The past two weeks I've been staying in the Mecca of tropical biologists: the town of Gamboa in Panama, right at the edge of the Panama Canal and the Chagres river. Gamboa was built in the 1930s for Americans who were working at the canal - it is a pleasant, widely set up town with about 350 inhabitants who are either working at the dredging division of the canal or at STRI, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). In Gamboa's heyday it counted almost 4.000 people - now there are only about 350 left, for that reason many of the communal buildings have closed down or fell into disrepair - although without making the town resemble a ghost town. Actually, one of the things I enjoyed most was to walk around the town with a very detailed guidebook written by some locals and learn about the buildings, their history and building style, and the vegetation.

So I've been experiencing the expat life - at least, that of a so-called ‘trailing spouse'. I'm staying with my Swiss friend whose husband is doing a postdoc at STRI and their two children of 2,5 years old and seven months old. It has been quite a Babylon here - usually I speak French with my friend but we switched to English because there were just too many languages going on: my friend spoke Spanish with some, English with others and Swiss-German with the children. So I learned a bit of Spanish, tried my best German with the children (or Dutch with the baby), and in the meantime learned some Swiss-German from their son. Typical activities included sitting underneath the house watching the children play in a tropical downpour, looking out of the window and see an iguana in a tree, kolibris on the feeder, and agoutis eating our mango leftovers, crashing the pool of the Rainforest Resort around the corner, going to the playground to meet other expats and their children, picking a lot of mangos from the ground, going to la tienda to buy some groceries, and organise day trips.

One of the first day trips was to the Miraflores Locks, one of three sets of locks of the Panama Canal. Unfortunately only two small boats were passing at that time so it was not that spectacular, but the little museum was interesting as it showed a bit of the history of the canal. The canal zone was American territory until 1999, so you see a lot of American products in the supermarket, they pay with American dollars (though the dollar coins are Panamanian) and the fridge is as big as they are in the US. On another day trip we did a boat trip on the Chagres river, briefly went onto the canal, and went to a Wounaan village, where 40 indigenous people live and show tourists their culture and handicrafts made from local plants and seeds like the tagua-nut. Yet another day trip took me and two German ‘batgirls' who were also working in Gamboa to Casco Viejo, the old part of Panama City, where we walked around admiring the contrast of beautiful buildings right next to ruins, of which sometimes only the façade was still standing. Finally we also went to one of the premier bird watching locations in the world, Pipeline Road, in the rainforest right next to Gamboa. Apparently there are more than 500 species that live there and we not only spotted quite a few birds - a potoo, motmots, toekans and much more - we also saw some Capuchin monkeys crossing the road via the trees hanging overhead and several times the beautifully blue Morpho butterfly.

We also decided to go on a little road trip to go to the beach in Santa Clara and then to the mountains, a couple of hours of Gamboa. We went to El Valle, a village lying in the crater of a dormant vulcanoe. So that usually means there are hot springs - one thing high on my list ever since soaking in the hot springs in Taupo, New Zealand - so we spent an hour or two in the Pozos Termales, got our face plastered with some healthy mud, rinced it off in another tropical downpour (the wet season is starting) and then soaked in the hot spring for a while. Then we went on to the Serpentario where we had a Python squeezing us to death (no, it was too small to do that) and had the way serpents kill their prey visualised by our guide with a stuffed snake and rabbit. And of course we spent some time at the famous handicrafts market, looking at jewelry and figurines made of tagua nuts, kalebas painted with all kinds of colourful birds, baskets made from palm trees and much much more.

We also had some interesting food ventures. As it's the mango season, we made mango jam, mango salsa, a mango pie, and many mango salads. We also cooked platanos (cooking bananas), made papaya juice and ate yucca in a restaurant. There were also cashew trees in the village, so we thought it would be fun to pick some and try our hand at roasting them. So I picked about thirty cashew nuts from the ground one day (they are attached to a fruit that they call the cashew apple, which can be made into a drink), brought them home, washed them and then googled instructions to roast them. And then quickly rushed to the kitchen to throw the nuts out again before anyone would get it in their head to bite the shell to get to the nut, because especially the shell of raw cashews, is really toxic - there were stories about people who bit in the shell and then had burned lips and skins for weeks! Not such a good idea...

In this way, the time in Panama flew past and now it's back to the US!