//WL2K Darien Province Update

Quick update on our Darien Province excursion. There will be more detail and photographs in a blog entry to come. We have been traveling in the Gulf of San Miguel part of the Darien Province for nine days. The trip brought all kinds of unexpected surprises. First, we did not end up traveling there by ourselves. We made new friends who buddy-boated with us for the whole tour. They shared the navigation, the tides and currents, the heat, the winds and unpredictability of this remote place with us. We explored five main rivers and numerous creeks to look for indigenous communities, unusual settings, exotic birds, animals and insects. The mud was everywhere and even Cetacean got stuck in it when the tide dipped a bit lower overnight than we expected. The people we met were welcoming, loved having us buy their beautiful artwork, and filled us with questions for which we may never find answers. The Darien rivers are incredible during the day with dense mangroves lining each side of a waterway, egrets, herons, night herons, toucans and ibis plying the waters for fish, peregrine and black hawks, and vultures circling for their meals, and crocodiles (some of us actually saw one!) on shore and somewhere (yikes!) in the water. Each morning we awoke to the sound of howler monkeys. Each night we heard them again, quarreling with the screeching parrots. There were the hidden noises too, the ones in the mangroves. Weâ?Tll never know what they were but it was fun to imagine the noise makers. The sky was bright with stars. The moon lighted the way during night tours in the dinghy. We have returned to the Perlas archipelago with plans to be here for maybe a few more days.