new friend - Luis and his family will be having dinner with them on the boat after Christmas!!
The funny thing is Grace has hardly stopped crying since she got it back!! Happy Christmas everyone!