by Levison Wood
‘Chinga,’ was his response. I knew it meant something very rude in Spanish.
And then he launched into a story that I found very difficult to believe. But I suppose he had no reason to make it up.
‘Three days ago, I was on the beach in Tulum with some English girls. They were clients actually. We were doing a photo shoot. Did I ever tell you what happened to my business after Africa?’ he said.
‘Yes, I seem to remember it didn’t work out.’
‘Yeah, exactly, I had to sell everything. It was a tough time, but you know what, it was worth it. Every moment in Africa was amazing and I saw things that nobody gets to see. Those experiences are worth more than a few cameras and lights, so even though I lost it all, I don’t mind. But I had to get a proper job.’
‘Sorry about that,’ was all I could reply.
‘There I was, in my late thirties, working for some bastard making all the money. But I was the one doing all the work, seriously, everything. It was a production and he just sat on his ass in Miami watching the dollars come in, and there was me making coffee for the models.’
‘It could have been worse,’ I suggested.
‘Models!’ He almost sounded angry now. ‘People think, being a fashion photographer, I sit under a coconut tree with a piña colada, getting drunk with super-hot girls in bikinis on either side of me.’
It had crossed my mind.
‘No, I have to make coffee for them, and order their taxis and ask them what kind of skinny latte they want. You know, there was this one girl who only ate cabbage soup. Cabbage soup! She’s like a rabbit, Lev. Well anyway, one day, I’d had enough. I was going to quit, but the universe had a different idea. The boss of the client’s production company approached me and asked if I’d like to work directly with them. Of course, I felt a bit bad on my own boss – he might have thought I was stealing his customers, but it wasn’t like that. They asked me, and of course, I said yes. Now I run these massive productions myself. I do all the same work, but earn ten times more.’
‘So, you’re doing well?’
‘Very well, I’ll show you my houses when you come to Mexico.’
‘So, you’re up for it then?’ I asked him, eager to get to the point.
‘Let me finish the story,’ he said.
‘Sure.’
‘Anyway, as I was saying. There I was, three days ago, on the beach in Tulum with some English girls, clients. We were doing a photo shoot for some fashion magazine. And one of these English girls started to complain about something. I asked her what was wrong, and she said that she’d lost her book. A book, she said. I mean, there’s lots of things to complain about, but it was only a book and we were busy. We had models to film and bikinis to try on and rabbit food to arrange. But no, she wanted her book. She said she’d nearly finished it. We looked everywhere; in the hotel, in the minibus, by the swimming pool. It was lost, I told her, now back to work. She was sad, she said. She said I’d like the book, it was about a guy travelling and stuff and he’d been to Africa as well, travelling all the way to Malawi. Anyway, of course she found it. It was in her bag after all, the silly girl. She showed me the book. It was called Walking the Nile by Levison Wood.’
Alberto laughed down the phone.
‘It’s true. That was three days ago, and I had no idea what you’ve been doing the last few years, but now I can see. So now you ring me up, asking to come and drive the length of Central America, what choice do I have? It’s, how do you say in English? Fate, destiny? Everything happens for a reason, and so, of course I’ll come. But I’ve just sold my chopper motorbike, what will we drive?’
I broke the news to him.
‘Erm, we’re not driving. We’re walking.’
The line went quiet again.
‘Chinga,’ he said.
‘I’ll see you in six weeks.’
4
Meeting an Explorer
Apart from the jaguar, there are no large predators in Central America to worry about; an absence of which would represent, I felt, a great improvement on life along the Nile. Having said that, there are much the same amoebic and bacillary dysenteries to deal with, yellow and blackwater and dengue fevers, malaria – of course – and cholera, typhoid, hepatitis, tuberculosis and rabies. Then there’s some very special extras. Bot fly, for instance, whose larvae bore into your scalp, eat your flesh from the inside and then, forty days later emerge as inch-long maggots. Chagas disease, likewise, is rather gruesome. Here, the assassin bugs bite you on the face, and then, gorged, defecate next to the puncture. When you scratch the resulting itch, you rub the shit and their cargo of protozoa into your bloodstream and then between one and twenty years later, you die from incurable brain damage.
River blindness is no less pleasant. Blackfly transmit a particularly determined kind of worm that migrate into your eyeball. Then there’s leishmaniosis – a flesh-rotting disease, a bit like leprosy, which eats away at your warm extremities. Let’s not forget Zika virus either, which emerged as a freak exotic malady in 2015, causing an epidemic of shrunken-headed babies across Latin America.
I asked my friend and tropical-disease expert Dr Will Charlton what he thought my chances were. I was assured that if I didn’t succumb to at least one or two of the above, then I should consider myself very lucky indeed. Of equal concern was, of course, all the stuff that I would likely encounter in or around my jungle campsites to come. Vampire bats have been known to bite humans and transmit rabies, giving rise to the zombie myth. The bushmaster viper can grow up to twelve feet long, but generally bites only if you stand on it. The fer-de-lance (seven and a half feet) can be more aggressive and chase you across the road. Anacondas are likely to be found in the rivers and will crush you to death.
In Belize, the tarantulas can grow to the size of saucers; black widow spiders inhabit every drainpipe and are fifteen times as poisonous as a rattlesnake, whereas bullet ants are a mere nuisance with only twenty-four hours of excruciating, debilitating agony on the cards. My personal horror was the prospect of yet more crocodiles lurking in the depths of the swamps I would inevitably have to wade through.
The political situation was no less horrifying. Decapitations in Mexico, stabbings in Belize, forestry wars in Guatemala, murders in Honduras, kidnappings in Nicaragua, hijackings in Panama, and a whole host of drug and gang violence in Colombia. And that’s not to mention the hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes and floods that happen every year in virtually all of those countries. I’d been warned explicitly about the perils of walking through the favelas of Belize city, and the cartel neighbourhoods of San Pedro Sula and the remote lawless border regions of El Petan. But, of course, the most terrifying place of all was the Darién Gap – that squalid stretch of jungle that has been the demise of explorers for centuries, as the poor Scots found out three hundred years ago.
Nowadays, the Darién is barely less inhabitable that it was during those early ill-fated expeditions, in fact it’s probably worse. For fifty years, it’s been the refuge of the guerilla group FARC, who have launched a campaign of violence against the Colombian government from their jungle hideouts. Even now it’s a sanctuary for criminals, gun runners, drug smugglers and human traffickers. Newspapers rarely cover the story of what’s known in NGO circles as ‘the other migrant crisis’. While Europe and the Middle East are in turmoil as the war in Syria rages on, and a steady flow of migrants from Africa try their luck at floating across the Mediterranean, there’s another, equally desperate group of people trying to get into the United States.
While Mexicans have been digging tunnels and jumping fences for years, there were now reports of thousands of migrants, mainly from Cuba but also other parts of Latin America, and even from Bangladesh, Nepal and Afghanistan, making the arduous trek from Colombia into Panama. Of course, they didn’t do it alone, it was part of the vast network of criminal gangs that rule the region with an iron fist – and a Kalashnikov. And they weren’t exactly known for being friendly to outsiders want
ing to nose about their business.
Over the last twenty years, the Darién Gap has swallowed up more people than perhaps anywhere else in the western hemisphere. Stories abound of journalists and backpackers getting kidnapped and released only after months of starvation and psychological torture at the hands of the notorious FARC rebels. Some though, sadly never escape. In 2013 one poor chap, a Swede called Jan Philip Braunisch, set off to attempt to become one of the handful of foreigners to have ever succeeded in crossing the infamous jungle. He’d been enchanted by the impossibility of the task; the fact that it is the only break in the 17,000-mile Pan-American Highway and has defeated armies and conquerors alike for centuries.
Unfortunately for him, he was kidnapped almost immediately upon entering rebel territory and not heard from in over two years. It was only when his family was handed a bag of bones that they discovered he had been executed in the jungle. The suspicious rebels had assumed he was a CIA operative working with the Colombian anti-narcotics units and didn’t want their lucrative trade disrupted. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the FARC systematically targeted Westerners and anyone else they could blackmail to fund their campaign of terror. The journalist Robert Young Pelton spent ten days detained by the gang before they let him loose in Colombia. He was one of the lucky ones. In 2003, he described his experiences to National Geographic the day after he made it home:
The basic problem of the Darién Gap is that it’s one of the toughest hikes there is. It’s an absolute pristine jungle, but it’s got some nasty sections with thorns, wasps, snakes, thieves, criminals, you name it. Everything that’s bad for you is in there … We had probably been travelling a week before it happened … at about 11.44 in the morning, three Kuna Indians passed us on the trail, and all of a sudden we heard automatic gunfire for about three minutes, about a half a mile from us. Our guides ran away – they dropped our stuff and just took off … I suggested we walk into the ambush, as opposed to try to hide or run away … So we decided to talk very loudly in English and keep together as a group and let them know we were coming. It took about a half hour for them to calm down because they were so amped up … they were wired and twitchy, shouting and yelling … they killed four people from Paya, and they burned Púcuro to the ground … The Darién Gap is an extremely dangerous place … It’s used as a conduit for drugs. There are no police there, there’s no military, the trails aren’t marked … The jungle there is not viewed as a place that is pristine and beautiful – it’s looked at as a place where you get killed.
Not exactly reassuring stuff, I thought to myself. It wasn’t just the FARC either; there were dozens of other paramilitary groups and criminal gangs operating in the green vastness of the Darién Gap, making it without a doubt one of the most hostile regions that I was ever likely to encounter. What I needed was the advice of an expert; someone who knew the Darién, who knew the jungle, and could put me in touch with people that could try and help me not to get killed.
He was ramrod straight in a pinstripe Savile Row suit and a Regimental army tie. His polished, black Oxford shoes glinted in the half-light of the summer evening. His perfectly white hair was combed impeccably over a seventy-nine-year-old head.
‘Evening, Colonel,’ I said, being greeted with a vice-like handshake.
‘Let’s sit down,’ he said. ‘This’ll do.’
I was expecting that we would go upstairs to the library, or at least into the tea room, but the Colonel was clearly in a rush and wanted to deal with me as quickly as possible. So, we plonked ourselves down on some ancient wooden chairs in the entrance hall of the Royal Geographical Society in South Kensington.
It is always magical entering the hallowed halls of the society and I have never grown tired of walking along the creaky corridors, looking at the old paintings and busts of the great explorers. All of my Victorian heroes look down from the walls: Baker, Stanley, Burton and Speke. In a side room, where a four-hundred-year-old Chinese map of the world hangs proudly from the wall, is a model of Mount Everest – it is the same one that Edmund Hillary used to plan his famous ascent of the mountain in 1952. I imagine all the fabulous eccentrics to have trodden the same halls and it never ceases to amaze.
Outside, two statues peer down on the unsuspecting tourists from Beijing who are busy photographing the Albert Memorial, having spent the day marvelling at the dinosaurs inside the Natural History Museum. One is David Livingstone, the other Ernest Shackleton. But the RGS usually remains unnoticed; bypassed by the masses.
The Colonel looked every inch the London gentleman. He was the kind of explorer that looked just as comfortable sipping whisky in a Pall Mall club as he was in a pith helmet in the jungle. He reminded me of the explorers of old, a last bastion of a noble creed in these changing times. I’d read his book years ago. The front cover has a photograph of him in a safari suit, holding a pair of binoculars, while riding an elephant. He used to be ‘the chap at Sandhurst in charge of adventure training’: which, in the words of the Commandant of the time meant ‘sending cadets overseas, to the benefit of their character, and at the least possible detriment to the Empire.’
‘Blashers’, as he was known to those allowed into his inner circle, was something of an enigma. He lived in Dorset with his wife and dogs, and had only just discovered the Internet in this, his seventh decade. This was the man who almost single-handedly invented white-water rafting, when, as a Captain in the Royal Engineers, he led the first team to descend the Blue Nile and realising he was going to be late for a tea party, floated down the river on an improvised inflatable tyre.
This was the very same chap, who, being fascinated by the musical sensibilities of the Wai Wai tribe of Guyana, had decided to hack a path through 350 miles of rainforest to deliver a grand piano to their jungle hideout. Not only that, but he had returned several times to make sure the thing was properly tuned.
Colonel John Blashford-Snell, OBE, veteran of thirty-seven years of service in the Army, founder of the Scientific Exploration Society and Operation Raleigh, and leader of over one hundred expeditions; he’d once even designed a pith helmet ‘to meet the needs of all explorers’.
‘So, you’re having a go at the stopper, are you?’ he said, with the clipped tones of an old public-school boy. ‘El Tapon, in Spanish. It’s what the locals call the Darién Gap.’
‘I certainly hope so,’ I replied, not wanting to sound too confident, given the fact that he was one of the few people to have completed this expedition and that was over forty years ago.
I needn’t have been so coy.
‘Well, you’ll have a jolly good time, I’m sure.’ He attempted a smile, but it only served to cause a creaked wince in his weathered face. He was here for a meeting with someone very important, so I knew I didn’t have much time.
‘Did you bring a map?’
I opened a 1975 atlas of Central America. He shook his head, tutting, and pulled a laptop close instead, where Google Earth displayed the digital route in bright red.
‘I went this way, you see, to the east a bit and over the Atrato river, but of course I had a Land Rover with me, which made things complicated, so you should have it easier.’ His ancient finger prodded the screen.
‘How many men did you take?’ I asked, wondering how on earth he managed to get a vehicle through an impenetrable swamp.
‘Oh, rather a lot, sixty perhaps. A few whites and plenty of natives. Ended up having to get some prisoners from a hard-labour camp in the jungle, though, we needed all the help we could get. Got an excellent deal with the Commandant – he gave them to me for a fortnight for a crate of scotch.’
My God, I thought. He’s mad.
‘We only lost seven on the last trip,’ he said, barely raising an eyebrow.
‘Lost seven?’ I asked. ‘Who?’
‘Our Colombian escort.’
‘You mean they went missing?
‘Oh, no,’ he carried on, ‘ambushed. Killed the lot of them, they did. Very inconvenient as they were brin
ging our weekly resupply. Poor buggers.’
‘What? Who killed them?’
‘Bandits, I imagine. Or FARC, perhaps, truth is we never did find out. Had to push on, you see.’
He opened his briefcase and pulled out a folder, handing it to me. It was a photocopy of the expedition diary. I flicked through with interest and he pointed out some black-and-white photographs from the expedition. Everyone in the pictures was in jungle fatigues. This had been very much a military-run expedition, in conjunction with the Panamanian and Colombian armies. All of the images looked like they had been plucked straight from a Vietnam war album.
‘Well, there basically was the beginnings of a war at that time. It got much worse though,’ he said.
One of the photographs showed the famous Land Rover in the middle of a forest river valley, being driven up some ladders onto an inflatable raft.
‘All bloody rivers and swamps, so we had to float the thing most of the way.’
I didn’t dare ask why he had decided to take a Land Rover in the first place.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked, pointing at another picture of a white man surrounded by boxes of equipment.
‘That’s the expedition cameraman. Bloody hard job carrying cameras in those days, all film, none of this digital nonsense back then. Game fellow, he was, walking backwards the whole time. Only problem was that he was a vegetarian. We were all eating monkeys and iguanas, and he lived on nothing but onion rings.’
‘I don’t plan on taking any vegetarians,’ I said.
‘Good. The Kuna won’t tolerate it.’
‘The Kuna?’
‘The Kuna tribe. Troublesome people, they are. They have rings through their noses and believe in dragons, but nowadays all they’re interested in is the money.’
‘Did they give you any hassle?’ I asked.
‘Oh, just the usual aggro over food and supplies. Although in Colombia we did have a gunboat escort us upriver, so they generally gave us a wide berth.’
