Day 19 - January 5, 2008
The Gamboa resort in Panama offers a ride variety of tours and exhibits, including a boat ride out to Monkey Island for a respectable fee. As 2:45 rolled around, my family and I left our rooms and headed to the lobby. There we met our newfound friends, Matt and Judie, who, amongst six lucky others, would be joining us on our excursion to the secluded nest of nature. Man, that was a damn good sentence.
And so we took our leopard-printed jeep down to the marina where we boarded our ship. The tour began rather well; we drove by the Panama Canal, this time from a different angle than I had seen before having stood on the canal itself. Once we got past that, we took off heading to the monkey refuge.
The monkeys were pretty cool. The first mini island had some howler monkeys, a little baby one too. Our boat captain kept roaring the engine so the monkeys would get pissed off and howl. Personally I found it to be a little cruel, especially for the newborn.
After that, we headed off to Monkey Island for real, passing by a few sloths and birds on the way, nothing too spectacular. But once we finally arrived at our destination, the Cappuccino Monkeys began storming the boat, jumping on to grab the bananas that our tour guide Liz and Captain had supplied. We watched them jump around for a while, climb up and down trees and leap from branch to branch. Made me wish I had a tail.
The real adventure started on our way back. After a minute of driving the engine started making some funny noises then suddenly stopped. We all exchanged glances then looked over to the captain. He tried starting the motor a few times but nothing was happening. Slowly we drifted around these two land patches as we tried to figure out what to do. Neither the tour guide nor the captain had any walkie talkies and we were out of cell phone reception. More than that, the ship wasn’t equipped with any paddles. We were definitely up shit creek.
As we floated around, a boat passed way off in the distance. We all waved our hands and life jackets and the people in the boat waved back like morons. The second boat that passed got the idea and headed to our rescue. Our captain and guide explained to the six south americans our situation after which they drove back to mainland to tell the resort what happened. Now, all we could was wait.
And so we did, sitting peacefully until we started to drift ever so softly towards the actual Panama Canal. You see, as the cruiser ships went by, they sent out waves which eventually rebounded against our neighboring shore and drawing our tiny boat ever closer to the middle of the water, where we would easily get the shit knocked out of us by a several ton ship. Luckily we were next to a small growth of stringy bamboo that we grabbed onto and held onto for dear life. Twenty minutes later our rescue ships finally arrived. We hopped on and zoomed back to the resort.
