Panama’s Soberanía National Park, Bird Dorks, And The Man Who Had Nothing

GAMBOA, Panama- Gamboa is located at the end of the road, right on the continental divide, along the banks of the Chagres River near the point where it feeds into the man-made Gatun Lake, which is the primary water source and thoroughfare of the Panama Canal. In other words, it is at the crossroads of continents, waterways, and development — a place where species from north and south converge in the middle and bespectacled dorks with binoculars and ultra-long telephoto lenses come to gawk at birds, monkeys, and anything else that flies, creeps, or slithers.

In other words, if you want to look at some wildlife in Panama, come here.

I was originally in Gamboa to get a taste of Canal Zone history. The town was once the site of a booming transplanted American community who brought all aspects of small town Americana with them. For 57 years there were American schools and American churches and American little league … and then one day it was gone.

Gamboa probably would have went the way of many other Canal Zone towns and gotten eaten up by the surrounding forest if it wasn’t for the canal’s dredging division remaining there.

As it’s located at the end of the road, Gamboa is literally the place where development ends and the forest begins. It is also where the ecosystems of North and South America converge and is considered a vital biological corridor where crocodiles and iguanas, monkeys and hundreds of species of birds gather and do their respective things.

For this reason, the 20,000 hectare Soberania National Park was created here in 1980 and later on the Smithsonian established a tropical research institute … and now troops of college kids with big rubber boots are tramping through the forest taking samples of microbes and bugs and rescuing amphibians.

I walked through the town of Gamboa along a narrow paved road that petered out into a gravel path and then turned onto an old access corridor called Pipeline Road. It’s basically a hiking trail today, and is widely considered to be one of the best birding trails in all of Central America — and is therefore intermittently speckled with khaki clad birdwatchers checking boxes off their lists.

While I wasn’t really equipped or inclined to do any birdwatching, I did enjoy the walk. Howler monkeys bounded between crackling limbs hooting at me and birds squawked from the canopy above. The hot sun shone down through the leaves in speckles … creating a nice shady walk of the kind that would have been literally impossible to report any hardships about. I leisurely made my way up a slightly inclined hill and simply dug how ideal everything was …

I then came to a fork in the road with a visitors center in the middle and figured I’d take a break, eat some Greek yogurt and fruit that I had packed in, and figure out where to go next.

As I walked by the front of the visitor’s center, which was actually kind of like a hot dog vendor stand made of plank board, I was welcomed by a young dude chilling behind some stacks of maps and brochures.

“Would you like me to tell you about the park?”

“Sure.”

He then broke out a map and showed me this loop trail that went into the forest, stopped at a lookout tower, and then swung by the banks of Gatun Lake. It seemed cool and I said that I was interested.

“Ok, for foreigners it costs $30 to enter.”

I couldn’t hold back a laugh. “So, what you’re telling me is that it costs $30 per person to walk down a trail and climb up a ladder?”

Traveling in Panama is relatively affordable, but tourism is incredibly — no, ridiculously — expensive. It’s almost as if the prices for tourist activities here are determined by a group of cronies sitting around the national tourism office chugging beers and one-upping each other as to how much the stupid foreigners would be willing to pay …

$15 to go to the Panama Canal museum, $17 to go look at the canal, and, apparently, $30 to stroll through the woods.

I decided to stick to the free Pipeline Road.

I really couldn’t imagine things looking much different on the paid trail a few hundred meters away.

The nice thing about a good hike is that there’s often very little to write about. There’s nobody to talk to, nothing to negotiate the price of; you’re just walking and thinking easy thoughts. Every once in a while your meditations are broken by a jumping monkey or a screeching bird.

The birders on this section of the trail were out in force. I know from experience that these are serious folk.

I traveled with a birder for a while in the Peruvian Amazon over 20 years ago. The guy traveled with nothing but a change of clothes, a wide brim adventurer hat, and a pair of binoculars. He had a long white beard and only wore Indian hippy garb. His mission was birds — not capturing them, not eating them, not even studying them … just looking at them. Our guides got it about as much as I did.

How long can you just stand there looking at the same bird? Will it change a different color or something if you wait long enough? I don’t get it. But I don’t have to …

“What’s the point of it?” I asked him one day, wondering why he was so adamant about looking at something for no other reason than being able to say that he looked at it.

“It’s good to know the things that you see in life,” he replied.

This guy was in his 50s and had been traveling for decades. He didn’t carry a camera. He didn’t keep a diary. He didn’t have a wife. He didn’t have kids. He didn’t have a home. He never even had a career — he just picked apples or something for a few months a year in France. All he had was a little notebook full of lists of all the birds around the world that he looked at.

I was young and just starting my traveled then and this guy has a major influence on me. He had nothing — truly nothing. I wanted to have nothing too.

But there was something about that notebook that seemed to manifest the time of his life — a measurement of accomplishment, a collection which made what he did with his days, weeks, and years seem worthwhile.

He’s probably dead now. I wonder what he thought on his death bed when he realized that the only thing he had in life was a list of bird names.