Back to El Valle

The trip down to Panama was uneventful. Most of us met in the Atlanta airport to catch our flight. Matt and I sat in a bar in the airport and went through figures on the textbook we were writing. We also started planning the logistics of the next round of experiments. We continued the work on the plane in spite of Matt’s propensity to air sickness. We arrived in Panama City, again the blast of tropical air getting off the plane and a late night trip into the city center.

Piet and Amanda met us in the airport. Amanda Rugenski is a graduate student in Matt’s lab. She has a brown ponytail, a husky voice and an athletic bearing. I found out later that she is into outdoor recreation and enjoyed hard core skiing, rock climbing, back packing and mountain biking. Amanda is very smart, quick on the uptake, and turned out to be very good in the field.

This trip, my luggage and everyone else’s made it. The drill was the same as the previous trip. Matt ran to the Smithsonian to check in and prepare chemicals and get vehicles. We drove out of the city and picked up supplies. We had a difficult time deciding which aged rums to buy to try. By the next afternoon we had made it up to El Valle, checked into our hotel rooms, and got our gear ready for our first quick trip to the stream. We needed to get a few samples collected and start some equipment running. Piet launched into questioning me about the experiment immediately.

The Hotel Campestre was in obvious disrepair. The large lobby and one wing of the rooms had been completely torn down and only partially rebuilt. It had been only two years but the grounds were less well kept and the jungle was creeping back in.

The building we had used for a lab and housing 2 years before was not available and Amanda and Piet had only one room/ lab to use. The room was a wreck with equipment and dirty clothes everywhere. They had not had any maid service so there was a peculiar smell in there. The large amount of water filtering had led to some spills. Apparently, neither was willing to clean if the other did not, and neither did. I initially felt bad for the hotel staff who would ultimately end up cleaning up the mess, but these feelings lessened as events unfolded.
The road to Rio Maria was quite a bit better than before. It was paved up to the first steepest hill. Some of the pavement was not great because it was covered with gravel and almost as slippery as a muddy road. The top of the road was as bad as ever, there had been a landslide across it and it was very muddy and rough.

As we went over the lip of the volcano and down into the Rio Maria valley the most striking thing was the new paved roads and fresh gashes through the forest to construct dirt roads. A housing development was being constructed across the valley very near the stream. As we approached the stream the road widened and had obviously been improved. A hundred feet of jungle had been bulldozed out on either side of the road. It looked like development on both sides of the Rio Maria was going to happen in spite of the fact that there were assurances that the watershed would be preserved only two years ago. Obviously the developer/ land owner was not telling Edguardo and Heidi the truth earlier.