On the morning of Wednesday, February 22, we went for another walk along the loop to the old officer’s housing. As we got closer to the abandoned barracks, we could hear the howler monkeys screaming, which sounded otherworldly. We found them near the entrance to the barracks.
When we first walked up, the monkeys went silent and stopped moving. After a couple minutes of watching us watching them, a few of them resumed moving around through the trees. After a few more minutes, they started screaming again, and many more moved around. At the end of the video, Eric zoomed in on the monkeys, and you can see how small the monkeys are. It’s hard to believe such small creatures can make such loud, scary sounds.
We noticed that there was a car parked in the carport of one of the abandoned barracks and wondered what it was doing there. It felt like we were in a horror movie: we were in a jungle, the sky was ominously grey, the monkeys were frantically screaming as if warning us of some danger, there was a cluster of abandoned buildings nearby, with a mysterious car parked at said abandoned buildings. We decided to take the advice we always give to the stupid people in horror movies who ignore the red flags, and we noped out of there without investigating further.
Our timing was great — we returned just as it was starting to pour rain. After returning, Christi and Keith did school while Eric did boat chores. In the afternoon, Eric and Keith did D & D while Christi did chores.
Later in the day, one of the braver cruisers went in to check out the situation. It looked like people had moved into the barracks as a protest that they wanted these buildings to be made into housing.
Thursday was another day of school, chores and D & D.
On Friday, we flew to San Diego, which was an all-day adventure. At 0930, we caught a cab from the marina to the airport in Panama City, which was about a 1.5 hour drive in total.
It was a fairly long drive to get out of the Lorenzo National Park to the Gatun Bridge.
Beyond the bridge, we had to drive back north to Colon before heading back south to Panama City. We’ve heard that, much like Casco Viejo, the heart of Colon was made up of majestic, but run down, old buildings. We must have stayed on the outskirts, because the little we saw of Colon was newer. There were a couple of high end housing developments near the bridge, but most of what we saw were blocky, unattractive industrial buildings. In between Colon and Panama City, it was mostly lush jungle. And Panama City was similar to Mexico in that there would be beautiful new buildings next to slums, and everything in between within the same neighborhood.
Our flight back to San Diego was uneventful. We didn’t arrive until 2230 PST, which was 0130 by our body clock time. By the time we went to bed, our body clocks thought it was 0300.