by Levison Wood
We made our way to a small fishing village called Puerto Caimito, which stood on the west bank of a wide river estuary that spilled its brown flow out into the sea.
‘We can’t swim across that,’ said Alberto, looking out across the bay. It was almost a mile wide, and even though we were both good swimmers, we had our bags to think about.
‘Let’s ask one of these fishermen to give us a ride across,’ I suggested, watching as the seagulls swooped down in bids to steal the day’s catch from the slimy decks of the boats.
A wiry man in a football shirt, with delicate painted fingernails, offered to take us across the river for thirty dollars. It was a rip-off, but there was no other choice at that moment, so we agreed. Alberto loaded his bags on first and gave me a hand clambering onto the little motorboat from the shallows. The journey, which should have taken five minutes, ended up taking almost an hour, as we ran out of petrol halfway across the bay and the prospect of floating out into the shark-infested waters of the Pacific Ocean became a very real possibility. Luckily the wiry fisherman with his painted nails persisted with his efforts to restart the engine solely on fumes, which seemed to do the trick and get us at last floating in the right direction.
On the other side of the river was another small fishing port with a sandy beach and the wrecks of three old boats, now rotting half-submerged in the sand.
‘Follow the road along the coast and it will take you to the city,’ said the captain nervously, as we jumped out into the knee-deep water. He paddled away rather more slowly than he would have wanted.
Alberto and I walked up the beach and onto a raised road that went off up a hill to the east. On the far side of the road were some buildings with flags hoisted above them. Just as we were walking away, a man emerged from the building and started running after us.
‘Stop there!’ he shouted.
We stopped and turned around. The security guard was armed with a pistol, but he looked more intrigued than malign.
‘Where are you from?’ he said frowning. ‘Are you Cubans?’
‘No, I’m Mexican,’ said Alberto. I told him I was British.
‘What are you doing jumping off a boat onto that beach? You know this is a private port, don’t you?’
We didn’t and apologised.
‘Are you trying to get to the United States?’ he said, confused.
‘No, we’re going south.’
‘Oh, I thought you must be illegal immigrants.’
Alberto laughed. ‘No, we’re going the other way.’
The guard told us that we’d still have to go through immigration and they’d need to check our passports. So off we went down the road, where a huddle of equally confused immigration officials quizzed us as to our intentions.
They let us go after Alberto worked his usual magic, and soon enough we were back on the track. The guard had suggested we take a shortcut along the beach from Vacamonte to La Playita, which would save us a mile or two. So that’s what we did, we scrambled round the rocky headland and found ourselves walking across a wide beach as the tide was out. Cockle- and clam-pickers squatted in splendid isolation as silhouettes against the distant shoreline, searching for a meagre living among the rock pools and sand.
We picked our way, trying to stay dry by hopping from rock to rock. Inland there was a dense mangrove thicket and from experience I knew that it would be flooded and hard to get through. Ahead there was high ground a mile away, where the headland separated us from the next village, but first we had to carry on along the beach. After another few hundred metres, we were confronted by a wide but shallow-looking stream that ran through sand.
‘We can walk across that,’ said Alberto. ‘It’s not deep.’
I led the way. We’d made good progress since leaving the port despite our brief detention by the immigration people, and both of us were looking forward to getting to the city, maybe even by that evening, so we picked up the pace. Now we were walking on flat sand where there were no rocks and it was easy going, so I wasn’t anticipating what happened next.
Just as we reached the little stream that flowed out of the mangrove and went out to sea, I took a step forward and suddenly found myself plunged into a bog of mud.
‘Shit!’ I screamed, as I flailed waist-deep in the quagmire.
Alberto, only a few steps behind me but still on dry land, laughed out loud.
‘Chinga! Is that quicksand?’ he said.
I’d crossed swamps and rivers aplenty before, and found myself stuck in the mud on several occasions on most continents, but in all my travels around the world, I’d never fallen foul of proper quicksand before.
‘Yes, it bloody is!’ I shouted. ‘Give me a hand.’
I reached out, but Alberto didn’t want to make the same mistake that I did and couldn’t quite get to me. I was sinking fast. It was a terrible feeling of utter helplessness. After only a few seconds, I was up to my chest. I couldn’t move my legs at all; the sand was so viscous, it was like being stuck in superglue.
Alberto had stopped laughing now and was looking around for a stick, or something to pull me out with.
‘Use your bag,’ I told him. ‘Hurry.’
Alberto took off his rucksack and got down on his knees at the edge of the gloop and held it out with both arms. I was just able to grab a hold of one of the straps as the sand came up to my shoulders. ‘Now pull!’
He pulled and I tried to kick as best I could. He did well and after a few minutes he’d managed to get me loose enough so that I could haul myself out and onto dry land.
‘That was close,’ he said. ‘Imagine if I wasn’t here and you were alone, you’d be screwed.’
He was right. It was a good reminder why I didn’t try and do these journeys on my own.
For a while I lay on the dry sand covered completely in mud, filthy but otherwise happy to be alive and not currently gurgling my last breaths under a tonne of soggy grit.
Sometimes you simply have to take the long way around.
‘I told you your shortcuts were a bad idea,’ Alberto winked and jogged off before I could clout him around the ear.
After cleaning myself off in the stale water of the mangrove swamp, we made it onto the headland and were treated to a view of indescribable beauty. The hills were covered in long pampas grass in dazzling white tussocks that danced in the afternoon wind. It was like a vision of heaven from the movies and neither of us could manage words, possibly because we were so knackered from traipsing through the swamp, but also we were genuinely moved by the sight of such unbridled natural splendour. From the top of the hill, we could see for miles ahead to the east as the coast stretched out. Inland the Pan-American Highway carved through the forest, and ahead a string of lovely coastal villages heralded that we were close to the city.
I looked at my watch. It was already four o’clock and if my calculations were right, Panama was still too far away to make it tonight, so we would need to find some accommodation soon.
We descended the hill and walked through the village of La Playita. We found a group of men sitting on the veranda of their bungalow, a little wooden house. All the men were black Afro-Caribbeans, like the Garifuna we’d met in Belize and Guatemala, and they wore white singlets with gold chains. They eyed us suspiciously as they were counting large piles of dollars and smoking spliffs. All around the garden there appeared to be dozens of cages. I squinted to see what was inside. They were filled with cockerels.
‘They’re for fighting,’ said Alberto as we walked past, smiling at the men and greeting them politely.
‘Cock fighting?’ I said, surprised that it was done here.
‘Yes, we have it in the little villages in Mexico, too, although it’s illegal. Looks like here they do it in the open. Those cocks are worth thousands.’
‘I think we banned it in England about two hundred years ago,’ I told him.
‘Yes, but it is popular across all of Latin America, people become millionaires from it.’
> I thought it best that we didn’t stay in the village, there were no guest houses anyway. ‘Let’s do another mile the other side and camp on a deserted stretch of beach,’ I suggested.
As the sun got lower in the evening sky and the ocean started to glow a deep red, we found a trail that led through the woods to what looked like an empty bay.
The deeper we got, though, the thicker the undergrowth became, and before we knew it, we were hacking our way through dense forest until to our surprise, we stumbled upon an abandoned building. In fact, it was a whole complex of buildings, all overgrown and lost to the jungle.
‘It looks like a hotel,’ said Alberto. ‘Look at the rooms and the toilet blocks.’
It was as if the apocalypse had already arrived here. Whatever had happened, the place had never been finished. Half-built rooms were now filled with vines, trees grew out of the roof, and animal droppings were scattered across the dirty tiles. A lone shoe sat with mushrooms and moss growing out of it. It was a sneaker of a very 1980s style, perhaps indicating the date when the place was abandoned. Maybe it was destroyed by the Americans when they invaded in 1989, or it was one of the dictator Noriega’s investments, lost after he was ousted. Either way, we had no choice but to make use of it for the night as the sun set.
‘We’ll put up our hammocks on those trees,’ I said, pointing to a thicket next to the ruined bar by the beach. So we did. As the dusk turned to complete darkness, we set up camp on the cliff, listening to the sound of the waves crashing on the rocks below. I imagined what a wonderful place this would have been if it had been finished. The only inhabitants now, though, were the lizards and tarantulas.
‘Goodnight, muñeco,’ said Alberto, zipping up. As we got into our nets, I gave the scene a final sweep with my headtorch. All around were the sparkling eyes of hundreds of spiders, big, hairy ones, reflecting in the glint.
‘Goodnight, mate,’ I said, thinking it was best to keep that to myself.
The next morning, we woke at dawn to the lapping rhythm of the Pacific on the beach below. Out to sea a steady stream of ships were silhouetted against the crimson horizon. It was beautiful. I looked at my phone and it was six a.m. If we were lucky, we could decamp and head back to the road, then cross the canal before lunchtime and eat a good meal in the city, so we wasted no time in packing up. Just as I was planning the movements, I got a news-flash pop-up. Donald Trump had won the US election.
‘No way,’ said Alberto. ‘OK, now I’m not going home,’ he joked. ‘Mexico will be too full. I think I’ll stay in Panama.’
An hour and a half later, we reached the crossing point over the Panama Canal. Ahead lay the grand metal beams of the Puente de las Americas, a vast bridge spanning the famous canal and also the gateway to Panama City, which lay like a beacon of incongruous modernity on the far side of the bay.
‘It’s huge. I never imagined it to be so big,’ said Alberto, as we stepped onto the ‘Bridge of the Americas’, dodging cars and trucks that rumbled over the sixty-metre-high conduit.
It is exactly a mile long and we were the only pedestrians; no one else was daft enough to risk the perilous walkway that ran along the edge of the speeding traffic. The only other people not contained in their cars were the workmen; engineers and labourers, dangling from ropes high above with welding gear and face masks; working on the incessant repairs that are needed to keep this feat of engineering alive.
But the real masterpiece wasn’t the bridge, of course, it was what it spanned. Looking down into the distant waters, we were reminded that we were in the presence of something very special.
The Panama Canal must be considered one of the modern wonders of the world. It was started back in 1881 and at a cost of almost twenty-eight thousand lives was eventually finished in 1914. Every day an average of forty container ships pass through, generating billions of dollars in revenue for the country. It used to be owned by the United States, who extended an exclusion zone along the canal to keep the locals out and the money flowing back to America, but after a long and painful process, the canal was finally handed back to the Panamanian government twenty-seven years ago.
To the right, on the far side of the road, extended the Pacific and a long line of ships, waiting to enter the canal on their voyage to the Caribbean. I could just make out the headland where we’d camped by the ruined hotel the night before. To the left, down below, were the dockyards and refuelling stations and customs ports that serviced the fourteen thousand ships a year that transited the canal. There were vast yards filled with shipping containers, stacked ten-high in all colours from every country in the world. There were ships moored from China, the Philippines and Norway; surrounding them were the yellow cranes that picked them up and dropped them down. From up here, they reminded me of those machines at amusement parks that grapple teddy bears and drop them down a chute if you win.
Beyond the industrial littoral zone, the canal stretched out to the north; it became narrower and ultimately disappeared as it rounded the bends in the valley, where jungle-clad hills were a reminder that this man-made miracle was still beholden to the forces of nature.
‘Look down there,’ said Alberto, with a spring in his step. He pointed to the east, where the suburbs of the city sprang from the coastline. ‘It doesn’t look real.’
In the distance, I saw the glittering skyscrapers and flyovers of a very modern, confident metropolis, quite unlike anything we’d seen thus far on the expedition.
It took another hour to leave the bridge and follow the highway. It was still the Pan-American – the same road we’d been following for weeks, but here it struck like a knife straight through the centre of the town. Fringed with palm trees and flanked on the one side by the corniche of the Pacific and on the other by a great wave of plush hotels, fancy restaurants, and boutique shops selling designer watches and Ferraris, it was hard to imagine that only a few hours before we were pulling each other out of quicksand and hacking through tarantula-infested jungles. It was as if we’d suddenly been teleported into Miami.
Before long the road had taken us into the middle of the city and we were surrounded by billboards, busy streets full of busy people, and flash cars whizzing past. ‘I feel quite claustrophobic now,’ said Alberto. I could sympathise. ‘Well, we may as well make the most of it,’ I said. ‘After this we’re back into the jungle and there’s the Darién Gap, let’s enjoy ourselves for a few days.’
And so we did. We checked into the most expensive hotel we could afford; a sixty-storey glass monstrosity overlooking the promenade, with a pool deck and a Jacuzzi spa and a rooftop bar that sold overpriced margaritas and rum cocktails with little umbrellas in them. There was a sushi bar and a breakfast buffet and a shopping mall. It felt indulgent and initially quite uncomfortable, after seeing all that poverty and injustice along the way. But does punishing oneself achieve anything? Sometimes, perhaps, but we’d reached a milestone in the journey and from here on in we were on the homeward leg. It felt like we were allowed a little luxury after the rigours of the road, so for three days we rested up and ate good food and restocked our supplies of medicines, batteries and other bits that had disappeared or fallen apart along the way.
We’d been walking for almost four months now and I’d almost forgotten what time of year it was. The tropics have that effect, but when you suddenly get sucked into a city, there’s no avoiding those little indicators that remind you of another reality and another life, away from the road. People walking hand in hand with their partners; friends having fun in pubs and bars; families enjoying time together in the parks and shopping malls. The stores all had their Christmas decorations up and though it was incongruous to see inflatable Santa Clauses and twinkling Christmas trees next to the palm-fringed swimming pools, there was no denying that we were both thinking of home.
Before we carried on, there was one thing left to do. By pulling some strings and making flagrant use of contacts, I managed to blag us a ride on a helicopter. Ostensibly this was to get
us a good view of the city from above and obtain some nice aerial footage for the documentary, but there was another reason, too. I wanted to see what lay ahead.
As we got into the little AS350 helicopter and buckled up, the pilot giving us the thumbs-up as the rotary blades started and we wobbled into the air, I kept my eyes on the horizon to the south-east. The chopper rose higher and higher, making its way over the canal where the ships looked like little toys, and then in a grand circle over the ocean back towards the old colonial town with its ancient fortress and iron cannons, then high above the skyscrapers and there, beyond the shanties and favelas, I saw the highway disappear into the distance as the jungle extended for as far as the eye could see into Darién province.
Somewhere out there was the end of the road, the Darién Gap, and, beyond that, the gateway to South America.
20
The End of the Road
We left Panama City and the Pacific behind, following the Pan-American Highway east and inland. We were feeling rejuvenated and fit after a rest and we were starting to cover distance quickly. Thoughts of home and Christmas spurred us on, as did the prospect of succeeding in our mission and making it to Colombia. At first the road carved its way through the agricultural plains and gritty villages of Pacora and Chepo, before winding through the valley of Lake Bayano, where the fringes of the jungle began to get thicker and more wild. The further east we got, averaging twenty-five miles a day, the quieter the road became.
‘There’s nothing beyond Yaviza,’ I said to Alberto, but it was more to remind myself of where we were going. ‘Nowhere for the trucks to go.’
The road gradually deteriorated until the prevalence of potholes and the deep mud meant that only the sturdiest 4x4s could cope with the terrain, and often we would not see cars for hours on end. By the time we got to Avicar one day, after relentless rain and silent walking, the reality dawned on us that we weren’t out of trouble yet.
