Lost Worlds (23 page)

But once in the piragua and moving southeast against the flow of the Tuira River, we soon entered a tumultuous world of thick rain forest entangled in vines and creepers. The river was full following a recent series of storms in the distant mountains along the Colombian border, but the two Indians had an uncanny knack of avoiding the strong currents of the outer bank and easing us through the shallow stretches where the water trickled over boulders and rocks clearly visible in the crystalline stream.

At last I’m really off, I thought, as clouds of bright blue and yellow butterflies flurried past. Into the deep unknown, I thought. Maybe even retracing some of the routes of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century explorers….

But my thoughts and elation were premature. We had barely begun, a mere two hours on the river, when I heard, boomboxing through the forest, the sound of salsa music once again. And as we rounded a bend I saw another forlorn little village perched high on the riverbank.

“El Real!” my two guides shouted at me excitedly as if I’d be delighted to find a rest spot so soon after leaving Yaviza.

In a form of communication we had developed during our short journey—a haphazard mishmash of winks, nods, and other gestures coupled with a dozen or so words that sounded vaguely Spanish—they explained that they had business to conduct in the town and that we would be staying overnight. They suggested that rather than pitching my pathetic little pup tent I might want to stay at the local hotel, and insisted it was not only inexpensive but well served by ladies whose attributes (if their gestures were anything to go by) were generously endowed, and whose ardor would not be daunted by the appalling heat.

A line of naked Indian children with faces painted in odd black markings, particularly around the eyes, stood mute and motionless at the top of the steep bank and watched us closely as we ascended a precarious staircase formed of crudely notched tree trunks. As soon as I arrived at the top, puffing with my overloaded pack, they squealed and scattered.

Ahead of me were groupings of simple timber and thatch huts raised on stilts. Some had roll-up walls of bamboo slats that were kept raised during the day, Samoan-style, revealing all the intricacies of Indian domestic life.

These were Choco Indians, my guides told me before vanishing off among the huts to transact their mysterious business. “Not like our Cuna people. They do not wear clothes and they still hunt with bows and blowpipes and arrows of poison. Be careful,” they warned.

Two elderly men, sprawled in hemp hammocks, watched me sleepily. They wore loincloths and little else while women were more modestly dressed in old T-shirts (and some not) and sarong-like skirts. Most of them were cooking on open fires. The smell of frying plantains wafted through the scrub surrounding the village. It was hard to believe that we were only 150 miles or so from the raucous din of Panama City, although the crackly salsa music from behind the thatch-roofed huts reminded me that twentieth-century urban influence spreads rapidly even into the remotest parts of the globe. My previous travels have revealed VCRs in the wilds of inner Mongolia, Bruce Springsteen posters in the almost inaccessible tribal settlements of Zaire, Big Apple sweatshirts in unmapped Himalayan hamlets. Our global village is no longer a McLuan fantasy but becoming more and more a reality of life with every new electronic innovation. And I—an incurable romantic—usually resent it.

In spite of its sleepy spirit today, El Real has a remarkably dramatic history which began three centuries ago when the town became the key shipping point for gold mined in the region. Boats carried the valuable cargo down the Tuira out into San Miguel Bay and up along the coast, past the Perlas Archipelago, to Panama City. A tempting prospect indeed for pirates and buccaneers who plagued the region. English privateers burned the poor little town to the ground in 1680 in frustration when they realized they had missed the shipping of over three hundred pounds of gold to Panama City by a mere three days. Then came more raids by other European pirates, rebellions by local slaves transported here from Africa long before the notorious American slave trade, and attacks by Choco and Cuna Indians, who resented the intrusion of strangers into their tribal territories.

The El Real of today is a far more tranquil place and I even found the hotel—a hotel that boasted a restaurant with no furniture and no food, a bar with no beer, a toilet with no toilet, and rooms with no keys. Decoration consisted primarily of pinup photographs, four of which had been elaborately framed like old masters.

“There are no other guests here, so your bag is very safe,” I was assured by the young boy at what I took to be the reception desk. He inspected my passport with the overblown seriousness of a border guard waiting for his “tip” and said my photograph was
muy
something or other, which didn’t sound at all complimentary.

After a wash in a sink with a single tap that released pallid brown water in a hesitant trickle, I decided to go in search of the salsa music. Not really because I wanted to but because it seemed to be the only source of life in this odd little place.

“Main Street” was a pleasantly haphazard mix of more huts on stilts topped with untidy fringes of palm-thatched roofs interspersed with gardens and flowering trees. Aromas intermingled in the dusky air—more frying plantains, strong cigar smoke, and a couple of stalls selling plantains (of course) and some soupy concoction of maize, vegetables, and oval chunks of white meat. Three discarded and still bloody snakeskins nearby may have been the source of the meat, but I never tasted it to find out. Families sat in the shadowy recesses of their verandas and smiled at me as I wandered by, following a flow of villagers making their way to the source of the music. There seemed to be considerable activity for such a small community. Then I realized it was Saturday night. Time for the weekly
pico-pico
dance.

Illuminated in Christmas-spirited garlands of pink, blue, and yellow lights, the dance hall was already a sweaty crush of churning bodies dancing and stamping to the ceaseless surge of salsa. As the crowd thickened they turned up the volume to such a pitch it was hard to distinguish the instruments from the crackles of overloaded speakers.

I edged over to the bar and bought a lukewarm beer. So far I’d felt pretty inconspicuous in the mélange, but as I lolled against the counter I became aware of a group of men gathering around me.

“You got cigar?” one of them asked me.

I was smoking quite an acceptable Panamanian brand of cheroot and saw no reason not to share them. My generosity brought me instant popularity.

“An’ my frien’s. They like cigar too.”

Five cigars vanished in as many seconds. Apparently I had now bonded with the group and they pinned me against the bar, puffing away happily on my cheroots and asking me a rapid-fire series of questions in a Spanish dialect I hadn’t yet learned to decipher.

After a while the gist of their queries became clear. Every time a woman passed with anything approaching passable features, they would gurgle and grunt and gesticulate their hips in a manner so suggestive that even Elvis would have blushed.

Then one of the men vanished and returned a minute later with a large Indian lady, possibly in her early thirties, wrapped in a flowery sarong and showing distinct signs of wobbly intoxication.

“You dance with?” he asked, nodding rapidly. I had no wish to offend, so I took the outstretched hand of the unsteady lady and found myself being dragged into the thickest churn of bodies.

Now, I’m more of a foxtrot and quickstep dancer myself, and quite a good one, or so I’ve been told. The lady quickly realized that I had no idea of the subtleties of salsa and, having clutched me as tight as a boa constrictor to her ample figure, swirled and spun me like a bag of lumpy laundry. I tried as best I could to avoid her feet and flow with the incessant beat, but it was just too fast and too hot and I could feel my interest fading fast. “
Bueno, bueno
,” she cooed as she pulled me closer and rotated her broad hips across my torso. I tried to smile and keep up with her. “
Bueno—
ooh. Chi-chi-chi.
Bueno, bueno
, cha-cha-cha.” Her endless endearments somehow kept me going. I couldn’t escape anyway. There were gyrating bodies doing the most evocatively erotic things all around me. Although my smile was rapidly becoming a grimace, I persevered, hoping there might be a quick end to the tune when I could escape, back to the benevolence of my beer. But salsa is endless. Maybe it’s all on loop tape that just keeps playing until bodies collapse in utter exhaustion. Except that no one else looked exhausted. As the music pounded on, the faces of the dancers became ecstatic. Eyes were closed. Heads, bodies, arms, and legs—all moved faster and faster. The room was Hades hot, but no one noticed. The dancing went on and on like some kind of African tribal rite and I was trapped in the middle of it all, belly-to-bellied by this buxom matron with her endless
bueno, buenos
.

Somehow, eons later, I staggered back to the bar, only to find that someone had finished my beer for me. I ordered another and my dancing companion, whom I thought I’d managed to escape, rubbed my arm and made it clear that she felt entitled to a bottle too.

One of my previous male companions returned, still smoking my cigar.

“Good, no?”

I nodded and tried to brush away the sweat that was now tumbling off my forehead in waterfalls.

“She likes you,” he said, and began his nodding antics again. “You want?”

No, I really didn’t want. I didn’t want the Indian lady, I didn’t want any more dancing, and I didn’t particularly want his company any longer.

“No, no,” I said. “I go now.”

The nodding stopped and he looked horrified and confused.

“No want? To hotel. She go with you.”

“No—honestly. I think I’ve hurt my leg.” I tried to demonstrate my limping technique in the press of bodies at the bar, but he didn’t seem to understand.

As if by magic another Indian girl appeared—younger and obviously pregnant. She looked as sullen and dejected as I felt.

“You like this one?”

“No—no. Listen, I really have to go.”

He was nonplussed. Obviously his role as pimp or whatever was being maligned. Two other men—big men—were pushing their way through the crowd with their eyes very much fixed on me. This, I realized, could become a little unpleasant.

“Well”—I tried to sound cheerful and nonchalant—“thank you so much. I’ve enjoyed meeting your friends. I must go back now. My leg is very bad.
Muy, muy malo….
”

He muttered something menacing as I turned to leave and I felt his hand grab my arm. Oh, well, I thought, here we go again. Time for another beer-hall brawl. I swung around quickly with my ready-for-battle look, expecting the worst. Fortunately, he backed off, uncertain what to do next.

I smiled and gave him another cigar, hoping that would repair his injured pride.

He grunted something but took it anyway and I left him standing with his two ladies.

I made it through the throng to the main door and regained the relative sanity of the street. I half expected the men to follow me and was very relieved when they didn’t.

The cool night air brushed my wet body like a gentle fan and I made my way back to the hotel, acknowledging the quiet
olas
from the families on the verandas and whistling a little to suggest a nonchalance I didn’t really feel.

True to their word my Cuna Indian guides arrived early the following morning before the heat hit and we strolled down to the river past the debris of last night’s antics. Salsa was still playing somewhere back in the village and a few inebriated souls sat on the steps of their stilt houses or wandered the streets like lost dogs.

I was happy to say good-bye to El Real and hoped that finally we’d leave these last remnants of questionable civilization and enter the Darien proper.

And we did. Quite abruptly too. Five minutes after waving farewell to another straggle of children on top of the steep riverbank, we were skimming up the Tuira through a tunnel of vine-festooned forest. Back in the shadowy recesses behind the riot of river vegetation, I could hear monkeys calling to one another. Butterflies bobbed about us again—red and black ones this time—and the cries of unfamiliar birds echoed in the canopy.

In the shallower sections of the river the motor was turned off and the two Cunas poled us through with the grace of straw-boater-clad punters on the streams of Cambridge University in England. At one point the river broadened and, as none of the channels seemed deep enough even for poling, we all hopped out and pushed the piragua through the gentle current. Sand trickled between my toes and the water felt warm and silky. I expected onslaughts of mosquitoes on our exposed bodies, but strangely, there were none.

The pushing was easy and I felt a surge of special pleasure again that comes to travelers when they sense the adventure they longed for beginning to happen. I think the two Cunas picked up my mood and they smiled too as we eased the craft up the soft river bottom.

The day drifted on, punctuated by periods of poling and pushing. The forest grew thicker now, although we saw occasional clearings of Indian gardens and, more ominously, the smoke from slash-and-burn fires that plague the western fringes of the Darien.

You can hardly blame the peasants for wanting to be pioneer-farmers in this nation of go-nowhere poverty. But, in their thousands, they are decimating one of the last of the earth’s great wildernesses (great, that is, in ecological values, not size). And, as research has proven over and over again, they end up no better than before they began their machete-felling and burning and creation of small but very short-lived farms.

It may seem odd, but in this fetid environment of teeming plant life, the soils are invariably ill-suited to intensive agriculture. The story goes as follows: Peasants are often driven out of other small farms well away from the rain forests by avaricious cattle ranchers who acquire their lands by fair means or foul to raise thousands of steers to satisfy the ever-increasing worldwide demand for beef. Driven eastward in their search for new land, they slash and burn into the forest perimeters and plant their subsistence crops of bananas, corn, and maize on poor soils nourished for a short while by the ash from the burnings. Within three or four years the soil nutrients are used up by the cultivated plants or are washed away by the two hundred inches of rain a year received by this region. So in desperation the peasants turn to creating small grass pastures, which they then sell to the land-hungry ranchers. Invariably this second phase ends with overgrazing. The leached soils are then abandoned as the process moves ever eastward, even into the foothills of the Darien and San Blas Mountains which form a four-thousand-foot-high wall between the threatened forest and the vast liquid landscape of the marshes fed by Colombia’s Atrato River and its tributaries.