Well after this morning’s lengthy post, perhaps it’s fitting that there isn’t much to say today.

Today was mostly a day of rest. Some of the castaways busied themselves by hiking to a massively huge tree out on the island somewhere. I will get out there later this week, but as for today, I decided to take a different route.

There are two schools of thought on vacation: you can hike and walk and climb, or you can bask and relax. Seeing as how I spent much of yesterday crittering around the area, I decided to kick back today and do nothing except sit in the sun and read. I set up a chair down on the shore and knocked back about 100 pages of the book about infinity I’m reading. It’s actually really really good. All my preconceived notions of David Foster Wallace as a math phony are wrong (well, I still have issues with parts of Infinite Jest). It’s exceptionally dense and at times quite complicated but I’m rapidly relearning calculus in the process and reawakening brain cells that I thought I had killed long ago.

I also listened to my iPod a lot. If you haven’t bought The Postal Service’s Give Up yet, go get it now.

Wow, this is like pure blog material: books and music I like and sounding haughty about it.

To illustrate how I didn’t move for 3-4 hours, here are the boats that went through the Canal while I was sitting there. This is mostly for Stan as he could probably spend a lifetime looking at these big mutha-truckers:

Boat One
Boat Two
Boat Three
Boat Four

After this I climbed the Stairway to Heaven to see if the animals were coming out at dusk. Unfortunately Wacky German Scientist was up there so I didn’t hang around long. Wacky German Scientist is this daffy Afrikaner-looking 50-something man, Oxford trained, who arrived here yesterday. He claims to study “the elephant” in Kenya but who knows. Last night we saw him before the Bug Hunt and he inquires: “Pardon me, does any uv you know zee correct way to zee library?” Keep in mind it’s about 8pm and the only “library” around here open at that hour is the 20 pulp paperbacks near the beer cooler. We point him that way (“Oh, zay hav beer here?”) and he slowly ambles down zee road, shining his light on the woods, looking like some hopelessly lost German tourist with his socks up way too high on his bare legs.

So I didn’t hang around him today, he might have a blunderbuss. I ended up down by my room and was greeted by about 10 howler monkeys all jumping around and eating and howling. They were tiny compared to their death-roar, maybe about 1-2 feet long and skinny. Everyone marveled at my howler monkey impression but after a while a couple monkeys started coming close to me to check it out. They tend to throw poop so I stopped. Unfortunately they must have been mad at someone on the main path because it is smeared with monkey poo. It should make the walk home tonight interesting. They are foul little creatures.

It’s so much fun being cynical in the rainforest, there is endless humor and irony up here in nature.

Well, that wraps it up for tonight. There is another bug hunt (this time for army ants) but the volunteers are dwindling. Tomorrow is the first live broadcast so business is upon me. By the way, if you want to watch, you can catch streams at this URL: http://www.eds.com/jason/jxv_broadcasts.shtml

Oh, and you can see the small public sample of our web content at this address:
http://www.jason.org/expedition/live_broadcast/j15_expedition_landing

So good night everyone, from hot but amazing Panama.

Written by Orion Smith on Jan 25, 2004 at 7:58pm

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