Meet My New Boyfriend, Laylo

This past year when I visited the Peruvian Amazon, I shared a long-hidden passion of mine… I love sloths! For some reason, these slow-moving, clumsy-looking, furry creatures have always captured my imagination. It started when I saw an Animal Planet special on sloths & watched their mating process. When the female is ready, she begins howling loudly. Males jump into action- or as jumpy as a sloth can get. Watching the males ever-so-slowly move through the forest to the waiting female cracked me up. It looked as if they would arrive a week too late to do the job at hand!

I came back from my adventure and was sadly forced to report- no sloth sightings. This was remedied today when I visited the sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica. Take a look at my new boyfriend, Laylo. He was initially a “Layla” until they confirmed “she” was a “he.”

These creatures are absolutely adorable. Living up to 30 years, they come in 2-toed and 3-toed varieties. The 2-toed are omnivores while their 3-toed cousins dine on leaves and vegetables. They hang upside down most of the day and sleep for up to 18 hours at a time. They aren’t lazy- just blessed with an extremely slow metabolism. Their faces charm you with a constant smile.

The sanctuary began when the owners took in an injured sloth years ago. Buttercup was injured, was nursed back to health and now is grand dame of the sanctuary. Word spread and local began bringing other injured or neglected sloths in to join the family. The sanctuary is now home to over 120 adults and 20 baby sloths requiring constant feeding and rehabilitation- with the goal or reintroducing these gentle creatures back to their habitat. It costs them close to $11,000 a month for feed and upkeep of their sloths.

Unfortunately, deforestation, roads and pesticides have made the rainforest a dangerous place for these slow-moving cuties. Imagine trying to cross roads when a turtle can leave you in the dust. Chemicals have left many of their favorite leaves toxic to the sloths. Humans, who take babies from their mothers, to use as pets or tourist attractions, account for a number of their residents. Falls from their treetop hideaways can leave them badly injured or vulnerable to predators such as jaguars. A careful diet of goat’s milk and almond tree leaves revives weak babies. It takes 30 days for food to pass through a sloth’s intestinal tract so medicines and proper diet take a long time to do their magic. Big plastic bins (like you’d use to store holiday decorations) serve as homes to the babies.

Their habits are interesting… they leave their trees only once a week for the tiresome journey to the ground to go to the bathroom. Once done… they even dig and cover their waste. This may be an effort to cover their scent and keep predators off their trail. I’d like to think they are just thoughtful and clean. I bet Laylo would even put the seat down!

To find out more, visit www.slothrescue.org.

The Big Ditch

After seeing the Panama Canal in action, you can honestly see why it is dubbed one of the man-made wonders of the world. What’s really wondrous is the fact that the canal exists today given the political, public health, budget and engineering challenges faced since work began on the canal back in 1840.

First take a moment to step back in time. Sailors, for centuries, had searched for the fastest and most efficient way to circumnavigate the globe. When the Spanish first landed on this isthmus, they traveled overland to the Pacific Ocean some 50 miles west. But how could sailors and merchants build a canal of sorts to shave off the 8000 mile journey around the south end of South America at Cape Horn?

In stepped French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man who built the Suez Canal. Lesseps (shallow trivia fact: Lesseps is related to one of the Housewives of NY… the one who says she is a countess) envisioned using the same process used on the Suez- building a sea-level canal blasted through the mountains and utilizing existing rivers. Unfortunately, this approach failed to take into account the topography of Panama, the jungles, and possibly most importantly, mosquito-borne disease. After eight years of digging, Lesseps finally relented and hired Gustave Eiffel (yes, the tower guy) to design a lock-based system (actually, DaVinci first developed the concept!) By then, money had dried up and countless thousands had died due to rampant malaria and yellow fever, forcing the French to abandon the ambitious project.

Years later, in stepped Teddy Roosevelt and the US. At this point in time, enough had changed to support the success of the canal project- engineering had advanced to allow for the movement of water required for the lock system, railroads could be built to carry away the tons of rock removed from the canal bed and medicine had advanced so that doctor’s now understood how malaria was spread and importantly, how to prevent the disease from spreading. The US was able to use much of the digging completed by the French and opened the canal in 1914. The Panamanians took control of the canal in 1999 and currently employ 9,500 to run the canal.

Our ship, the Coral Princess, a Panamax ship, is specifically built to the specifications of the canal and is currently the largest vessel traversing the canal. We had a scant foot or two of space on each side as we entered the canal. To cross, each ship must be raised and subsequently lowered 85 feet using a series of locks, each of which requires 52 million gallons of fresh water to fill each lock. Rainfall in the mountains and gravity provide the necessary water (in fact, recent rains left the system with too much water requiring release through dams at Gatun Lake.) Six locomotives called mules (after the original furry animals that did their job) are attached to the ship to help guide it and avoid damage to the canal. A trained canal pilot boards each boat and takes control of each vessel throughout the 12-hour journey.

What was amazing to me were the fees charged for each crossing. Cruise ships pay a premium for an appointed crossing time (don’t want to keep us busy tourists waiting!) and pay a per-cabin fee. We paid about $330,000 for this trip. Container ships pay less- in the range of $20,000 - $40,000 per crossing, but may queue up for two days before being assigned a spot. We didn’t actually cross the entire canal for this fee- we turned around at Gatun Lake and returned back to the Caribbean Sea. A million ships have made this traverse- growing demand of 40,000 ships annually is supporting the building of an additional lane of locks at Gatun to be completed in 2014.

Seeing this marvel up close is something to behold and should probably be on your bucket list. Just considering the scope of the project (it cost over $350 million a century ago); the engineering feat; the cost to human life (over 22,000 died building the canal) really hits home as you watch the workers going about their daily jobs, moving huge ships along as they travel the world.