![]() Four cruise lecturers then took a small motorboat across the lake’s choppy surface to tour Barro Colorado Island, home to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. On this creative and intelligently designed voyage, the theme was evolution.Īlong the way, the ship was lifted 85 feet in the legendary Gatun Locks, the Atlantic-side steps of the Panama Canal, into the vast Gatun Lake. The trip was the third in a continuing series of Scientific American cruises put together by InSight Cruises, in which a sterling faculty of expert scientists and the occasional freeloading journalist lecture to an enthusiastic and well-adapted audience. (Which, coincidentally, is the opening line of my planned novella Mopey Doc, about a melancholy physician with a body mass index of 37.) If the creatures slowly digesting leaves in the trees of the Aviarios sanctuary are sloths, call me glutton. The biggest test of my mettle was seeing whether I could finish yet another extravagant dinner. I’m talking about the incredibly diligent and attentive staff on the luxury cruise ship Zuiderdam, which left Fort Lauderdale on February 27 for the Bahamas, Aruba, Curaçao, Panama and Costa Rica before returning to Florida. How I got to Aviarios is a story of hardship and struggle. They didn’t say anything to me, anyway, at the Aviarios Sloth Rescue Center just north of Cahuita, along the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, which I visited on March 6. How sloths conceive of themselves remains a secret-three-toed sloths ( Bradypus variegatus) seem to smile a lot, but they’re not talking. They could have been called deliberates or contemplatives. Life is going to present special challenges to any creature named for a deadly sin.
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