Barro Colorado Island and Miraflores & Pedro Miguel Locks
How about waking up surrounded with lush rain forest and the most delicate pink colors of the sunrise? Well this is how the guests of the Sea Voyager started their day.
We spent all morning walking for several miles, in different trails either on the Gigante Peninsula (main land) or on the Barro Colorado Island, all part of the Barro Colorado Monument which cover around 5 400 hectares.
Barro Colorado Island (BCI) has been a very important biological research station since 1923 and in 1946 it became part of the Smithsonian Institute.
We could not ask for a better day, it poured rain and then stopped right on time for our first outing, giving us the real taste of a tropical lowland rain forest. As the rain stopped the guests were pretty happy, forgetting that as soon the sun will come out the humidity will fill out the air and transform the forest in a natural sauna. Walking through this ecosystem was the highlight of the day for most of us.
The tropical lowland rainforest is a chain of great adaptations; the sunlight is the key factor for the evolution here. The trees will grow as tall as they can, serving as platforms or balconies for the smaller plants that couldn’t make it that high, like orchids, ferns and bromeliads among many others.
The size, color, shape and pretty much all the characteristics of the plants will vary depending on the layer of the forest that they inhabit. The layers of a forest are like the different floors on a building; the ground-cover will be like the basement, dark and humid and the canopy or top of the trees will be like the penthouse with a great view, sunlight and aeration; between those two floors we found an incredible range of microclimates with plants and animals specially adapted to survive in each one of them.
And if the forest wasn’t already enough good, we saw monkeys, anteaters, agoutis, coatis, deer, crocodiles… all that just in a morning. So did we leave some excitement for the afternoon? Well how about crossing the rest of the Panama Canal with sunlight and moonshine and the amazing Americas Bridge as the cherry on the cake for the day.
How about waking up surrounded with lush rain forest and the most delicate pink colors of the sunrise? Well this is how the guests of the Sea Voyager started their day.
We spent all morning walking for several miles, in different trails either on the Gigante Peninsula (main land) or on the Barro Colorado Island, all part of the Barro Colorado Monument which cover around 5 400 hectares.
Barro Colorado Island (BCI) has been a very important biological research station since 1923 and in 1946 it became part of the Smithsonian Institute.
We could not ask for a better day, it poured rain and then stopped right on time for our first outing, giving us the real taste of a tropical lowland rain forest. As the rain stopped the guests were pretty happy, forgetting that as soon the sun will come out the humidity will fill out the air and transform the forest in a natural sauna. Walking through this ecosystem was the highlight of the day for most of us.
The tropical lowland rainforest is a chain of great adaptations; the sunlight is the key factor for the evolution here. The trees will grow as tall as they can, serving as platforms or balconies for the smaller plants that couldn’t make it that high, like orchids, ferns and bromeliads among many others.
The size, color, shape and pretty much all the characteristics of the plants will vary depending on the layer of the forest that they inhabit. The layers of a forest are like the different floors on a building; the ground-cover will be like the basement, dark and humid and the canopy or top of the trees will be like the penthouse with a great view, sunlight and aeration; between those two floors we found an incredible range of microclimates with plants and animals specially adapted to survive in each one of them.
And if the forest wasn’t already enough good, we saw monkeys, anteaters, agoutis, coatis, deer, crocodiles… all that just in a morning. So did we leave some excitement for the afternoon? Well how about crossing the rest of the Panama Canal with sunlight and moonshine and the amazing Americas Bridge as the cherry on the cake for the day.
