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Bird watchers on a flight path to paradise
James Wilson finds that the US withdrawal from Panama and the determination
of an entrepreneur have been a boon to twitchers
Financial Times ; 27-Feb-1999; 961 words
ARCADIA
Do not be deterred by the unwelcoming message at the gate of the Canopy
Tower, one of Panama's most intriguing lodgings.
"This is a US Military Defense Site," warns a sign. "It is illegal for
persons not possessing a valid US-issued identification document to enter."
Nor should tourists let the forbidding high wire fence come between them
and a bed for the night.
For three decades the Canopy Tower was Semaphore Hill Long-Range Radar and
Communications Link, built as part of the barrage of defences that the US
threw up around the Panama Canal. Later its powerful radar was used to
track drug traffickers' flights from South America.
In 1995, with the US winding down its presence in Panama, it was shut down.
Rusting, windowless and stripped of its sensitive equipment, it had the
proportions and beauty of a giant oil drum, topped off with a golf ball
radar dome.
The only thing going for it was its location: hidden at the end of a
mile-long road that twists through the forest to the highest point around.
The tower rises to the height of the jungle canopy in a sea of
uninterrupted green. For one Panamanian entrepreneur, Raul Arias de Para,
it had the potential to be the perfect birdwatching platform.
Panama, the sliver of land joining two continents, has an enviable
reputation among birdwatchers. Each Christmas members of the Audubon
Society, the US birding and conservation organisation, go out for an annual
survey.
Members in Panama have regularly topped the survey, spotting more than 300
species in a single day. A few miles from the Canopy Tower is the famous
Pipeline Road through the jungle, perhaps the best place in the world to
observe birds.
Arias de Para spent two years picking his way through negotiations and
ended up with a swords-into-ploughshares concession to transform the
Semaphore Hill radar tower into an ecotourism resort. On handover day, a
sergeant turned up and thrust the keys to the place into Arias de Para's
hand.
"It was a bit unceremonious," he recalls. "I was expecting a general or a
captain and all we got was an NCO." Photographs of the event show the
soldier grinning broadly; the place seemed a long way from a twitchers'
sanctuary.
The new owner's first task was to find water. The staff who worked in
shifts at the station had relied on rainwater and a tanker delivery. He
bored deep into the hill. No luck. Then he heard of a retired US engineer
who had bored a well for the US army 25 years ago on the same hillside.
Told which spot to try, Arias de Para struck water this time. But the
original well remained a mystery until a former worker at Semaphore Hill
turned up at the gate one day to see the changes. He remembered the well;
the US, grown paranoid about the risk of enemies sneaking into the jungle
and poisoning the water, had abandoned it and hidden all trace.
Arias de Para put a series of floors inside the tower to divide it up,
added stairs, and sliced through the corrugated exterior with a blowtorch
to put in panoramic windows.
On one floor he built six en suite bedrooms, and above them a lounge and
kitchen. He brought in an interior designer from New York to come up with a
colour scheme. He slung hammocks - woven in Colombia, the world's best -
and stocked up the library with rainy day reference volumes.
As for the fibreglass, 9-metre high golf-ball dome, Arias de Para painted
it yellow and surrounded it with wooden park seats, offering uninterrupted
views across untamed acres of jungle.
Around the tower the birds soar and swoop, while coatis, members of the
raccoon family, scrabble in the undergrowth at its base. The cries of
howler monkeys drift over the treetops. From the roof, ships can be seen
steaming through the Panama Canal where it carves through the continental
divide. On the horizon, 20km and half an hour by car, the Bridge of the
Americas arches over the Pacific entrance to the canal. Go 45km in the
other direction and you reach the Caribbean.
In February the Canopy Tower opened for business with the first tour group
of US birdwatchers. Leading them was ornithologist Robert Ridgely, author
of the seminal Guide to the Birds of Panama.
In their week's stay, says Arias de Para, Ridgely spotted a black swift
never seen before in this part of Panama. The only problem was the group's
hours. "They wanted their breakfast prepared for 5am every day," says Arias
de Para.
The canal zone, as a strategic site, has benefited from the US presence,
being largely spared from deforestation and intrusion. This year the US
leaves Panama completely and will turn over more than 25,000 hectares
(9,650 sq miles) of land - much of it barely touched jungle - along with
dozens of military installations.
But Panama has no armed forces of its own to fill them; they were abolished
after the military ruler Manuel Antonio Noriega was overthrown by the 1989
US invasion. Arias de Para, once an opposition politician who was
imprisoned twice under the Noriega regime, was later one of those charged
with dismantling Noriega's troops.
So other ways are being examined of turning military sites into tourist
centres. The notorious School of the Americas, a training camp for Latin
America's military, is being converted into a hotel.
Arias de Para sees the Canopy Tower as a further fitting symbol of
transformation. The list of bird species seen there - the plum-beous hawk,
the crested guan, potoos both great and common, and puffbirds and manakins
- has now reached more than 250.
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