Upon Further Inspection...

This story begins with one peaceful night in a sleepy little town called Taimati. I was relaxing in the mosquito net on my bed, having enjoyed a double feature at the local cinema (yeah, we set up a projector in the school and had a comedy and an action movie that day, both dubbed over in Spanish, for only 25 cents each, it was great) and reflecting on my life here. All of the sudden I heard a splat on the floor. I assumed that one of the two bats that is presently plaguing the kitchen at night in search of plantains had decided to relieve himself mid-flight within my room, so I slowly found my hand lamp and shined it onto my floor in search of the noise's source.

That is when I took note that indeed NOPE, NOT BAT POOP. BIG SPIDER. As it so happened a large black tarantula had fallen off something or otherwise leapt onto my floor. He froze when I shined the light on him and so I turned it off for a few minutes to listen for his movements. When I heard him creeping along the floor I turned the light back on and saw that he had relocated himself to the base of the wall. This put me in a predicament. You see I should take a moment here to explain the sanctity of a volunteer’s mosquito net. It is the only space that is truly yours. Your host family gives you a room, and when you are living alone you have your own small house, but even those areas are intruded by nature. Nothing enters my mosquito net, and if it does I swiftly hand out justice in the form of a merciless death sentence as soon as the creature appears for trial. So there I find myself, in my happy place, trying to decide if I would exit the safety of the net in order to wage half-naked war on this new-found conquistador or if I would let him go and deal with the paranoia of not knowing where he is in the morning. As you can tell this is no easy decision, so I took my time and would check back on him every minute or so in the hopes that he would raise a white flag and passively leave or set himself on fire . Either way I just wanted him gone. No, these options weren’t good enough for the tarantula as he chose to slowly creep towards my defenseless shoes. Now there is a difference between waking up the next day and not knowing whether the tarantula is in the house or outside and waking up the next day knowing the tarantula is likely within my belongings. I could NOT stand for this. I MUST defend the shoes. 

I carefully exited my mosquito net and tried to decide whether I should whack him with a Chaco, or my hiking shoes. As I weighed the two options in my hands the spider made a quick side step to show that he noticed me noticing him. That is when I decided that this was no ordinary foe. I decided to forgo the shoe and instead picked up a metal rod I had laying around for reasons such as this. I carefully lifted the rod to the heavens and lined up my shot. I delivered swift justice on the intruder and smote him in the helm which gave way to a simultaneously satisfying and unnerving crunch/squish. I had won a victory worthy of the fables! All I was missing was a distressed princess. Now for the matter of body disposal, it was far too late to have a proper funeral pyre so I figured I would sweep him out of the house so the ants would not invade next, but as I pushed him out of my room the two bats in the kitchen started swooping down at my headlamp! I decided this was quite enough and I would just leave the tarantula’s remains in the kitchen as a sacrifice to satiate the blood thirst of the bats. (Notably we did finish sweeping him out in the morning). I returned to the safety of my bed and rested the night away.

You may be wondering why this blog post continues here, but it does. I woke up the next morning and had breakfast all business as usual. I relaxed a little while before deciding that I would try to go visit Matt in Cemaco. I was leaving the house when I thought “I should get my camera to take some photos of Cemaco and maybe some butterflies or something along the way,” so I returned to grab that and then was on my way. As I started down the trail I saw about 2’ of a 4’ snake laying across the trail. I recognized the pattern as a type of rat snake they have down here so I was not too afraid, but he had apparently heard of my recent vanquishing of the mighty black tarantula because he slithered off into the bush fairly quickly, never looking back.

I continued on the path and everything was status quo, a little muddy in parts but otherwise normal. I had come to a tiny concrete bridge that is within 10 minutes of Cemaco when I looked up ahead on the trail and saw a dog walking around. I was hoping he wouldn’t try to get angry as I passed him but I did notice that he was a little strange looking from a distance. “Mange?” I wondered as I looked up to inspect him still from a safe distance. NOPE, NOT A DOG. LEOPARD! Holy Moly! There I was on the trail between our two little towns all alone and probably 25 yards away is a leopard. That is when I learned that the jungle may be hot, and it may be humid, but it is still very possible to get goose bumps. I ran through every survival show that I had ever seen in my head to think of what to do, but luckily it had not noticed me. I quietly took out my camera (SO happy I decided to take it that time) and snapped a photo from far away.

It is kind of far away in the photo.

 

This zoom version you can see his spots on his shoulders!

The photo may not be the best quality, but you come across a leopard in the jungle alone with only a camera and your clothes and see how close you get. From his relaxed disposition I decided to act under the presumption that this leopard had not heard of my victory against the tarantula or that if he had it left him unimpressed, so I took care to quietly back away without being noticed and get back to Taimati. There I shared the story with people who mostly did not believe it until I showed them the photo. So the moral of this story kids is that you should always double check things! That bat poop might actually be a terrifying tarantula, and the dog…well most likely it would still be a dog just statistically speaking….but it could be leopard! 

   

P.S. Thank you God for both delivering me safely back to Taimati and for giving me the opportunity to see such an incredibly beautiful and rare animal in its natural habitat.

Visitors!

I had my first site visitors! Their name's were Aja and Alex, both girls that live in other areas of the Darien. Aja lives in Meteti (the regoinal "hub" if you choose to call it that) and teaches English while Alex is a Sustainable Agriculture Systems volunteer that lives in a small community of roughly 80 people.

We met up at the bus terminal in Meteti around 6 a.m. to take a chiva (small van thing in this case) to Puerto Quimba. I should just mention in advance that arriving into Taimati almost never goes smoothly. We were to wait in Puerto Quimba for the boat which I hoped would just show up on time and smoothly take us straight to site, but as we waited some people that worked around there found us and said "Are you the gringos going to Taimati?" (in Spanish of course) which we confirmed for them. They let us know that the boat would not be coming here today and that they were in Las Palmas waiting for us because they had some motor trouble...of course. We took the next boat out to Las Palmas which was simple enough and went smoothly. Once there we came across some of the Taimati people, not particularly tricky since there is only one road in Las Palmas, and they informed us that we would be leaving around 2 p.m. This gave us about 6 hours to ponder the deeper mysteries of life for instance: how do so many taxi drivers make a living in a town with only one road...seriously there are several taxis there and it doesn't take that long to walk anywhere on the single road. Luckily waits are always nicer when you have friends around to pass the time with.

As fate would have it 2 p.m. came and went and we were still in Las Palmas. The motor had been fixed but from what I could pick up we were waiting around now because the sun was hot. Albeit the sun WAS hot, but in a site where arrival depends strongly on the tides the temperature should not be causing delay. Closer to 3 p.m. was our actual leave time. We had a small motor and were burdened with many goods so it took a decent amount of time to get into site, and when we finally got there....well we didn't quite get there... instead we hit ground about a quarter mile out. This had happened before but the other time we were on the incoming tide so we waited and came in with the tide. This time we were on an outgoing tide, so the best option was to abandon ship and walk ourselves and luggage into town through the mud. We made it and in high enough spirits just in time to watch a beautiful sunset from the beach.

We spent the next two days hanging out in Taimati and Matt's neighbor site of Cemaco just passing time, talking with the people, and having fun. We had a rousing game of PIG on the basketball court wherein I held a commanding lead until the girls realized they could take easy shots and just incorporate short dance moves just before the shot to force me to mimic them. This made me lose both the game, and probably a small amount of respect in the passing men's eyes.

The final night we all spent in Cemaco with Matt and his host family and the girls left early that morning to go to another site to attend the anniversary of the Comarca Embera-Woonan (Embera-Woonan being the names of two indigenous peoples and Comarca denoting a large parcel of land like a reservation). That is what brought them through our sites in the first place, a desire to visit a few sites on their way to this anniversary. Matt and I also wanted to attend this anniversary as a cultural event, but the main office sent us a message to say that we were not allowed and would "receive a stern talking to" if we did go. Trying to stay off the office-trouble-radar we of course stayed home.

It was a lot of fun to have visitors. I look forward to whoever may get the chance to visit me in the future and to the other sites I will get the chance to explore.

Picture Time

I thought since most of my blog posts are all words I like to sit back and let the pictures do the talking sometimes, well...the pictures and their captions.

An anteater that came to visit out of the jungle (the defensive posture is because the teen boys were being exceptionally mean).

Can you spot the blue morpho? Hint: it's on the tree! The blue is on the top side of it's wings. They are really beautiful as they flutter through the jungle.

Some type of freakishly large moth that had a weird ridge on its back.

The snake from the last post. It crawled from the candy shelves down into a bag before we took it outside.

The host family bird. We had a shaky relationship at first but we are best friends now, no more biting!

Really cool lizards we have running around town.

Kuka-Leka that were mentioned in a previous post.

Leaf cutter ants with a local house in the background.

Little beach crab building his home.

Pickle in Peligro

For those of you non-Spanish speakers, peligro means danger.

There was one morning when I was eating breakfast and everything was business as usual until a Senafront police guy came in (he was staying with us at the time because he is family) saying that they had a dead guy and they needed help. He changed from his street clothes into his camo, grabbed his guns and ran back out of the house. I finished my breakfast and decided to see what all this hullabaloo was about. As I stepped outside there was a helicopter coming in to land on our soccer field and a lot of other Seanfront police agents running up to the field. The helicopter filled with the police and immediately took off before a second one showed up to take the remaining Senafront guys.

Start the engines of the bochinche (gossip) train! There were many varying stories of what exactly happened, but from what I can gather a local family owns a farm a few hours distance out into the mountains. This family had a distant family member hanging out in the farm and was in coherts with some Columbians that were not selling sugar or salt. The Senafront guys got word of this and raided this farm. Some shooting happened and some bad guys died. Later that evening I called the duty phone to let them know what was going on, but that I was totally OK and everything in Taimati was pretty chill besides the evacuation of the Senafront guys to go help the raid. It was an interesting reminder that I am definitely not in Kansas anymore. Well, that and the snakes and spiders... they remind me too.

Snake we found inside the house once!

A beautiful butterfly, to remember that not everything is scary down here.