Day 120 - 128 (July 12 - 20) - Paradise Gardens, Boquete

Day 120 - 128 (July 12 - 20) - Paradise Gardens, Boquete After a little over a week, I was feeling a good bit better, but still not 100%. So I found a place in Western Panama, near Boquete, that I thought I'd go visit. It is an animal rescue center called Paradise Gardens.

So on the 12th I caught a bus about 8 hours to David then a local bus (basically an old school bus)

up the road an hour or so to Boquete. Boquete is a big jumping off point for hiking, white water

rafting, and things like that. It is very mild, cool by local standards and rains a lot, think rain forest. I wandered around town for all of 5 minutes (its a small place) and bumped into two people who were already volunteering at Paradise Gardens. We shared a cab up the road.

The next day the real work began. I helped sweep the walkways and clean up a bit but then tri

ed to orient myself to the park. Firstly - there was a resident volunteer family from Canada there (parents + boy (11) and girl (8)), a brother/sister pair from Durham, NC (small world), a couple from Dallas and a couple (Peruvian/Irish). A few days later a young couple

(Chilean/Argentinean) joined us as well.

The park itself is fairly large and had lots of birds -

mainly donated when people bought them

and had to leave the country or just couldn't take care of them any more. A lot of these could not be released to the wild

since they were not native (lovebirds, cockatoos, various others). Several animals were residents of the parks since they

had been hurt or raised there and could not survive on their own in the wild.

Other animals included a tayra (Tyrone - relative of the weasel but arboreal), margay (Lottie -

beautiful, spotted cat, bit smaller than an ocelot and more arboreal), 6 scarlet macaws, a pair of green tip macaws, a baby coati (related to raccoons but with a longer snout), a jaguarundi (Athena - a medium sized cat, hoping to be able to release),

three white-faced capuchin monkeys (Billy, Monty and a baby - Manolo), several tamarin monkeys (small mean, little gremlin like things) and several others (including Sam a large cockatoo). There are also lots of flowers and beautiful tropical plants as well as a Japanese garden on the grounds.

Most days we would get up at 8, make our own breakfast and then get ready to open. We were open to the public from 10 -4. So we had to sweep the paths, feed animals (really just help the full time employees feed them), clean cages, trip back plants from the paths/clear hyacinths from the ponds (both daily tasks as the weather really helps the plants to grow) and other basic tasks. We also built a new enclosure for one of the parrots (we had good, large enclosures and very few cages). Once open we would do the meet and greet and any other projects that needed to be attended to. We also played with some of the animals - especially the monkeys, one of the parrots and the coati.

We also had a couple of former guests

who would return for a free meal, there was a falcon who would land in the road and wait for meat and some black squirrels that would raid the bird feeders.

Unfortunately after a few days there, it became apparent that the actual owners (who are out of the country) needed to liquidate some of their assets, this one included. So the resident volunteers had planned to leave for a vacation and were suddenly packing to move as well. We helped them any way we could. Which included some big group cookouts and a great trout ceviche. Eventually time came to leave, I headed out to get the buses back to Panama, many of the other went to a howler monkey refuge. On couple stayed to help the new owners (they were going to be the house sitters when the couple went on vacation anyway). I had a great time, got to do something useful and meet some great people.

Unfortunately I found out a little later that the new owners asked the last of the volunteers to leave, have temporarily closed the park (for renovations but will hopefully open it up - some of the animals really need interaction). As long as the animas are well looked after, everything should be ok.