Walking the Americas

by Levison Wood

  ‘A gunboat?’

  Now I was in awe, and suddenly felt woefully unprepared. I didn’t have a gunboat.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t much use to be honest. The thing sank with its crew. You’re far better without,’ he said in a comforting tone.

  But the truth was that I was relatively ill-equipped. Not only did I lack a gunboat, I also didn’t have an army of prisoners traded for scotch, or a sixty-man backup team, or a light aircraft capable of parachute resupply, or the full backing of the British Army, not to mention resupply teams from the Colombian and Panamanian military. I read in his report that he’d carried boxes of dynamite to blow holes in the jungle.

  ‘Well, the dynamite was quite useful,’ he conceded. ‘See if you can get hold of some. In the Congo, we were up against some rather frightful tribals. Armed to the teeth with guns and spears and they were always shooting at us, so we had to scare them off. We didn’t fire back. We put on little displays, like getting the plane to fly low over the jungle and we chucked bricks out of it. Then I’d hide my engineers in the bushes and set off sticks of dynamite, so they thought the aircraft could drop bombs. Bit of theatrical action, you see, never goes amiss. Yes, see if you can get some dynamite.’

  I replied that I’d ask around.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll have a cracking time,’ he said, genuinely.

  I was flicking through the report as he spoke and noticed a picture of him in full military fatigues topped by a white pith helmet, and a contingent of chaps marching in three columns behind him. It occurred to me that his idea of a cracking time might be fairly unique.

  ‘If nothing else, you’ll have fun with the Embera,’ he carried on. ‘They’re another tribe with rings through their noses, but less hostile than the Kuna. They’re up for a laugh. I remember it was Burns Night in the jungle, so of course, we had to celebrate. We had some of the Indian guides and their women with us and gave them some haggis and whisky. They seemed to enjoy it. They didn’t quite get the hang of reel dancing, though. There we were in the middle of the jungle with all of these topless girls, tits jiggling all over the place, as the Gay Gordons played on the radio.’

  5

  Departure

  To the north lay almost one thousand miles of unbroken water. I pondered what I would encounter if I were to travel in that direction. Probably the swampy estuary of the Mississippi River, if my calculations were correct. But the rickety little fishing boat that scuttled me along the coast of the northern Yucatán would hardly make it ten miles into the Gulf of Mexico before it would break up in the waves, and it wouldn’t take too long to get eaten by sharks in those tepid waters. And in any case, it was the wrong the direction entirely, I should have been thinking about what was to my left – to the south – instead.

  The boat, powered by a little 45 hp motor, bounced across the frothy waves in a westerly direction, keeping the shore never more than a few hundred metres away, and my mind wandered. It became difficult to focus, difficult to comprehend and accept that I was on yet another life-altering journey, another walk into the unknown. Perhaps it was too much of the sea air, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe I’d bitten off more than I could chew this time.

  It had started less than forty-eight hours before, in the sweltering heat of Cancún.

  ‘Señor,’ said the bell-boy. ‘Press this button here, is very easy.’ The short, dark, twenty-something man in a white frilled shirt smiled patiently as he handed me the plastic control to the air-conditioning. There were far too many buttons to press and try as I might, I couldn’t get the thing to work. Nobody has air-conditioning in London. I’d already lain sweating on the bed for an hour, staring at the pathetic fan that creaked around the ceiling. It did nothing but agitate and swirl the hot air around the room. The sheets of the bed were soaked through and I was too idle to move, let alone exert any mental energy on the remote AC unit. It was only on the fifth attempt to ring reception that my call was answered, and the promise of a porter made things become bearable.

  Even after the ambient temperature had reached a tolerable level, I carried on lying there, still, listening to the noises of a resort that bore no resemblance to the beginnings of what was to come.

  On the bedside table lay stacks of glossy leaflets advertising jetskis, banana boats, parasailing, and some sort of jetpack that propels you out of the water, whilst attached to what can only be described as a giant vacuum cleaner. It promised the full ‘James Bond experience’. Other ‘experiences’ to be had included Coco Bongo’s superhero show, with its comprehensive cast of lycra-clad champions, who, according to the literature, promised to entertain several thousand inebriated revellers, in addition to the lure of as much tequila as you could drink. Señor Frogs adopted a similar approach. Sixty-five-dollar entry got you free drinks as well as luminous face paint, and the option of a T-shirt included in the price. La Platino needed no such affectation and was far more direct: ‘Two-for-one sexy babes’. Happy hour, every hour.

  The Gideon Bible, which was, of course, for one of the most devoutly Catholic countries in the world an essential item in every hotel room, lay hidden beneath the pile, presumably unopened.

  Afternoon wore into evening, but the heat remained. I’ll treat myself to a day on the beach tomorrow, I told myself. For now, I only went as far as the balcony to look down on the scene of paradise below.

  The sun was setting on the lagoon and it cast a deep-maroon glow over the Caribbean sky. The shadows of palm trees were stretched long over the hot tarmac of the famous strip. I could already hear the monotonous thud of music in the beach bars down the road. People would be getting ready to party, I thought. Make-up was undoubtedly being applied by the coachloads of American college girls, and the boys, barely out their teens, were no doubt preparing for the night ahead with buckets of tequila washed down with cheap beer. Part of me wanted to join them in a nostalgic last dash at youth. The other, greater part of me, was resigned to feeling old and I looked forward to an early night in on my own.

  A gecko scuttled across the wall, and I observed as he darted after a limp spider. Below, the stragglers from the beach came wading in. A Mexican family washed their feet in turn at the poolside tap, getting rid of the sand acquired from an afternoon swimming in the glinting shallows. A child carried an inflatable crocodile. Not far away, in the lagoon on the other side of the road, the real things, I pondered, were just waking up for their evening hunt.

  Like the crocodiles, I watched hordes of the young men, livened by their tequila buckets and emboldened with uniform T-shirts, each with his own profanity displayed across the back, as they stormed down the avenue in the direction of La Platino – no doubt contemplating the two-for-one sexy babes. The music got louder as dusk turned to night and the resort came to resemble an open-air flashing disco. As far as the eye could see to the north and south were twenty-storey hotels, enormous white megastructures designed for the sole pursuit of pleasure.

  In between, high walls designated where one hotel stopped and another began, but truth be told, they all looked identical. Palm trees and artificially irrigated cacti poked from rock gardens. Three-tiered swimming pools, all spotlessly perfect, vied for synthetic attraction. A limousine cruised slowly down the strip passing by endless shopping malls, all selling the same nylon hammocks, ceramic geckos, oversized sombreros, tequila shot-glasses, pyramid-shaped keyrings and Lucha Libre wrestling masks. The cargo of this lewd motor car was a pack of pink-tiara-wearing bachelorettes and a bride-to-be on one final vodka-fuelled adventure.

  I sighed. Hardly an auspicious place to begin what was potentially going to be my biggest expedition to date. ‘No, I’m having a night in.’ I looked around the room at the equipment strewn across the floor. Compass, check. Satellite phone, check. Memory cards, spare batteries, jungle boots, machete, first-aid kit, Spot Tracker, diary, daysack, sweat rag, socks, mosquito repellent, head torch, canvas hat, river shoes, tourniquet, field dressing, penknife, cameras, check, check, CHECK. I
packed it all away into the bag, and then, just to be sure, emptied it all out again onto the floor.

  And then I went out in search of a tequila. Just one wouldn’t do any harm.

  The boat sped up and every wave that we smashed through felt like a tsunami. I was soaked through and hungover. Anyone that’s had a tropical hangover knows that they should never do it again. Especially when you have a three-hour boat ride ahead of you. We lurched and banked, if that’s the right term? I’m not a nautical type of chap, and can’t stand the sea at the best of times, never mind after half a bottle of Don Julio. Still, I kept it in and kept my eye on the horizon.

  ‘Cinco minutos,’ shouted Jose, over the noise of the engine. The stern, moustachioed fisherman, my trusty captain for the day, pointed to a small spit of land, and I had never been so glad to see the sight of a beach in my life. They were the first and only words I’d get out of the man the entire journey.

  As the shore got closer, I noticed the knotted mass of mangrove swamps and gnarled scrubland beyond the perfect white sands. For as far as I could see, there was only that: white sands and tangled bushes, as flat as the earth before Columbus and the first Latin navigators proved the theory wrong.

  I thought of those Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards as we came in to anchor. It was on this stretch of coastline that history was made. Columbus beached at Hispaniola, now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in 1492 on his famous journey. His later voyages took him to the Bahamas, Cuba, and within sight of the Honduras coast. The Caribbean islands didn’t take long to become a base for further explorations, and with them, conquest.

  Twenty-five years later, in 1517 a Spaniard called Cordoba landed with a group of men a few miles to the east of where I was currently speeding along. His views were undoubtedly rather similar to mine. Little has changed in the barren landscape of the Yucatán. It was him that gave the place its name, and probably not for the first time, it was the result of a miscommunication.

  When the smiling little Indians paddled out in their dugout canoes to gaze at the vast warship anchored just off their beach, there was, of course, no way of communicating. The Spanish assumed that they must be Muslims. Cordoba asked them what this place was called, and the Indians replied, as you would, ‘I don’t know what you are saying. I don’t understand.’ Which, in the Mayan language, sounded something like ‘Yu-ka-tan’. Cordoba and his band of merry men reported back that they had discovered the land of Yucatán. When, in actual fact, they didn’t have a clue where they were.

  Of course, as word got back to the outposts in Cuba and in turn to Spain that the Indians had gold earrings and nose rings, then the invasion began in earnest. Two years later, the infamous Hernan Cortés and his conquistadors arrived at the same coastline. Where old Columbus came in peace, in his quest to prove a trade route, Cortés came in full shining armour, sword in hand, to conquer the new world for himself.

  It took a mere three years for him to decimate the Aztec empire and install himself as Governor of Mexico. The rest of Central America was soon to follow.

  Looking out at the mangroves, though, I wondered what on earth was going through the minds of those first conquistadors. What drove them to think anything other than fever and mosquitoes lay ahead? Perhaps it was the shame of going home empty-handed that led them to battle through the swamps in their steel suits and feather-adorned helmets? Whatever it was, I didn’t envy them. I suppose at least I was relatively unencumbered, with nothing more than a rucksack and a camera.

  This was not a palm-fringed paradise, the kind you’d expect from the Caribbean coast. There was something malign, sinister in the air. The beach was littered with the debris of centuries all around, the sickly sweet smell of rotting vegetation, and death perhaps.

  The boat lurched forward into the shallows and Jose chucked in a small anchor to stop us drifting back out to sea. I thanked the weathered old fisherman for his trouble, giving him his pesos, and shook the brown hand that was as gnarled and knotted as the roots of the bushes beyond.

  ‘Hasta luego!’ I said. ‘See you again.’

  Jose forced a smile, but he looked doubtful.

  With my rucksack slung on one shoulder I jumped into the warm sea, which splashed up to my knees, and waded ashore. Before I could trudge up to the dry sand, Jose had already pulled up the anchor and put the motor in reverse. I watched as he backed up, pointed east, and with nothing more than a tip of the finger to the heavens to acknowledge his departure, he sped off into the distance, bouncing over the waves. I felt like one of those hapless Spaniards with Cortés, my boat gone, and with no option but to set off on foot.

  I had managed to avoid being seasick, but as I stood there with sodden feet and trousers, I suddenly felt very alone. To the east and west was nothing. To the north, a vast shark-filled sea. And to the south, the direction that I was to travel, a flat, featureless swamp. The only consolation came from my map. If it proved correct, then five miles away was the village of Sisal, and from there a road that led thirty miles south to Mérida, where I hoped that Alberto would be waiting.

  I dumped my rucksack on the shore, which was strewn with driftwood, and opened it to take out my boots. The sun bore down and the sand was hot to touch. Sitting on a smooth rock, I noticed that all around were millions of beautiful shells. There were tiny clams and gigantic conch and the remains of some sort of horseshoe crab, a living fossil which has swum in these waters since before even the dinosaurs roamed the plains.

  Sixty-five million years ago, a meteor shot through the solar system at forty times the speed of sound and entered the earth’s atmosphere. It was so big that even the powerful forces that burn up most space rocks did little to shrink the enormous asteroid as it ploughed through the sky. There were no people then to look up and shriek with terror, but I have no doubt that some sort of fear passed through the minds of whichever dinosaur happened to be grazing on the spot where I was doing up my shoe laces.

  Exactly forty miles from here, the meteor hit the earth with an ear-shattering bang; it was the equivalent of a billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb used in Hiroshima, and caused such catastrophic destruction that everything within a thousand-mile radius was wiped out almost instantly. Most of the dinosaurs and seventy-five per cent of life on earth died over the course of the coming years, as the fallout changed the earth’s climate forever. Seas froze, volcanoes erupted, earthquakes split continents, and the poor dinosaurs couldn’t keep up. Life retracted back into the oceans and for a time the planet was uninhabitable. But luckily for us, mammals emerged from the shallows once again, and a new form of existence began.

  But it seems not all the dinosaurs died. Ten metres away, an iguana eyed me cautiously from his perch on a rotting log. Completely motionless, his grey scales gave the impression of a noble carving, rather than a living beast. He reminded me of a spirit animal on a totem pole. Up above flew a pelican. From a distance, its awkward shape resembled that of a pterodactyl and for a moment, I half-expected a plesiosaur to jump out of the surf. Who knows what’s down there in the last bastion of exploration?

  With my back to the water, I trudged up the beach, treading carefully to not break any of the beautiful shells, for fear that I would interfere with the natural order. With one last look at the frothy surf, I stepped over a gnarled root and into the mangrove swamp. At once I was engulfed by an oppressive heat. As soon as the sea breeze was blocked by the bushes, it was like walking into an oven; the air was stuffy and still and a cloud of mosquitoes rose out of the staid pools of rancid water. I was sweating like a pig and started to chug on the already tepid bottle of water I was carrying.

  This is going to be a long journey, I thought to myself.

  6

  Yucatán

  Sisal used to be one of the principal ports in the Gulf of Mexico. In the nineteenth century, steamships used to travel directly to New York carrying henequen fibre to make ropes for the industrial revolution. For a time, over twelve hundred haciendas churne
d out thousands of tonnes of rope a month, employing a majority of the Yucatecan population in the industry. It made a lot of landowners very rich, and gave work to the indigenous Mayan people.

  Nowadays, there’s nothing in Sisal but a few fishing boats and crumbling houses. The port is full of half-sunken vessels and the rotting guts of yesterday’s catch. I didn’t hang around. Having agreed to meet Alberto in Mérida at his home, I plodded along the empty main road for two days, barely seeing a soul. This was a one-way road from nowhere and aside from the occasional pig truck hurtling by, there was nobody around. On either side of the road the mangrove extended for miles, and the road cut through the swamp like a perfectly straight sword.

  I don’t like straight roads, because you can see too far ahead – they remove all sense of surprise and wonder, and you realise just how far there is left to go. Perhaps it was the searing heat, but even the occasional villages I passed by seemed empty, like the whole of Mexico was on a siesta. Perhaps it was. I walked, slowly at first, letting myself get used to the heat. I hadn’t walked much in the last six or seven months, and from bitter experience I knew all too well the importance of acclimatisation. Every few miles, I’d stop and drink water under the shade of a thorn bush; my T-shirt was soon drenched with sweat, but the lack of wind meant that it barely cooled my burning skin.

  I looked at the cold-blooded iguanas with envy, as they basked on the boulders that poked out from the scrubland at the side of the road. As I walked south, the mangrove steadily became drier and transformed into dense bush. It wasn’t proper jungle, more a thick mass of vegetation barely three metres tall, but impenetrable to all, except tiny deer, wild pigs and the bizarre-looking armadillos, of which I saw two squashed as flat as a pancake in the middle of the road. Above, the only witnesses to the true scale of the vast, flat forest were the vultures as they circled in droves, waiting for me to pass so they could eat their roadkill in peace.