Parque Nacional Cerro Hoya

This past week I traveled to the southern peninsula of Panama (called the Azuero Peninsula) to take a trek through low deforested plains, summit cloud forest mountains (Cerro Hoya) spot monkeys, toucans, macaws and even search for elusive jaguars.

The focus of our trip was two-fold. First, a former Peace Corps Volunteer is studying jaguars in this national park and their mating habits, so we were put together to carry cameras and place them in specific places so she could study their travel habits (unfortunately the cameras never arrived so we never carried them and never placed them, a few people are going back to Cerro Hoya next week to do that). The second portion was to help continue training the main guide that will hopefully lead some of the small pueblos surrounding the national park on how to effectively guide and work with tourists (as a major project in some small towns outside of the national park is eco-tourism).

So that is how we started and what we were doing. There ended up being 16 volunteers and one guide on the hike, which is a lot of people, too many probably, but that’s beyond the point now. We traveled to a small town called El Cortezo, Los Santos and spent the night, dividing food, talking about the hike and the risks of the hike.

The risks (we knew about):

1. Jaguars – I mean, jaguars are big scary animals that are straight up predators and pretty much own the jungle, so walking around trying to walk where jaguars walk is pretty dangerous.
2. Africanized bees – You’ve heard the scary stories about packs of wild bees that attack your orifices until you can’t breathe. yeah, that’s these bees.
3. Snakes – Snakes exist in jungles, so snake exist.

Day One:
We hiked out of El Cortezo, we left the house a little after 6 am and basically hiked up hill under a (luckily for us) cloudy sky. We climbed and arrived to the base of the national park at around noon – six hours of some of the most strenuous uphills (but we had three horses carrying a lot of our stuff).  It was a short day though, which was nice. We hiked to a small little farm at the base of the national park called Joberito. We spent the night at Joberito, the wind whipped, random cows and pigs rummaged around near our tents early in early morning hours. We woke up early, knowing the following day we would enter the national park, and meaning we would see some very beautiful jungle habitats, enter the domain of the jaguars and the natural environment which we figured out was a lot more dangerous than just bees and snakes.

This is a lot of what our first day of hiking looked like, leading up to the national park.

Day Two:

Day two we left from Joberito and worked our way into the national park. Again, we started pretty early, waking up a little after four am and getting on the road around six. We hiked for nearly ten hours this day, we arrived to our camp “Panther camp” – an area where jaguars had been sited in years past. we finished the rest of the climbing early this morning, so this day was basically spent walking along ridge lines, making new trails that will be used in future years and hikes to come. We arrived in camp with ample time to bathe, cook and set up before darkness crept up to us. The fires were made, food was being prepared and tents set up as the wind continued to whip as it had in days past (and for continuing days). Quietly at first we heard what seemed to be breaking branches but soon realised the problem was much worse. A tree at least one hundred feet tall and three-four feet wide was falling over, crashing towards the ground, and not towards our camp, but towards the river where three people were bathing. It’s hard to say what really happened next, some people screamed, the husband of one woman at the river sprinted down, one lone voice screamed. Apparently the three below had heard the tree coming and were either able to jump out of the way of falling branches or quickly dodge to the river bank and out of harms way, they were left with small cuts from some branches that fell on top of them, from diving into a very shallow river bed, but more than that, they (as well of the rest of us) were really shaken up. Never had we expected that something like this could happen, and knowing how close of the three of them were to real death, it was a little more nerve-wrecking. I don’t want to seem over or melodramatic, but to say that none of us slept well until we were under the stars on the beach, nearly three days later, without trees swaying back and forth overhead. I can still remember, clearly, and may never forget, the collective sigh when from that riverbank we heard one fellow volunteer say, “We’re fine.” Those words, they could have been something so different, and just a matter of feet, sometimes, is the difference between life and death.

Day Three:
The next day we woke up, still a little shaken up, still a little nervous to talk about wind and trees and we headed towards the summit of Cerro Hoya, I can’t remember the elevation, but it was chilly and it was full of moss growing on plants that were growing on other plants. We walked through small fields of orchids, and we ended up reaching the summit in time for lunch but had to continue because we spent a lot of time on the summit as well as looking at capuchin monkeys that we encountered on the trail. In the afternoon we began the gruelling downhill. Basically the trail was straight down hill with large rocks as foot holds (that also occasionally went sliding down towards our fellow hikers). Howls this time came in the sound of volunteers screaming “Rock!” instead of the howler monkeys we had heard in previous days. With about one hour left of our hike, our guide spotted a spotted jaguar, he said it was staring at the him/the group before showing its teeth and going the other direction. We had been following jaguars for days, seeing tracks and scat multiple times each day. Our guide, Mingo, had told us we probably wouldn’t see any jaguars, but they would definitely see us. So for an hour, he made off the collar comments about the jaguar most likely tracking us and how we needed to travel in small groups for bathroom breaks. It was hard to tell if he was joking or nervously talking, I’m assuming it was his nerves. It was a serene day of hiking, we were nervous and on edge and after sliding down mountain hills we were ready for a break. We arrived at a place sufficient to sleep, after inspecting trees (and being paranoid about them), we drank a little more of the fermented sugar cane (seco) and rum we made room for in our backs – sometimes if you are going to survive a night of wind and looming cougar doom, you need a drink or two to ease your mind.

Day Four:
The final day of the hike we continued downhill, although it seemed the most difficult downhill was behind us, from there we crossed rivers multiple times as we came closer and closer to the beach town – Cobechon – in which we were going to spend the night. The hiking ended up being nearly 8 hours, but we took a very leisure pace, as our bodies were really suffering from the weight and from the scrambling up and down unsolidified trails. (This photo is one of the last views of the Cerro Hoya which we summited the day before, as we were exiting the park.)

We exited the park, and actually outside of the park we saw some of the most spectacular wildlife of the entire trip (it is the dry season, so a lot of animals but specifically birds were in the lower ground with closer access to water). Here we saw the Azuero Parakeet, toucans and two green macaws (which are very rare in panama).
In the centre of the photo is the toucan seen just after viewing the green macaws.

This photo is a little harder to see, but there are two green macaws, their bodies are basically entirely green  and their necks, heads and tails consist of red and blue. They were truly beautiful birds, we would catch up to them on the trail and they would feed and peck at each other (macaws mate with one partner for life) and then would swoop out of the tree and watching their outstretched bodies sail, almost without flapping their wings, to the next spot to sit, relax and eat was truly unbelievable. What beautiful animals.
We camped in a small little town (not even a town just four houses on the beach) called Cobechon, the following morning we would take an hour boat ride to a small surfing village called Cambutal. This is the sunset view from Cobechon, a small and very tranquil visit, yet unfortunately without beer on our day of arrival (ugh.)

The next morning two boats showed up at eight am to take us to Cambutal, the surfing village we were going to stay in. We ended up staying at a research sea turtle station about 45 minute walk out of cambutal, it was utterly beautiful, crystal blue water, waves pounding down on the shore and a view that seemed to go on forever. We had lunch and beers in the community and continued our celebration of finishing, surviving and not having to carry anymore bags of rice or oil in our backpacks for the entirety of the evening, finishing laying out at night, watching shooting stars and hearing the waves crash on the beach. Here is a picture of a few friends and myself on the boat ride along the southern Azuero Peninsula coast, heading towards Cambutal.

It was truly a really, really awesome hike. At a lot of points we felt really remote and not ever did I feel we were in control, but instead the natural environment. Now I’m back, but not for long, I’ve got some work in site to do and then I will head off for another quick vacation to Costa Rica for about a week, rambling around, looking for kind old women to take us in, and to see not what the tourists see, but to fumble around in the dense jungles, to force nothing, but to let it all, slowly, come my way.

Lots of love from the south.