Panama Part 2: The Darien

Ah this part was good. Probably a highlight for the book and the trip. I am also close to catching my tail as well, while I sit here writing this in Panama City. I want to be caught up when I fly to Colombia on wednesday as I copnsider South America to be the second half of my trip. Though I seem to have spent too much money this month. Need to reign that in a little. At Panama City we bought our tickets for the end of the Inter-American highway and set off into the unknown. It would literally be the unknown when we realised just how shit, incomplete and innaccurate Lonely Planet's section was. We would have to write our own guidebook for it. The bus down to Yaviza is $14 and the journey takes 7 hours approximately. Unless you want to just say you have been to the end of the road (which we have now) you may as well stop in Meteti. One gripe. You have to pay 5 cents to enter the forecourt of the bus station. How skanky is that? Thats worse than being charged to use the toilet (which I was as well). You buy a bus ticket then you have to pay to get to the bus you just paid for. Ridiculous.



Anyway we arrived in Yaviza after we had had three passport checks on the way down and been asked what we were upto. We had wanted to get a boat up from Yaviza or El Real to La Palma, which the book says you can do. Its not true. Well maybe its true, but the army won't let you do it anyway. We arrived in this end of the road town (seeing two other gringos sadly) and its just a town full of trucks and looks like any other town. So far, so un Darien. We got some lunch and enquired about travelling deeper. Apparently some old man then muttered that we were crazy and so we asked some soldiers about walking to El Real or taking a boat. They instead escorted us to a Panamanian military base. Hmm were these real soldiers? Were we about to be kidnapped? Nope. We were going to be passport checked. What else would you expect in this region. Its all we seemed to do. All day, everyday. It had also been disappointingly unjungly on the way down there. The most dangerous thing being a swerve to avoid some car driver who went at 4mph and swerved in front of any vehicle so they could not pass. He almost took out a petrol tanker. The military interviewed us and were pleased we spoke Spanish (well Dom did). They then escorted us back and made us get a bus back to Meteti. They told us it was too much to travel by boat and would not have let us even if we had wanted to pay. We hoped we were going to get a military truck ride, but they slapped us in a minivan and sent us packing for $5 back to Meteti. From there we got a $1.25 pick up truck ride through the jungle to Puerto Quimba. There we got our sixth passport check in one day. I had presumed they kept marking down your last known position, so that if you went missing they would know where to go to look for you if a search and rescue was needed. The army guy here was cool and knew everything about European football. He even knew Spurs were on 38 points as we had just beaten Chelsea in a great result. The lancha was $3 from here to La Palma and we rocked up into the capital of the Darien expecting to stay for two nights and head back. La Palma is an interesting port town, with the local girls eyeing you curiously and the local guys eyeing you menacingly. I reckoned it would make a good night out but we never found out due to logisical changes. We checked into an ok hotel, whos drainage emptied straight into the sea and went to find a boat skipper to take us to the Rio Sambu. One old man negotiated us a good price and then a young drunk gave us an awful price. We returned to the old man but he ignored us while he played 6 games of dominoes before eventually giving us a higher price than last time. We haggled him down to $75 each and then went back to the hotel. Their our hotel guy informed us there were public transport boats to Garrichine for $10 returning on fridays. So we did the un-English thing of cancelling on an agreement and opted to take a punt into the unknown. We rang the airlines and they told us that they did not fly back until saturday and so we had two options of heading back to Panama City. After we found the only internet cafe that took 1 hour to load up facebook, we turfed in and were excited for some Heart of Darkness unknown travelling.



We were woken up in the morning by some incessant knocking on our door that went unanswered when challenged. It would later transpire that our landlord had knocked at 6am because he was worried we may miss the 9.30am boat going from 15 metres down the road. Thanks. We gathered some cash from the ATM (Its the only one in the Darien so we needed some cash) and headed to the boat. As usual it was late to depart because two guys who had gone to get water, instead decided to stop off for a beer. One of them worked on the Panama Canal and I presume his boat time keeping is better there. Our ragamuffin crew set off for Garrichine passing awesine virgin jungle and some cool beaches and islands. It turned out that the boat can't actually go close to shore and so we had to jump out and wade into town like a bunch of drug smugglers, lugging our luggage on our backs. We crossed over the sand into this small waterside village. Here we were told there was no public transport to Sambu, but that we could hire a trcuk for $40. The local told me it was the going price and when Dom asked him if he was going to pay $40 on his own and he said yes, even the local women laughed at his crap lying. After getting instructions to head through town to the crossroads by the mango tree we eventually managed to get a ride for 3pm that afternoon for $5 each. The locals pay $2 to $3 but oh well. There we got chatting to a local priest and then his drunken uncle from the boat. He was trying to tell Dom his friend has a cheaper ride and we could stay at his place for free. Never trust an alcoholic and I did not trust this man. Fuck it we were in the middle of nowhere and had to wing everything as it turned up. Then the drunk guy took Dom off for some beer and our truck turned up. This was after Dom had already gone missing for 40 minutes and Tom and I were a little afraid we were being picked off predator style and I suggested it was safer to stay together than go searching, especially with random people walking around swinging machetes. Tom ran off to find Dom, while I stalled the driver. There was no real space on the truck and we would not have got a place if we weren't paying gringo prices. Eventually we brought him back and luckily there was no additional space for the drunk, so we shook off his bad influence and headed in the back of a truck over what can only be described as a 4x4 testing track. It was an awesome ride. We were heading into more and more remote jungle, while the truck had to ford rivers, dive down gaps, drive with its right hand side 2m above the left, climb near vertical parts and bump and jump all over. It was truck krypton factor. No wonder they charged a lot for the rides. Vehicles can't last very long out here surely. We arrived in town and were taken to see Juan Loco who put us up in a really cool room for $50 for two nights, though our luggage stayed there when we weren't there and we effectively got it for three nights without having to worry about it. Dom also broke the toilet lid by falling through it turning on the lights and he did not care much about it. Cool guy. Cool town. We took out some traditional Indian bow and arrows to shoot at stuff while we wandered around to negotiate some trip itineraries. We were introduced to lots of member of the town and offered various facilities at reasonable prices. There were semi naked women walking around, a little girl salesperson who wandered into our apartment and unbelievably good, cheap homecooked food. They never ripped you off with prices either. I was paying 15 cents only for chocolate. We did see how bad a runway we would take off from as well but I will leave that for later. We turned down the chance to see some artesanal stuff and dancing, and having discovered we would not be able to get some beer, we designed a compromise plan and decided to go and visit the Embera tribe in the morning for permission to travel in their lands up river.

We grabbed some early breakfast at the place we always ate in town. It was great food and never more than $2.50 a plate. The owners were a really nice old couple. Sometimes they did not always understand us, but they always looked after us food wise. We walked over the bridge into Puerto Indio Indian village and were taken to see the Indian secretary. It was a cool little village and he escorted us to a hut which bats flew out of. It was equipped with a computer that had been set up by an English old man before he dropped dead. There we got our letter of permission and got a deal of $58 each for transportation up the river to Quina (the penultimate town) and back again. We would have to pay seperately for all our meals and accomodation in the village (that amounted to around $15 more per person). We got a stamp in our passport from the Embera-Wunaan nation and headed back to tie up the lose ends back in Sambu. While passing back and forth we got to witness the massacring of a cow with an axe blow and each passing had the cow more skinned and carved up until the final one, where one cow leg was left hanging from a tree. We had been taken to the local community centre that the Indians had set up and one of them had been burnt down. There seemed a degree of hostility or at least lack of warmth between the people in Sambu and those in Puerto Indio. We had been told the Indians would charge us an extortionate amount of money for the trip but it seemed reasonable to me. The night before at dinner we had negotiated an agreement between the three of us to best accomodate everyone's individual desires. Anyway we set off down river with two Indian guides after sliding the boat over polls into the water. Lonely Planet had described it as heart of darkness. I think it was quite pleasant and sunny, but i was definitely remote. We punted and engined up the river. Sometimes when it got tough we would assist the poleman with the punting and sometimes when we were grounded (the river was quite shallow in parts) we had to jump into the river and push the boat upstream for a time. Overall the river trip was around 8 hours, but we stopped off in some villages along the way. The first of which we were treated to Pipa (sweet coconut before it goes brown), which is a really thirst quenching drink and had some food cooked for us. We were also treated to an awkward moment when all the locals (complete with their lack of clothes) laid out all their artesanal goods for us to see and we did not want to buy anything. Tom and I don't anyway and Dom did not see anything he liked. I don't envy Dom the task of using his Spanish to explain that we were not going to buy anything off them, but suffice to say we were spared this embarassing situation in the other villages. We even came across some ants that apparently cure arthritis if they bite you four times, but then again they did tell us sea lions and hippos used to live in a local lake until 200 years ago.

In the second town there was a small man in a loincloth talking to us about his family, a makeshift basketball court and some more naked people. We were running out of time before sunset so we just passed through briskly and set off for Quina where we would spend the night. Arriving in town we were taken to our hut for the night (where the hammocks and mosquito nets were set up). Meanwhile we decided to play football with the local kids, ranging from around 5 to 12 years old. Me and Dom split sides to split the Spanish, Tom on my side and we divided the kids into shirts v skins. It was really good fun and the kids loved it. I managed to cut my feet up as we played barefoot, but Dom ended up with some really nasty blisters. We played until we lost all the light and the score was a respectable 2-2 with Dom scoring the equaliser by actually shooting the crossbar off the top of the goal. It almost landed on my head, but luckily we could put it back together. The kids were asking questions and wanted to play again in the morning, but we knew we had to leave early and did not confirm anything. Then the kids made us head to the river to have a bath and insisted upon carrying our stuff for us. I gave one of the kids my hat to keep and he in the morning gave me one of his marbles in return (Dom had taught the other kids in another village some Spanish games with marbles) and then we went back to eat and sleep. We did sneak down to the river to go wildlife hunting and found a bunch of noisy toads. Tom was barefoot and we were skulking around the river bed. Only later did we find out secretion from these toad's skins was deadly and these were the same toads the Indians used to extract poison for their weapons. That night we slept in a hammock for the first time. It was really uncomfortable and my night's sleep was not great. The other barely got any sleep at all though.

In the morning Dom's feet were in a really bad way and he did not come on the morning hike (which me and Tom paid $5 for). There we were shown hardwoods immune to axes and drank water from bamboo. It turned out that we were the first actual tourists to come down here. Every previous gringo had been a scientist of some kind. That was pretty cool. Indeed three Spanish scientists had trekked out into the mountains for 7 days and only taken 1 gallon of water. They ran out and were told they had to turn back, but they wanted to drink river water instead. The guide then carved up loads of bamboo and they lived off bamboo water for the 7 day hike. We also came across a walking tree. Its roots are out of the ground and it has three like a tripod. One drops off every so often and a new one grows. It apparently moves around 1m in a year. We also managed to chew somw wild peppermint, which is apparently good for strong teeth. With Dom injured I was having to rely on my Spanish for all interaction with the locals on these hikes. Dom had been playing football again meanwhile and said he felt the girls had more sympathy and empathy than the guys. One of the boys had asked him for money, while one of the girls had asked her dad to give Dom some money for some trousers (he had ripped jeans from all of the travelling done so far). We said our goodbyes and it was sad as the village had been good to us and set off downstream.

I fell asleep on the boat for some of the downriver trip, but it did not require as much of an effort with the polling so it was ok. We stopped in one more community, where we were shown how to hunt fish and crabs with a stick catapult. Tom says its commonly called a Hawaiian sling. Then we saw their fishing stocks and raced back downriver to the town. Back in Sambu a cargo ship had crashed into the bank to unload the local supplies. We spoke with the captain about heading back to Panama City via cargo ship, but he was not that friendly and they were not planning on leaving until the tuesday anyway. Damn that scuppered that idea. Dom's feet were really bad at this point so we called off the overnight camping trip in the jungle. Good idea really, because we had no mosquito net and the mosquitos out there are huge and would have eaten us alive. Instead Tom and I went out to see a Harpy Eagle (the most powerful bird of prey in the world and almost extinct) for $10 each. I had wanted to see this bird ever since I saw a stuffed one in Saltillo and thought it was some ancient species. We went and met our guide who took a machete and a rifle with him. Tom wanted me to ask him if the rifle was for the guerillas. Apparently it was for wildlife and the guerillas were far down river away from where we were. Nice to know. We took a tiny boat. Really tiny. Like 6-8 feet long for three of us and it rode only an inch above the water. One small move could easily have sunk us. The guide rowed us downriver in this dingy for twenty minutes or so before we started a gruelling jungle hike. The guide had told me it usually takes 2.5 hours and the slowest was 4 hours by a 60 year old Candian woman. Fair play to her though. This was not your mothers trekking. Unless of course you are the child of that 60 year old woman. In which case you would be the exception. This was brutal, climbing and hacking through jungle, fording rivers, crossing chasms on logs and moving at such a pace that I was liquid sweat. People need to see Tom's photos to do it justice. We blitzed this area in 1.5 hours, including passing the river bed where we would have been eaten alive (slept) and hunted shrimps to cook on an open fire. We would have been food as much as any of the shrimps. At one point I fell through a tree log that had decayed and was lucky not to injure myself. Though it was funny. We saw smaller eagles, a few tarantulas (Tom discovered he has mild arachnophobia), millions of birds and butterflies and we hacked so deep into the jungle you had no idea where you were or any idea how to get out. The guide found us the nest and cut down a tree for a better look (easy as that), while climbing a tree himself. We were the first non naturalists to go out there and the first not to see an eagle (the guide suspects the nest may have been destroyed. I reckon it may just not perform for amateurs). Apparently the Indians used to shoot them as bad omens, it takes three years for a chick to learn to fly (no wonder they don't replenish easily) and there are only about 25 pairs left in the Darien (Its only real habitat). Likely it may be exitinct before I return next time and after 2 hours there it was sad not to catch a glimpse. We did the jungle trek back in the dark, complete with multiple spiders and fireflies. We found our dugout canoe (a slightly larger one) and proceeded to head in the wrong direction on the river. It took me ages to work out from my Spanish that the village was on a bend and we were just going to enter from the other side. I was wondering where he was taking us. There are crocodiles in the river as well and I was worried about being smashed by the big cargo boat as it departed on the river that night. As I said to Tom. We were in a dugout canoe, in the dark, with a flashlight, surrounded by crocodiles. Very different. We then hiked back to the village while he expalined he had first come across the eagles while working on his pig farm and then there was 10 minutes of solid Spanish that I have no idea what was said. All the time we were avoiding these monster mosquitoes that can bite right through your clothes. So there was no protection and Tom and I only had one old Zimbabwean malaria tablet each. Both of us are a little sick now as well. Though I suspect its Dengue Fever if its anything. When we got back we joined two of the locals for some beers outside the apartment with Dom. We ended up in a huge debate about whether a culture dies if a language dies. I argued it does not have to and somehow seemed to caricature myself as a cultural imperialist who wants only a monoculture. Not my finest debating. We also discovered an interesting quirk in English culture. People will ask about food 'Are you full' and about beer 'are you empty'. It kind of implies that you can never have enough beer because noone ever asks you if you've had enough, while food its the opposite.

In the morning I woke up and grabbed breakfast while the others slept. Then Tom and I set off for $10 a piece to the local crocodile lagoon. This was another hike into the middle of a different type of jungle. One huge spider fell on the guide which made Tom jump and then we found a web covered in about 10 huge bastards. The laguna was covered in dense plantlife, but you could still see crocodile heads poking through and at one point we were at an area that Tom described as prime attacking territory on the waters edge. The guide found a baby crocodile on the side of the lake and we took turns to hold it before the guide threw it back, having failed to lure any of the bigger ones out. Was really cool and brutally hot though. You sweat the moment you step out of the shower on this terrain. When we got back the peacefulness of the village was distrubed by an arriving military helicopter that had arrived possibly to take off a sick kid. We then went to the airstrip where another couple of gringos had arrived, but they had only boated downriver to the mouth of the river. Juan said goodbye to us, we were all weighed on old school counter scales so the plane could take us and we went to wait in the wicker hut that was effectively the terminal. So much less hassle than any of the bigger airports. Flying has not been my forte since American Airlines tried to kill me in New York and this diddy plane did not fill me with confidence. The fact that the runway was effectively lots of rectangular concrete slabs glued together with grass growing out of the middles was also not comforting. On the plus side we got to see the plane land (late as usual) and bounce down the runway. It was twin engine small plane and the local kids manually loaded the luggage. It took 20 passengers and because it was so small we got to sit at the front and effectively watch all of the instruments as we were virtually in the cabin. We got to watch progress on the GPS, the flight was actually pretty smooth, but the best thing was the landing. I was sitting half a metre behind the pilot, dead in the centre. Effectively I got to watch a real landing like a flight simulator out of the krypton factor. Awesome stuff. Overall the Darien was phenomenal and most of ours highlights. It was so different to anywhere else. Everyone was so friendly as tourism has yet to kick in. We were the first non scientists to do most of what we did and we effectively went off the guidebooks to construct our own. This must be how cool travelling was for the pioneering 60s and 70s generation. Now just have to write up Panama City and then give another top 10 as its off to Medellin on wednesday and the second half of the trip.