Barro Colorado Island, Panama
Barro Colorado from the water
The canopy was thick, interwoven as ancient knitting, a smouldering mass of greens, reds and browns, with here and there a feathery pale-green tree rising above the rest, its silver-white branches starred with scarlet and emerald epiphytes and tangled bunches of purple-pink orchids
....
The lovely, rich fragrant smell of the forest enveloped us, the delicate scent of a million flowers, a thousand thousand mushrooms and fruit, the perfume from a quadrillion gently rotting leaves in the simmering, ever-changing, ever-dying, ever-growing cauldron of the forest.
The stairs in 1950 and now
We unloaded our gear, and then faced the fact that what lay before us was an almost one-in-one climb to the summit up a flight of cement steps, which reminded me unpleasantly of some of the steeper, more backbreaking Aztec monuments that Lee and I had crawled up a few years previously in Mexico.
...
'Well,' I said grimly, 'I'll walk up this once, just to say I've done it, but after that it's the Orient Express for me.'
I have rarely regretted a decision more.