Panama 2009

So while attempting to write my personal statement earlier and including a short sentence about my blog and how I am using it to “document my experiences on work placements” I realised I actually haven’t. So I’m going to write a few entries on work experience placements that I have carried out in the past and interesting things that happened on them.

This entry will be about my trip to Panama and Costa Rica, although it wasn’t strictly work experience!

The trip was amazing and probably the best experience of my life. The little shack we stayed in for the first two weeks felt and still does feel like a second home. I hope I get to go back some day!

The first night of patrol very nearly killed me. 10km doesn’t sound like that much, but when you’re walking on uneven sand in wellies that are a couple of sizes too big in the pitch darkness it gets slightly harder. After the first night I worked out to wear trainers rather than wellies and luckily the moon decided to come out on the following nights so it wasn’t quite as dark.

My patrolling days were cut short when my feet swelled up to elephant size because of the mosquito bites and I found myself unable to fit into shoes. One of the guys lent me some size 11 wellies and they still didn’t fit. I don’t have a picture of my elephant feet but here is a picture of my legs before the bug bites got too bad. I hope you appreciate the agony I was in for two weeks.

On the days I wasn’t patrolling I got to look after the hatchery which was possibly the best bit :D One night I was the first to come across a fully hatched nest. The baby turtles make a lovely sound when they are crawling out of the sand. It’s sort of a soft scraping sound but when they’re all moving together it sounds like running water. I couldn’t work out where the sound was coming from at first and nearly stepped on a hatchling D: Luckily I spotted them in time. They were all picked up and carried over to the sea to be set free!

Since I went on the trip I have written an essay on the navigational capabilities of sea turtles. It’s really very clever, the way they find the sea. The hatchlings use a mixture of information about the inclination of the beach and the light hitting the water to find their way to the water. They can get confused on tourist beaches where there is lots of bright light inland which results in lots of stranded hatchlings :(

Other jobs during the volunteer project involved digging out the unhatched eggs and opening them up to find out why they hatched. Mouldy sea turtle eggs do not smell very nice! A few of them were killed off by fungal or bacterial infection, some were eaten by crabs or broken by weeds. Information like this is used to determine where the best site is for the hatchery.

We also did some reforestation a little further down the river, and also monitored manatees on the river, though the manatee conservation project wasn’t completely up and running while I was there. We only managed to see a couple of manatees. They are very elusive! (So elusive I don’t have a picture, lol)

During the time we weren’t working there was lots of fighting over the two hammocks, card games and swimming in the river. I proved once and for all that I can’t dive by performing a spectacular belly flop into the river with everyone watching. Ooh, there was also a nut roasting dance/song and a lesson in how to make some yummy chickeny wrap things that I can’t remember the name of...

I haven’t even mentioned the days we went into town (Changuinola) or to the cocoa plantation (where I met my buddy Nuni and gained the reputation of crazy cat lady), but this entry is getting a bit long so I will leave it at that. I may make another entry about the rest of the things I did and about the Costa Rica part of the trip in the future.

Here is the banner we made on the last day at San San. Mine is the purple turtle! :D One of my Panamanian friends posted an updated picture of it on facebook a little while ago. It’s still looking good! (Yes I know the Jamaican flag is completely wrong. Andrey was pretty drunk at the time we made it and couldn't tell us what the flag looked like)

Ciao for now!

Lucy