by Levison Wood
Occasionally we’d stumble through military checkpoints, where soldiers in olive-green uniforms and camouflage webbing would stop and take our details. We’d already been warned that when we arrived in Santa Fé or Yaviza, we’d have to report to the SENAFRONT headquarters, but for now we told the soldiers that we were walking as far as Yaviza. Mentioning the Darién Gap at this stage would probably end up with us getting detained at every roadblock.
The jungle closed in on either side of the road. I wondered what might have happened to the Belgian backpackers, Tom and Peter. They were a week ahead of us and by my reckoning they must be well into the Darién Gap by now. I wondered if by some miracle they’d already made it to Colombia, or if maybe something terrible had happened. I had visions of stumbling over their corpses somewhere in the jungle. Perhaps they’d got lost or been bitten by a snake, or swept away in a flash flood, speared to death by the Indians, or shot by the rebels.
‘We can’t dwell on that,’ said Alberto. ‘They’re grown men, and it is big boys’ rules out here. You tried to tell them that it was a foolish thing to do, but they didn’t listen.’
We slept in little guesthouses when there were villages, but with each passing day they grew further and further apart. For hours at a time our only company were the howler monkeys that growled like dogs from the canopy surrounding us, and the watchful vultures that soared high above, waiting patiently for a car to come and squash a lizard, or run over a feral dog. Ten miles south-east of Avicar, we crossed the unmarked border into Darién province.
We’d finally made it to our last hurdle. The town of Santa Fé rose off the highway to the right-hand side. It was only a large village really, full of ramshackle bungalows and a few shops clustered around a main community park. As we walked along the main street, I noticed an old soldier waving frantically in our direction.
We stopped and smiled.
‘What’s up?’ said Alberto. The soldier, a tiny man in his late fifties, mouthed something incomprehensible. I thought he might be drunk, so I merely shrugged my shoulders. He put his hand against the side of his head and mumbled something and pointed to a nearby building.
‘I think he’s deaf and dumb,’ said Alberto.
‘Show us where you want us to go,’ I said in Spanish, feeling embarrassed.
We followed the old man to an army barracks, where the insignia of SENAFRONT was plastered across a concrete wall. Behind a barbed-wire fence was a reception room filled with soldiers armed to the teeth. Sat on the bench were a group of young men in dirty civilian clothes. They looked nervous and were sat in total silence. I assumed they must have been new recruits or local criminals. Either way, they didn’t look like they wanted to be in there.
‘Where are you going?’ asked a burly sergeant to me and Alberto.
I told him we were going to Yaviza.
‘You must the ones wanting to cross the Darién Gap?’
Damn, I thought. Those bloody Belgians had spread the word.
‘We’ve heard about you,’ he said knowingly. ‘Everyone has.’
It was futile to lie.
‘Yes, we’re trying to get to Colombia,’ said Alberto.
‘I know. You’ve been summoned to the headquarters in Metetí tomorrow. Make sure you’re there for six p.m., Colonel Carrion wants to meet you.’
Metetí was twenty miles away to the south, and where we were supposed to be arriving tomorrow anyway, so logistically it wasn’t a problem. It seemed we had been on their radar for a while and I suspected that SENAFRONT might have their own ideas about our journey.
‘Of course,’ I said.
While we waited for the sergeant to photocopy our passports and documents, I sat down next to a boy on the wooden bench.
‘De donde eres?’ I asked. ‘Where are you from?’
He didn’t look me in the eye. He looked scared.
‘He doesn’t speak Spanish,’ said the sergeant.
‘Where is he from then?’ I asked.
‘Nepal,’ he said. ‘He’s the only one with a passport. The others,’ he motioned to a group of other lads in their twenties, who were stood by the wall, ‘don’t even have identification, but I think they’re Indians or Bangladeshis.’
‘Illegal immigrants,’ said Alberto. ‘They come the same way the Congolese did, through Brazil and Ecuador.’
Poor lads, I thought, they’d made it this far only to be arrested. I tried to be friendly and said a few words of Nepali to the lad, and even showed him some photos on my phone of the Himalayas, but he was too terrified to respond and sat staring at the floor.
‘What happens to them?’ I asked.
‘We send them to a camp in Panama City, where they get processed.’
‘And then what?’
The sergeant winked. ‘They are usually just let go, and sent to the Costa Rican border. We don’t want them here and we don’t want to pay to deport them, so we let them carry on towards the USA.’
The next day we walked to Metetí, another meagre little town, but at least there was a small hotel and a Chinese supermarket where we could stock up with final supplies. We’d been told to go to the military headquarters, which lay on the edge of the town, so that’s what we did.
It was already dark when we were met at the gate by two officers. One was a shifty-looking man in civilian clothing who didn’t seem to want to look anyone in the eye and was constantly checking his phone. The other, a well-built, smart man in uniform, was Colonel Carrion. He was smiling and polite.
‘Gentlemen, follow me.’
Alberto and I walked behind the two men past the rows of barbed-wire fences and around the side of the main barracks, where young soldiers were washing their boots in the outside ablutions. They jumped to attention when we walked past.
‘I am Comisionado Carrion and this is Major Fernandez, head of intelligence for the special forces,’ said the colonel as we walked. The major said nothing.
‘This is the headquarters for SENAFRONT special forces group in the Darién province. We are very interested in your journey.’
Alberto and I looked at each other.
‘Come, this way.’ He led us into a room. It seemed to be an operations centre. The walls were covered in maps and aerial photographs. In the middle was a table and on it was a large model of the barracks with stick-in pins indicating the locations of ammunition supplies, weapons and vehicles, as well as defensive points and escape routes.
‘We were informed of your expedition by the Brigadier in Panama City. It seems you are well known for your walking,’ said the colonel with a smile.
Before I could reply, he carried on.
‘My sources also tell me you are an army officer, no? A Paratrooper.’
I nodded.
‘Well then, in the spirit of brotherhood we shall do all we can to help.’ He flashed a grin and pointed to his paratrooper’s wings sewn onto his camouflage shirt.
I had half been expecting him to tell us that we weren’t going to be allowed to venture into the Darién Gap, but it seemed he was just curious.
‘Normally we don’t let anyone go across into Colombia by land. It’s too dangerous and we don’t want people getting killed on our territory. But it seems you have done your homework and made it this far, so we will do what we can to assist your mission.’
I felt a wave of relief fill my body. Alberto smiled.
He pointed to the map. It was the most detailed map of the region I had seen and far better than anything we’d been able to look at before now, even with months of planning.
‘Which route do you want to take?’ he asked.
‘Well, we’d like to get to Colombia, either straight down the middle to the Atrato River and beyond, or else following the Rio Balsas to the west and try to get to Jurado on the coast.’
The colonel laughed out loud.
‘Look here,’ he pointed to the Rio Balsas. ‘All this area is full of ELN rebels on the Colombian side. Our troops are fighting them every week. A
lso, this is the most remote part of the Darién, it’ll take you weeks. The Colombians don’t have any military there, so it’s totally lawless.’
I nodded. I knew that already.
‘And here,’ he carried on and pointed to the central route which led to the Atrato. ‘It’s one big swamp. You’d have to go by boat, there’s no way of walking through that. In any case, we can’t let you go that way at the moment, as it’s the main drug-smuggling route and since the FARC ceasefire the whole area has been taken over by the cartels and criminal gangs. They don’t take prisoners.’
Alberto nodded.
‘At least with FARC you can do business. They have stopped killing foreigners since they’ve tried to become legitimate, but the gangs don’t want anyone walking through their turf. They’ve got nothing to gain and everything to lose. As far as they are concerned, they want the Darién Gap to stay as off-limits as possible.’
It looked like our options were running out.
‘Well, I can see only two options. You can just take a boat around the coast like everybody else …’ then he smiled, ‘but I think you don’t want to do that, no?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘In that case the only way to go is east, up the Rio Membrillo to Canaan and over the mountains to Puerto Escocés and Carreto. From there you can follow the coast to La Miel and cross into Colombia at Sapzurro.’
I studied the map. It felt like a cheat. We wouldn’t be crossing the main portion of the Gap, or even following in the footsteps of John Blashford-Snell.
The colonel sensed my disappointment and chuckled.
‘What’s wrong? Not hard enough for you?’
‘Well, it’s not the route I was planning, that’s all.’
‘Don’t worry, you’ll get plenty of excitement. It’s still the Darién Gap, but it’s the shortest way through. Nobody has been allowed to do this legally as far as anyone can remember. It’s off-limits to most people, but you still might find illegals – it’s the way that immigrants try and sneak in, the ones that can’t afford to get a boat. So you’ll need to be careful.’
‘Also, isn’t Puerto Escocés the place you were telling me about, where the Scottish made their settlement all those years ago?’ said Alberto.
He was right, of course. I’d almost forgotten about the Scottish Darién scheme, but now we’d been presented with the perfect opportunity to see the place that created the United Kingdom first-hand.
It was serendipity, and if there’s one thing I’d learnt on expeditions, it was to embrace change and go with the flow.
‘OK, we’ll go that way,’ I said.
‘I hope you know what you’re letting yourself in for,’ said the colonel.
‘What will be our main challenges, do you think?’ said Alberto.
The colonel shook his head. ‘Just stay away if you see any gangs of people. The smugglers – the Coyotes – can sometimes be armed. I think you already know the other main dangers. Wild boars, spiders, snakes, there’s plenty of those. Flash flooding can happen quickly, so don’t camp on river beaches. Make sure you carry enough food and water, of course. Get some Indian porters from Canaan to help you carry stuff. They will know the way, but you should remember this …’
He paused for effect and glanced at the intelligence major.
‘Never trust the Indians.’
Major Fernandez nodded solemnly.
‘I’ll let the outpost at Canaan know you’re coming so that they don’t arrest you,’ said Carrion. ‘We already captured two gringos the other day trying to cross into Colombia illegally.’
It couldn’t be, could it? I thought of the two backpackers, Tom and Peter.
‘They weren’t Belgians, were they?’ I asked. ‘What happened to them?’
‘Yes, something like that. Europeans. One of them was trying to take a bicycle through the jungle,’ he chuckled. ‘But my men captured them, because they didn’t ask for permission or have an exit stamp.’
‘And?’
The colonel shrugged his shoulders. ‘So they put them in prison for a few days and now we’re deporting them, of course.’
Poor buggers, I thought, after getting so close. But at least they weren’t dead.
Colonel Carrion stared at me and then at Alberto. ‘Whichever way you go, there will be dangers and risks. I will let you continue, but we are not responsible for you or your safety. Do you understand? Crossing the Darién,’ he said slowly and deliberately, ‘is a suicide wish.’
He patted me on the shoulder. It was time to leave.
The next day we walked south, bound for Yaviza and the end of the road. With the colonel’s words ringing in my ears, we trudged on in silence as the road became narrower and more decrepit. There were almost no cars at all now and on both sides a wall of thick, dark jungle rose up like an impenetrable green barrage of vegetation. For two days the stillness was unnerving. In the heat of the day even the crickets seemed to quieten down, and the only movement was the occasional rustle of the grass, as a lizard would scuttle away into the undergrowth.
We reached the outskirts of Yaviza at noon on the seventeenth of November. I remembered that John Blashford-Snell had described the place to me back at the RGS as little more than a clearing in the jungle. That was 1971. It appeared times had changed a little. The road was still paved in parts and a lot of land had been deforested to make way for fields and banana plantations. A few of the outlying huts were still of the traditional kind, with thatched roofs and wooden stilts, but in the centre of the town modernity had arrived. Most of the buildings were low-level, breeze-block bungalows, with bars on the windows. Almost every house had a satellite dish, and radios and TVs blared music. There were a few grimy snooker bars, cantinas, and hotels that looked more like brothels. Everyone, it seemed, was drunk. Some things, at least, hadn’t changed.
‘Look at him,’ said Alberto, pointing to a man being pushed along in a wheelbarrow. ‘Boracho!‘ he said, totally drunk. Almost all the inhabitants were black. Most of them were Colombians from the coast, who’d come to Panama in search of dollars and work and forgotten to go home.
‘We’ve got a nice life here,’ said Alfredo, a wrinkly old man with enormous lips and wiry grey hair. ‘I came forty years ago chasing after a woman and decided to stay. It’s better here than in Colombia. I hear it’s safe over there now, but back then too many drugs. Too dangerous, man.’
‘How did you get here?’ I asked, wondering which route he’d taken across the Darién.
‘Ha, ha,’ he laughed out loud. ‘I came by boat. I ain’t stupid. I’ve lived here since the 1970s and never even been in the jungle. No sir, I stay at home and drink, that’s all I need.’
We left the old man to his beer and carried on towards the river. The road just stopped. Literally it hit a wall, on the far side of which was a little hill covered in gravestones. It was the town cemetery and an ominous sign.
Speaking of which. There, where the tarmac finished, was an actual sign, just below the cemetery wall. It read: Bienvenidos Yaviza. 12,580km to Alaska.
I looked back the way we came. I couldn’t quite believe it. We’d been following the course of the Pan-American Highway since Nicaragua and barely walked a fraction of this, the longest road in the world. But I felt we’d done enough.
‘This is where it ends,’ said Alberto.
‘Or where it starts,’ I said, ‘depending on your point of view.’
We walked along a muddy path to the left of the cemetery, which led to the main street where the river port was. A couple of hundred metres away was a hanging bridge spanning the Yaviza river, and local Indians were walking across from the little village on the far side carrying stacks of fruit on their heads. Down some steps was a little jetty where dugout canoes were being loaded with boxes and bales. Oranges, bananas and bags of rice were coming and going. The Indians did the work and the blacks shouted at them. Otherwise people sat around and smoked and drank. Nobody was in any hurry to do anything here.
There wasn’t much left at all. The sign had faded into obscurity and the perimeter fence was all but torn down. The old bricks were cracked and weathered and plants were sprouting from between the holes. The river had encroached on the spoil underneath and pulled down most of what would have been there. Now there were just two walls, crumbling and sad, marking the last visible remains of the old civilisation. Nature had won out here and the locals didn’t even know what it was, and they cared even less.
I looked out over the brown waters as they swirled into frothy eddies. The sky was dark and brooding and the water was high. It was already raining somewhere upstream and the jungle on the far banks looked dark and menacing. This was the start of the Darién Gap, the nemesis of overland exploration, and our final battle.
21
The Last Jungle
We travelled back north to Puerto Limon, a little village straddling the Rio Membrillo at the point where the river flowed out of the wild mountains and into the lowland plantations. It was where we’d agreed to meet the boatmen who would take us upriver to Canaan, where we’d find our porters and begin walking through the Darién.
‘Be careful with that,’ said Segundo, an enormous man with hands like spades. He looked like a bouncer with his crew-cut hair and wide shoulders. A long machete as big as a sword swung off a leather belt. The Indian boatmen did as they were told.
‘That is fragile stuff. The gringo has cameras and things that will break, do you understand?’ He adopted the tone of a concerned father, rather than one of anger. ‘They are like my children,’ said the giant, grabbing one by his arm gently and patting him on his head. Segundo was to be our chief liaison man. He was of mestizo stock – mixed-race African, indigenous and Spanish – but spoke some of the Indian languages and knew the jungle like the back of his hand. Once, for fun, he had run across Panama from coast to coast. He’d been recommended to guide us, at least as far as the Indian settlement at Canaan, by Rick Morales, the only man in the know in the whole of Panama when it came to expeditions, so that was endorsement enough for us.
