Study trip to Cana, Darien

Cana, I think is used by an organization called ANCON. They allow groups to stay at Cana for vacation/etc and assign you a tour guide. It's a 3 day walk into a town and they have a little grass run way(that happens to be uneven too). It's rather cozy. There are people that, I think, stay there year round & are employed by ANCON. They are natives of Panama and some are related to men that worked in gold mines in the forest.

We went to see the mines which was really interesting because all the equipment left by the men had all kinds of plants growing in/on them. The mine itself was filled in and there were railroad tracks throughout the forest. One day we came across a train, abandoned on it's tracks. It was just so neat to round a corner of the path and see a train right in the middle of the rainforest. It makes you wonder how it got there and what it was doing there.

Another time, we walked through this swamp like path that lead to a river. We took a break at the river and I decided to journey up stream a bit rather than sit down. And to my amazement, I literally stumbled upon a pig's skull. That was my remarkable discovery...everyone took pictures of me with my head. There is a display in my high school of our trip and posted on the wall is me & my head. I had the opportunity to take it home with me but I decided to leave it at Cana with the natives.

We made a hike up a mountain (5.5 Mi.) to a camp site on the top. We carried only clothes & water while the natives literally jogged up the mountain with backpacks (100-180lbs). They carried a tent for each of the 15 people on the trip, our dinner, breakfast, and lunch for the next day, plus 50 gallons of water for washing dishes/hands and drinking/cooking.

Our bathroom on the mountain wasn't really a bathroom...it consisted of a hole in the dirt with a plastic seat (broken) and a tarp for privacy. But it was perfect, there was a natural clearing on the top that had been cleared by a storm and out of the fallen trees they carved benches. Sitting on them you could watch the mists rising in the morning and at night we sat and watched a wonderful heat storm. Our tour guide showed us a fungus that glowed in the dark that night and to this day I still have a film container in my room with it in it (even though it's now dead).

We ran into a few monkeys crossing through our camp and it's so cool to see these amazing animals just casually strolling by, when back in Pennsylvania you only see them in cages and there they were, just as curious about us as we were about them. We checked each other out and then went our separate ways. However, they weren't all like that...this one mother was being protective of her baby and was upset that we were in her way...she tried to scare us off by attempting to pee on us...eventually she went around us but only after peeing and screaming didn't get us to move. We ran into several packs of various monkeys.

The next day after lunch (to our disappointment), we went back down the mountain which was a lot easier than going up! We had to catch out plane back to Panama City.

I'm looking forward to going back to the Darien and Cana...the science teacher takes 3 trips each year educating teens on the importance of these forests and you don't know how amazing they really are until you've been there and seen it yourself. You can see a million pictures of it and think to yourself, gee that's a nice looking place, but being able to say, I've been there and experienced.

~Peace
Emily