Lost Worlds (22 page)

It is evening again; the sun scatters strands of golden tinsel across the bay. And wisps of silver cloud, pluming—just for me.

Thank you, little lost world of Barbuda.

Lost in the Golden Time

The idea of the Pan American Highway has always intrigued me. Tim Cahill’s record-breaking auto road odyssey with Gary Sowerby from its southern endpoint in Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego to the last few feet of bumpy track by the Beaufort Sea in northern Alaska (
Road Fever—A High Speed Travelogue
, Random House, 1990) only increased my fascination at this route, over fifteen thousand miles long, passing through such a kaleidoscopic wealth of scenic and cultural variations from latitude 50° S to latitude 70° N.

Conceived by the Pan American Highway Congress in 1925 and boasting a spectacular array of engineering and logistical feats, this amazing road has one glitch, a place where it surrenders its magnificent continuity and admits defeat against enormous topographical obstacles. That place is the Darien Gap in Panama, where Central and South America meet in a narrow and pernicious jungle, mountain, and swamp-clogged peninsula less than 100 miles wide and 150 miles long.

One traveler described it back in the sixties as “packed with incredibly dense vegetation, threaded with rivers and streams, and thought to harbor head-hunting Indians as well as poisonous snakes…the Darien Gap has long frustrated every attempt to travel the full length of the Pan American Highway.”

On most world maps you can barely make out the region at all. You wonder what all the fuss is about. But its impact on the highway is unmistakable. After crossing the tortured wilds of Patagonia, the notorious Atacama Desert of Chile, the western fringes of the Amazonian Basin, and a dozen other places once thought to be impassable, the road gives up at the port of Turbo in Colombia and travelers are obliged to spend tedious days arranging transit on a ship to Colón at the northern end of the Panama Canal. And all to avoid the terrors of this 150-mile-long “gap”!

Lurid reports have trickled back from world wanderers about this place. “A hellhole,” “the worst jungle in the world,” and even (to borrow Winston Churchill’s description of the Soviet Union) “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

In spite of its notorious reputation, little has been written about the Darien, and the place remains a tantalizing lost world—an ideal candidate for my explorations.

And so—off I went to Panama, hiking boots polished, backpack brimming, and expectations exhilarated by recent press tales of defeated expeditions and the strange habits of native tribes somewhere deep in the gloom and swampy morasses of this truly enigmatic region.

Panama City, following the graft and kleptocratic regime of Noriega, was not a place to dally in. Beyond the high-rise patina of urban sophistication on the edge of the shantytowns and around the vulture-encrusted rubble heaps, there was a mood of anarchy and creeping chaos—too many booze-or drug-crazy youths in clapped-out cars roaring around the city looking for something to distract them from the stupor of the streets. Many of the stores, looted and decimated by the locals during the U.S. “invasion,” were still boarded up. Banks, the lifeblood of Panama City, were open but seemed to sport more security guards than customers. Highways were littered strips, the haunt of packs of wild dogs by night and their human equivalents during the day.

I found little reason to linger and, after making my travel plans known to the disinterested authorities, I was relieved to be busbound heading east to the end of the road at the village of Yaviza. Finally I was off to the Darien to satisfy a decade of personal curiosity.

The first eighty or so miles were tolerable enough as I bounced along with a dozen Indian-featured passengers in a gaily painted minibus of a species known to older Panamanians as
chivas
or “nanny goats.” Salsa music blasted from a cracked speaker above the driver’s head. He only had the one tape, which he played over and over again, although it wouldn’t have made much difference if he’d had a whole library of salsa cassettes—that stuff all sounds the same to me. An endless frantic bongo-and-brass racket whose frenetic energy drove passengers into a deep stupor. Sweaty too. The music seems to exude heat and, even with all the windows open, I sat in moist misery wondering why so many of my “lost world” adventures seem to take place in such torrid climes. Next time, I vowed, I was going to stick to the cold places—maybe the Falkland Islands or Greenland or even Antarctica itself. This Yorkshire body, with genes generated in the cool Irish bog country of County Cork, does not adapt well to perpetual saunabath sorties. Maybe there’s a subconscious masochistic intent to my wanderings. Maybe there are deep-seated guilts in my psyche that need to be expunged by the torment and torpor of travel in such uncomfortable places. A hair-shirt harangue for an overly hedonistic life? Maybe even….

The road ended abruptly. Without any warning we bumped off the edge of the tar and onto a corrugated mud track, formed into peaks and troughs and ditches by trucks and getting worse by the minute. At first the driver didn’t appear to even acknowledge the sudden change and careened along even faster. He was an aggressive, arrogant fellow who called himself Zolo! (yes—he pronounced his name with the exclamation mark), blasting through mud sluices and skimming over the ruts in what looked like a frantic effort to lift the minibus off the ground and establish a kind of gravity-defeating hovercraft ride that would bring us to our destination in a state of suspended animation.

I had to give the man credit. A few times he almost made it, as we seemed to float weightlessly above the craters before crashing to earth with a jarring crunch and ominous creaking of springs and chassis. But at least we were on level ground. I’ve had enough bus-riding experiences in Central and South America to last most of this lifetime and they were invariably on narrow mountain roads undefined by anything so practical as guardrails. As a result you feel to be hanging by a few centimeters of bald rubber to the edge of precipe and canyons, cutting sharp corners with a precision guaranteed to come splat to splat with anything traveling in an equally foolhardy manner in the opposite direction.

Somewhere deep in my backpack I usually carry a tiny Saint Christopher pendant presented to me by my grandfather, who realized that he was largely to blame for releasing the wanderlust in me during my formative years (he was a
National Geographic
nut and made me one too). He felt a need, I suppose, to assuage his guilt by giving me this token of saintly protection. Usually I don’t wear the thing. I have a distinct aversion to men draped in chains and trinkets. But always—on Latin American mountain highways—I make an exception and slip it around my neck, under my shirt. I’ve read countless and very bloody accounts of busloads of peasants and adventurous backpackers being pulped in remote valleys after vain attempts at flying, off and over the edge of these notorious roads. But this time, as I said, we were on level ground and somehow Zolo’s attempts to become airborne seemed far less threatening.

Then he became a mere mad mortal again as we hit the first mud hole and sank below the wheels in a pool of thick gooey liquid that stank of festering vegetation and ripe sewage.

Zolo took the incident personally, cursing and raving at the track as the undercarriage of the bus steamed and the engine stalled and we sat for a few moments of silence in the sweltering heat.

Then he must have said—rather shouted—some magic word at the passengers, for one by one they began to leave their seats and their bundles and baskets (and a cage with three cocks in it) and shuffle down the aisle, out of the door, into the mud pool. They were like automatons. They didn’t even try to leap for the dry high ground at the edge of the track. They just stepped right in the goo as if paddling into the ocean. A few rolled up their dusty, stained trousers, but most didn’t even bother with that meager refinement.

The hell with it. I was damned if I was going to get out of the bus into that stinking morass.

Then Zolo directed his anger toward me, as I was the only passenger left sitting, holding tightly onto my backpack. And—surprise, surprise—I obeyed unquestioningly just like the others, shuffling down the aisle, trying to leapfrog the mud hole and failing miserably. I sank up to my knees in the stuff. The other passengers, who had been sitting mute for the first three hours of the journey, now decided it was time for a little light relief at my expense. Their laughter and giggles and ribald comments could have turned me into a raving nut case, like the driver, but after a second or two’s reflection I began to see the situation from their point of view and decided that we all looked pretty silly wallowing about in the goo, wondering what to do next. So I laughed along with them.

Zolo took charge again, replacing his anger with a fascistlike dictatorial role as he instructed where, when, and how to push the bus forward through the mud hole. And as we gave it our all, heaving and huffing like pyramid-building slaves, he stood dry and detached at the top of the steps issuing more orders and disappearing every so often to try to restart the recalcitrant engine.

Slowly—very, very slowly—we pushed two tons of deadweight machinery through that fifty-foot-long swamp of brown molasses until, ten long minutes later, it stood dripping and decorated in a Pollock frenzy of splattered globs on top of a dry stretch of track. Zolo managed to get the engine roaring again, spraying most of us with jets of steaming liquid earth and exhaust fumes. Then, rather than wait for us, he began to move the bus down the road, leaving us to chase after it and haul ourselves back on board in a Keystone Kops scene of utter confusion.

Strangely, rather than tear the driver limb from limb as any normal load of New York bus riders might understandably do, the mud-caked passengers returned morosely to their seats to await the next disaster. Which, of course, occurred within minutes of the first and required even more exertion on our parts.

After the third mud hole we were all beyond hope. Fatigue and frustration had eradicated any hint of protest. Our only link to sanity was to seal our thinking, feeling minds and set our mutual goal on getting through this series of morasses and into Yaviza before the cantinas closed. For every time we shuffled out of the bus and into the mud and then back into the bus again I mentally added another two frost-coated bottles of beer to my table at the first cantina I came to at our final destination.

By the time we arrived, late in the evening (after ten hours to cover 140 miles), I had accumulated a total of twelve frothy promises and actually managed to get through five of them before going to look for a place to stay in this village on the edge of nowhere.

Yaviza truly feels like the end of the road. A place where the dreams of its nine hundred mainly black inhabitants come to die and to be buried in the humid torpor and boozy languor of terminal apathy and hopelessness. I rarely saw anyone smiling in this ramshackle town of pastel-painted, mold-flecked shacks and weed-strewn streets which ended abruptly on the edge of the mangrove-fringed Tuira River. If this had been in Haiti I’d have been tempted to wonder if the residents had been zombied into catatonic trancelike states. I felt I was walking among the living dead and after a day or so I even gave up walking. At least Panama City had energy and verve; Yaviza had unbearable heat, mosquitoes, cheap beer, and little else. According to historical records Balboa is said to have constructed a boat-building facility here in 1514, using the tidal Tuira to carry his craft down to the Pacific. From the look of the lethargy of the place it was hard to imagine anyone having the energy nowadays for such an ambitious undertaking.

I needed a canoe and a couple of guides. Nobody, except those seeking an early end to their lives, enters the Darien without some kind of local help. And I was lucky enough in that respect. After two days of increasing desperation I was introduced to a couple of Cuna Indians who had come to Yaviza to transact some mysterious trading arrangements involving a boatload of bundles wrapped in banana fronds and tied with hairy hemp ropes. I have seen such bundles in other parts of the tropical world and decided not to inquire too intensively as to their contents. “Medicine” seems to be the popular euphemism and I left it at that. I’ve seen “medicine” in many different forms and, who knows, maybe the Indians were delivering a new jungle-harvested panacea for cancer or AIDS. I’d like to think it was something like that.

But at least their boat, a native piragua hacked from a tree trunk and powered by a rusty outboard motor (but more often by pole), would leave empty, relieved of its bundles, and the two men agreed to take me with them through a part of the Darien as far as their destination, somewhere deep in the jungle.

First impressions of the region were not encouraging. In spite of strict government regulations forbidding logging and the decimation of the jungle for cattle ranching, no one seems surprised by battered trucks hauling enormous loads of old growth lumber out of the wilderness. Panama’s land-hungry
campesino
peasants also see this as a promised land, a place to “slash-and-burn,” to stake a claim to their own patch of earth and wrench themselves free from Panama’s poverty cycle.

Far more exotic claims of “golden cities” and “all the wealth of the Orient” led such early explorers as Cortez, Balboa, Columbus, and Drake to this tangled land. Columbus is said to have had “a most strange attack of madness” here during his fourth “New World” exploration. Drake had a petulant fit here in 1596 when his “world treasury of gold” once more proved elusive, and Balboa was hanged in 1517 from a banyan tree shortly after discovering the Pacific Ocean on the west side of the peninsula.

Ironically, gold was discovered much later at Cana in such vast quantities that it became known as the El Dorado of the New World. Remnants of old mining machinery and a steam locomotive brought in from Britain more than one hundred years ago can still be spotted among the turbulent scrub of the forest which, as is its nature, was struggling to reinvent itself and obliterate all evidence of prior rape and pillage.