by Evan Antin
Our guide was amused by my enthusiasm. “The jungle is full of surprises,” he said. “Listen to this.” He made a few loud claps, then looked at me and smiled.
What happened next remains one of the coolest things I’ve experienced in the wild, especially courtesy of an insect. Within a few seconds, we heard a loud, rhythmic pounding along the water’s edge. Everyone on the boat started glancing around from the shore to each other and back. Something was coming.
“It is the warrior wasp,” the guide said.
Eh? All eyes rolled in disbelief. What we were hearing was big, stomping through the undergrowth, and coming toward us. But the guide explained that somewhere along the way in its evolution, this particular species had learned that size equals might, and they’d decided to get in on it. When a warrior wasp perceives a threat, it pounds its abdomen, and all the wasps around it start to pound their abdomens too. In sync. The effect sounds remarkably like heavy footsteps in the jungle. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. It boggles the mind to try to figure out how that masterful adaptation happened. Even after you know where the noise is coming from, it’s impossible not to worry that you’re about to be attacked.
Constrictors Big and Bigger
A big part of the lure of Central and South American travel for me is the snakes, and this was never more true than during that first trip into the Amazon. I scanned every inch of land and water I passed over in Ecuador looking for them. Every branch, every ripple, every unexpected color or movement in the canopy, on the ground, or in the water caught my eye, and my mind jumped to Snake?!
The jungle didn’t disappoint. On our first day, Tim and I went out in kayaks and spotted an Amazon boa in a tree above the water, three feet of neatly coiled predator draped over a single branch. I paddled close, stood up, and pulled him down with both hands, falling out of my boat in the process. He was snappy at first—opening his jaw wide and giving me an unobstructed view of his gnarly recurved fangs. Cautiously gripping him behind the head, I waited for the tantrum to play out. After a few seconds passed with no harm to him, he calmed down and let me wrap him around my arm. Tim filmed while I explained that an arboreal snake like the one I was holding spends its whole life in the trees. When it gets hungry, it lies in wait for a bird, lizard, or small mammal, strikes, and bites it with those inward-curving teeth; then the boa rolls its prey up into a tight ball and squeezes the life out of it.
Most people assume that constrictors kill by asphyxiation, but the snake I was holding was capable of squeezing its prey so tightly it could stop the flow of blood through the animal’s veins. The cause of death is typically circulatory arrest. This may sound like a potato/potahto comparison, but it doesn’t feel that way if you’re the prey animal. The upside, if you can call it that, is that circulatory failure is a faster and less painful way to die. Suffocation takes more time and causes more suffering. To be honest, if I had to be killed by any predator in nature, I think a large constrictor would be my choice. Most other predators—including “cuddly” ones like sea lions, who use their razor teeth to shred prey they can’t swallow whole (and alive) into large chunks—kill in a much more violent way. By comparison, being squeezed until you pass out (which will happen in a hurry) doesn’t seem quite as bad.
Despite their deadly power, their impressive fangs, and the way they’ve been made symbols of danger in cultures around the world, these snakes pose very little threat to humans. Constrictors aren’t venomous. Even if you piss one off and get bitten (which generally takes some serious and intentional provocation, since they don’t seek out human interaction), that bite won’t kill you, or even land you in the hospital. Unless you’re small enough to be constricted and digested, you don’t qualify as prey and are basically out of harm’s way, even with one of these sitting on your lap. By the time I’d stopped talking, the boa on my arm wasn’t interested in biting anymore. He was just hanging out, completely mellow. After we finished filming, I took him back to the base of the tree I’d pulled him from, and he glided straight back to the same branch to retake his position.
Handling a boa in the Amazon was a dream come true, but the next day out on the river with a guide I spotted the ultimate South American constrictor: the mighty green anaconda. Scotland has the Loch Ness Monster, central Asia has the Yeti, and South America has the so-called giant anaconda. That snake is supposedly somewhere between 50 and 150 feet long, and sightings of it have been part of South American lore for hundreds of years. After seeing a green anaconda, a truly magnificently proportioned creature, I can understand how a casual observer might think he or she was encountering something mythical. They’re almost too big to mentally process. To this day, I’ve never faced a bigger snake in the wild than the one that was draped over a clump of bushes along the edge of the water, part of her hanging so low it was submerged. Her coloring was a mottled green, and she was easily thirteen feet long, possibly more because she was loosely coiled in a couple places. She was at least nine inches in diameter and looked thicker in the middle. These snakes can grow to over 400 pounds, but this one looked to be somewhere between 180 and 200 pounds. Middling for an anaconda; gigantic for any other snake.
I asked the guide to get us closer, trusting it would take more than a couple passing boaters to startle the beast from her basking place. I wanted to put my hands on her, but decided to film her first in case she took off. Pulling out my video camera, I zoomed in on her head, explaining that I was just a few feet away from one of the largest snakes on the planet, and that based on the size, this was probably a female. In this species, the girls dwarf the boys, with females growing to twenty to thirty feet long and weighing as much as 550 pounds. Males rarely exceed ten feet—XS in anaconda sizes.
As we watched her soaking up the sun, it was hard to believe that a creature with so much heft could be a stealth predator, but when an anaconda gets hungry, she slips down into the water, submerging her whole body except her eyes and her nostrils, which are on the top of her head. There she lies in wait until something worth her trouble comes along. Mice and lizards won’t fill up a snake this size. She’ll eat small prey like fish and birds if they pass her way, but her preferred game includes bigger animals like wild pigs, capybaras, deer, caimans, and sometimes even jaguars. Yep, jaguars. Anacondas are their only natural enemies. Do you know how fast you have to move to strike a jaguar before it can get away? It basically has to happen in such a short span that the cat is already hit before it knows it’s being attacked. It seemed impossible that a snake that size could pull this off, but I knew she had a secret weapon (beside the obvious ones of her teeth and her massiveness). A snake’s body has more than ten times as many muscles as a human body, and a significant portion of those muscles are used to create mind-blowing strike speed. This is a new area of study (because it takes some seriously high-tech equipment to measure), but research shows a snake strike happens so fast it can occur four times in the blink of a human eye. One blink, four strikes. Step aside, jaguar. There’s a faster predator in town.
Once a snake like the anaconda I was watching makes her move, she’s all business. After she’s killed her prey, the super-flexible ligaments around her jaw allow her to open wide and swallow it whole. (Snakes are not nibblers—they always consume their prey fully intact.) Following a big meal, she may not eat again for weeks. She can just soak up the sun and digest.
Tim and I spent a week in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and by the end of it I was convinced that even my wildest childhood dreams had sold the place short. I love Kansas, Colorado, and California; woods, mountains, and beaches. But ever since that first time exploring in Ecuador, I’ve known that there’s something about the jungle that puts me in my element. I can feel it in the way the air fills my lungs, the way my ears buzz with the sounds of all the teeming life, how the environment simultaneously puts me at ease and heightens my attention. I’ve since found that this holds true in jungles all over the world, but that was the first time, the first jungle, and my first realization t
hat even when you’ve traveled thousands of miles by plane, bus, truck, boat, and on foot, sometimes you still find yourself in a place that feels so right it must be home.
4
Panama
The Pan-American Highway is a thirty-thousand-mile network of roads that can take you the length of the American continents, from northernmost Alaska to southernmost Argentina. If you have the time, money, energy, and nerve to navigate some of the most treacherous highways on the planet, you can drive the entire way—except for a single sixtyish-mile stretch that encompasses the mountainous rain forests of southern Panama and the swamplands of its Colombian border. That place, known as the Darién Gap (the name also corresponds to the gap in the road), is a largely roadless and not coincidentally lawless jungle where both the land and the people have been resisting efforts to connect the great highway for as long as cars have been driving it.
Due to a perfect storm of geographic, economic, political, and criminal elements, the Darién region is one of the most dangerous places in the world. It’s also a wild, unspoiled, mind-blowing wildlife habitat that’s home to only a few indigenous tribes, with no major population centers. When I was a kid, I’d seen Jeff Corwin visit and rave about how many snakes lived there, and his TV show was enough to make me decide to overlook the fact that this wildlife hot spot is riddled with drug lords, human traffickers, guerrilla forces, and Panamanian and Colombian soldiers, all trying to either contain or capitalize on its unique circumstances.
With so much crime and conflict, the Darién is a notoriously unfriendly place to be a tourist—or a missionary, or a journalist. Enough members of all three groups have been kidnapped or killed there to keep it off most travel schedules. It’s definitely not the kind of place you want your mom reading up on while you’re visiting, so I left it out when I told my parents, girlfriend, and friends about my South American itinerary. I figured I’d let them know when it was over. The only one in on the secret was my friend Tim.
I flew to Panama City and started hitting up tour companies for a guide—and getting no help. One after another they declined, saying, You don’t want to go there. How about seeing the canal? Or the San Blas Islands? Or surfing in Santa Catalina? Finally a company said they had a guide who’d grown up in the area who might be able to help me navigate the human and natural obstacles. I told them to book him.
I met Eduardo the next day. He was older than I’d expected—at least sixty-five, maybe seventy. He was small (about five foot one) and lean (maybe 110), and he quickly proved he was mentally and physically nimble, sizing up hurdles and strangers in seconds and figuring out the best way to get over or around them.
Eduardo spoke no English, but through a combination of my high school Spanish and charades, we came to an understanding that I should hide my passport. Then he looked through my things and buried the few traveling tools I had that might be perceived as threatening—snake hooks, a croc snare, and a couple knives—deep in his own duffel bag. As a local, he could get away with carrying them. As a foreigner, I needed to keep a low, nonthreatening profile.
Once we’d packed up our gear (much of mine was photo and video equipment), we hit the road. None of the passage to the Darién is easy. Neither country wants you to go (nor do the drug cartels), so along the way, we were stopped at one checkpoint after another, flagged for questioning at every single one. Soldiers and border police, most armed with automatic rifles and many with machete scars on their faces and arms, inevitably wanted to know, Quien es el gringo? They also took particular interest in rifling through my stuff. After the first checkpoint, I knew what to do, stammering out, “Yo español muy mal” (“I Spanish very bad”), as if I could barely string the words together, all the while trying to look helpless and mildly confused. My guide kept his answers short, but when pressed he’d roll his eyes and gesture toward me as he explained that I was a student, studying snakes, and that I wanted to see the wildlife. More than once, he took out the snake hook, demonstrated how it worked, and passed it around. He seemed to know some of the military guys, and he pulled us through again and again.
Once the soldiers at each station were convinced I had no drugs, no weapons, and no money, they mostly wanted to know when I’d be leaving. I sensed they didn’t think I’d last long in the inhospitable environment I was on the verge of reaching.
* * *
We took a bus to the first checkpoint, then a van to the next. From there we rented a motorbike and rode it to a dock (and another checkpoint). After a short trip in a johnboat and half a day in a truck that was either rented or borrowed (I definitely never saw a rental counter), we reached the last town, literally the end of the road: Yaviza. As soon as we were out of the truck, I realized, This is happening. I was in a place tourists do not go. I was the only white person, the only person wearing a backpack, the only one, I was pretty sure, there by choice rather than birth or necessity.
I’d been standing at the side of the road for only a matter of seconds, still trying to orient myself, when a wild-eyed man came rushing up with a crate, gesturing to me and clearly trying to sell me what was inside. I bent down and squinted into the box to see what he could possibly think I needed. A dirty, sad-looking baby armadillo.
There were so many things wrong with that scene: the man lying in wait to sell a baby armadillo, his rapid approach, the idea that this poor, sickly wild animal could be a pet. Not to mention the fact that armadillos are the only creatures other than humans that can carry leprosy. It’s been estimated that half of armadillos in some regions of the Amazon carry it, and numerous modern cases of what we often think of as this Middle Ages disease have been traced directly to contact with them. I was in possession of none of the multiple antibiotics I would have to take for months if I contracted leprosy during the jaunt to the Darién, which I was already expecting to be harrowing.
So … was I interested in buying a little armadillo to take along on my jungle trek as a pocket pet? For the record, I am the last person anyone could accuse of being a germophobe; and I’m usually eager to get to know any wild animal better. But that whole interaction felt like a weird, bad omen. Besides, I knew that buying that poor doomed armadillo would encourage the guy to nab another one to sell as a “pet.” I didn’t want any part in perpetuating what he was doing.
“No!” I shouted, taking a couple giant steps away from the dude and the crate, then throwing in a couple more nos for good measure as I walked away. Just no.
My guide sized up the situation and said nothing, and the armadillo man cleared out. Eduardo pointed me toward a tiny wooden building with a sign on the door that read POSADA and told me I’d sleep there. We’d be leaving in the morning. Then he said, “Mañana,” and walked away.
My room in this tiny inn was barely big enough to lie down in, made of worn wooden boards that left me exposed to the elements (and anyone who might have wanted to look in at me). I spent my night watching rats skitter along the perimeter, passing just inches from my toes. I was too excited to sleep, and a little nervous about how far I’d ventured into a place where I clearly didn’t belong.
In the morning Eduardo and I crossed a footbridge, hit our last checkpoint, and found ourselves on the far side of civilization with nothing but jungle ahead. The exploring was about to get real.
Frog Heaven
I had been to the Ecuadorian Amazon and seen the jungle, but the Darién Gap was a new kind of wild. There were no signs, and we seldom saw so much as a trail, often having to hack our way through the undergrowth with machetes. The foliage was so dense and the land so infrequently traveled that almost any path we cleared would grow over again in a matter of days. While it would be possible for someone to clear wider trails in some places, and to mark them, the most frequent travelers in the Darién are also the least likely folks to blaze the way. Drug smugglers and human traffickers thrive under the cover of anonymity the jungle provides.
To say that it was hot was an understatement, and the humidity stayed pegge
d near 100 percent. None of that bothered me, even carrying sixty pounds of gear and food. The jungle was my home away from home, and this might just be the wildest one on earth. I’d found my way in, and nothing was going to stop me from seeing my way through.
The farther we hiked, the more impressed I was with my guide. I’d spent a year working as a personal trainer before leaving for this trip, saving money to travel. I was seriously fit. But this guy could have out-hiked me any day, on any mountain, in his bare feet. The terrain was crazy steep in some places, precipitous enough that I had to use hands, feet, knees, and elbows to climb it. Nevertheless, Eduardo pushed on as if it were a path he walked every day.
Next to him I was one big, slow gringo. It was remarkably humbling.
The Panamanian portion of the Darién is almost entirely national park (though likely one of the least-traveled national parks in the world), and Eduardo had made arrangements for us to stay at a ranger station. The accommodations were basic—a couple bunks and running water I could sterilize. The two young rangers there were welcoming, if a little confused as to why I was there. For the few days we had there we followed a simple routine: get up, eat something from the rations we’d carried with us (peanut butter is heavy as hell in a backpack but worth it), hike all day looking for wildlife and taking turns carrying my equipment, rinse off in a creek, eat beans and rice, then sleep like a rock.
