Sloths in the city

After the weeks of coral seas and remote marinas it is quite a shock to arrive in Panama City with its high-rise buildings, giant shopping malls and traffic jams. It provided a great opportunity to re-stock the food cupboards, and for Vanessa to get a much needed haircut (during which I was entertained by the campest straight man I have ever met, who made me coffee and talked a lot about wine). We even had to time to go out for a couple of fabulous, tapas-style, meals in the old town.

The wealth of the city is obvious for all to see, not least in the marina, which was chock-a- block with large, sport-fishing, motorboats, with not a sailing yacht to be seen. You would think that with all this money the facilities would be amazing, but despite charging Solent-type prices for berths, there was just one shower and two loos for the boys, and the same number for the girls (I asked Vanessa, I didn’t audit it myself!). The reason, apparently, is that the locals go out for a days fishing and then go home in the evening and so they don’t need the facilities. However, what the marina lacked in the way of sanitation facilities, it more than made up for with wildlife.

As well as the almost ubiquitous dock cat, this marina was blessed with a small pack of racoons (or trash pandas, as the Americans dismissively call them. I think they mean it to be derogatory but to my ear it makes them sound even cuter), which slipped out of the shadows in the evening to scour the bins. But far more exciting than the racoons were the sloths. Late one afternoon I noticed a group of locals standing in the bushes by the marina gates. The Panamanians are a friendly bunch and so I didn’t think they were lying in wait to pounce on unsuspecting tourists, not least because the average age of the party was about 12. I waited until they left and then went to have a look for myself. About 10 feet up the tree was a sloth. As I looked more closely, the sloth seemed to have more limbs than your average sloth would need; clutched to its tummy was a baby sloth.

I ran back to the boat to get the camera and enjoyed it so much that I ran back again (nothing to do with the fact that Jacob has taken the memory card out and left it on the saloon table!) In my absence the baby sloth had partially detached itself from its mum, and, hanging upside down, reached out to try and touch the finger of a friend of ours who had joined the party in the bushes. By the time I got back, the mum had had enough of this “ET” like behaviour and had got Junior firmly back under control. As dusk fell, the two of them headed up to the very top of the tree, well away from the unwanted attentions of visiting yachtsman.

Jacob missed this close encounter because he had headed back to Shelter Bay to help the short-crewed boats in the fourth transit make their way through the canal, but he was back in time for the farewell dinner on the Sunday evening. After the meal, Vanessa had gone to the loo and came rushing back to tell me there was a sloth hanging from the roof of the shower block. It was an amazing sight. There was a piece of wood running along the bottom edge of the roof and the sloth had hooked its back claws over that. Its front paws and head were then threaded through its back paws, and so it was effectively using the back half of its body as a hammock. After a brief look at the throng of people now gathered around, it closed its eyes slowly and went back to sleep. We headed back to the boat and did the same, albeit in a more horizontal, less dangly kind of way.