by Steve Hely
It wasn’t a great day for sailing, the sky was gray and gloomy. I was on the beach for a boat, too, the German’s boat, a catamaran that would hold eighteen travelers who were looking to sail around the Darién Gap.
The Darién Gap
You could drive all the way from California to Chile, and on paved road, too—well, mostly paved road. I read reports that it gives out a bit in Honduras. But there’s road, all the way from North America to the very bottom of South America.
Except for one big gap.
The Darién Gap, it’s called. About 150 kilometers of mountainous, lawless jungle between Panama and Colombia where the road disappears. The landscape is too rugged, and no country wants the responsibility. All authority dissolves away into the wild. Drug cartels, tribal people, guerrilla fighters, ants and snakes and jaguars—who controls the Darién Gap? Nobody knows.
People have crossed it before. Noted Canadian travel writer, historian, ethnobotanist, and overall brilliant badass Wade Davis walked across it in 1973. He was twenty. He went along with Sebastian Snow, the “Rucksack Man,” an English adventurer, an Eton alum and bearded maniac who ended up walking from Patagonia to Costa Rica.
In 2000, two Englishmen, Tom Hart Dyke and Paul Winder, went into the Darién Gap. They ended up getting kidnapped for nine months by Colombian FARC guerrillas, a story told in their bestselling book, The Cloud Garden.
“Yeah, we used to run a trip into the Darién,” Captain Rich told me, back on the Canal. I wanted to hear all about it. “Lately some new guys came in there,” he said. “They wouldn’t be too excited about us taking people in there, Americans especially,” he said ominously. “You get lost in there, and nobody’s coming after you. Not Panamanians, not Colombians—I mean nobody.”
Gaps are interesting. For a while now I’d been fascinated with this one. I bought the best map I could find of it, the National Geographic Panama Adventure Travel Map. Even on there, the trails drift off and disappear.
The best firsthand account I found from anyone who crossed it is a book called Crossing the Darién Gap: A Daring Journey Through a Forbidding and Enchanting and Roadless Jungle That Is the Only Link by Land Between North America and South America, by Andrew Niall Egan, self-published by the author.
Let me highly, highly recommend this book to you. Andrew Niall Egan now works as a real estate agent in Florida, but when he was an eighteen-year-old kid in Canada, he went off on a three-month adventure from Mexico to the Darién Gap, determined to walk across it. So he does, and his adventures are amazing. He slept among tribes who had no idea what country they lived in, or how many people might be in the world. Many thousands? He encounters an incredible man, “The Prophet.” Let him tell you. He tells his story in a brisk and clear and compelling way.
When I finished his book, I wrote to Andrew Niall Egan to congratulate him on it and thank him for writing it. I said I was maybe thinking of trying the Gap myself. He wrote back and said he thought it “too risky to cross the Darién Gap overland right now, due to the risk of kidnapping.”
Fine with me, I thought, glad to be let off the hook. Andrew Niall Egan knew his shit and was a lot tougher than me, judging from his book. Anyway, he’s a great guy.*
But for me: I’d take a boat.
That’s how I got to Guna Yala, about to board a boat for a three-day sail to Colombia.
Pirates of the Caribbean
There were two Swedish girls, who were eighteen. “WHERE IS THE FUCKING DAMN SUN?!” one of them would yell, poking her head through the porthole, when she saw the sky was still gray. There was a German woman, maybe twenty-five, who sat in her bikini absorbed in an English book called An Irish Country Christmas. There was another German woman, maybe twenty-two, who spoke no English and kept to herself and read Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea in German (Muscheln in meiner Hand). The two German girls didn’t seem to like each other. I didn’t know why. They never said a word to each other in German.
There were two other Americans, Katie and Lucas. Katie was like a beautiful girl from a catalog for some clothing line with positive values. She was half-Asian and had a huge smile and she looked like a camp counselor your kids would fall in love with. Lucas was not super handsome. He was balding, even though he couldn’t’ve been older than twenty-two, but he was just pure winner, charm oozed off him, he was so comfortable in himself and so happy to help you feel comfortable. A great man, Lucas, I’m enjoying just remembering him now.
There was another American, too, a sweet-hearted guy, but he had brought his guitar aboard. This was an error. No one wanted to hear him play it, that was made clear to him with increasing clarity and force until he got the picture. He would get so seasick on the last days of the sail that he just folded himself into a ball and knocked himself out every six hours with Dramamine and rum. In Cartagena at last, it would seem to me that the girl who spoke only German was game to have sex with him, but he missed his moment and she disappeared.
Lena was a Dutch woman, my age and laughably tough. She would offer to beat any man on the boat in arm wrestling and did. She was the manager of a bar somewhere, but when she got giggling, it was hilarious, a very funny time indeed if you got her to laugh, which was hard but not that hard.
Then there was the captain, a Colombian, who spoke no English but projected calmness and competence. “He doesn’t drink, and he is all the time reading the Bible,” the shirtless German Gorgonic shipowner said on the beach in Guna Yala. He said it with scorn, as though this wasn’t exactly the kind of guy you’d want as your captain. He apparently didn’t have the wisdom of the Panama Canal’s Captain Rich, who knew the rarity and value of a nondrunk sailor.
The captain handled himself on the whole voyage with tremendous coolness. He was aided by a mate and cook, a black Panamanian, skilled at darting around the boat and checking lines and cooking on bad seas. He was skilled, too, in turning a blind eye to unbelievable acts of idiocy.
That was important because the other eight people on the boat were Australians.
Australians Abroad
By my calculations, there are no people age eighteen to twenty-five in Australia. How could there be? There aren’t that many people in Australia, but everywhere you go in the world, there’re Australians.
Australians are special. The first event that happened in Australian history was a drunken debaucherous beach party. This is a fact. It happened on February 6, 1788, as the first shipment of female prostitutes and convicts arrived at Port Jackson, near where the Sydney Opera House stands. Let me quote from Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, as he describes what happened when the sailors were given an extra ration of rum and set loose on the beach: “As the couples rutted between the rocks, guts burning from the harsh Brazilian aquardiente, their clothes slimy with red clay, the sexual history of colonial Australia may fairly be said to have begun.” One of the officers later wrote, “It is beyond my abilities to give a just description of the scene of debauchery and riot that ensued during the night.” That’s how Australia starts, and they haven’t stopped.
That’s white Australian history, anyway. The aboriginal peoples of Australia didn’t write their history down, though they keep long strings of it in oral tradition that maybe they’re still keeping secret. They must’ve reached Australia in boats, but then they forgot or quit boats forever.
Australians respect nothing except the epic and ridiculous, because that is the nature of the native animals of their homeland. Wherever you go in the world, you will find Australians being preposterous. I love them.
I’ve always gotten along with Australians. I visited their country once, for four days. I was invited to hug their television host, Julia Zemiro. This is a great honor in their land, they insisted. She won Australia’s Brainiest TV Star. Out in the bush I saw a koala asleep, balled up in a tree, and many kangaroos. The butter in Australia is fantastic.
/> But I like Australians best when I meet them abroad, because they seem to share with me, the ones I run into, anyway, a sense or a hope that the world is wonderful and ridiculous and to be enjoyed as much as possible.
A group of lions is called a pride, a bunch of birds is a flock. What is a bunch of Australians called? A party.
On this boat the Australians were:
a primary school teacher named Emma who got so high on cocaine and so drunk she was sputter-giggling with lascivious joy, pounding the table for hours. If her third graders could’ve seen that!
two dopes who I will call Bill and Ted because they resembled the good-hearted time-traveling simpletons of the 1989 film. These were the very same dopes I’d seen turn their backs on the waterfall at Agua Azul, settling in instead to watch the movie Dragon Ball Z on a tiny TV in a taqueria back in Chiapas. I call them dopes, which they were, but I will admit they were handsome dopes. They tried without success to have sex with the Swedish girls on the boat. It was a bit pitiful to watch. Their art at pretending to listen to girls was unskilled. But God bless them for trying. I hope they found pliable and equally dopey women somewhere farther down the trail.
and:
the A-Team. These people, four dudes and a beautiful half-Venezuelan girl who was their leader’s girlfriend, had quit or taken leave of their jobs, then flown to Mexico City, where they bought a used Dodge minivan, which they drove down the coast of Central America for three months, surfing at every remote and legendary local spot they could find their way to, and then they’d sold their minivan in Panama City and now they were on the boat with me.
The Dread Ship Jacqueline
The Jacqueline was a fifty-six-foot boat, and with the captain and the mate, there were nineteen of us on it, two to a bed belowdecks, narrow bunks above, or you could sleep out in a hammock under the stars.
The food wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good, either—flapjacks with honey one night, fish when we caught some.
The people aboard were age twenty, I’d say, on average, all skinny, far from home, looking for adventure, and getting drunk from wake-up until late at night. Every free space had cans of beer stuffed into it. I had two huge bottles of Abuelo rum and I’d run out by night two.
By the end of the first day, everyone had smoked all the weed they had, which was a lot. Cigarettes were in desperate demand. One advantage age and maturity gave me was I’d anticipated that, I’d known the idiots who’d be on this boat would get desperate for cigarettes, and my backpack was stuffed with them. Regular Marlboros and Pielrojas, a brand of Panamanian loose-tobacco deals Captain Rich had recommended I sample. They were hard to find, a cigarette for the poor and old-fashioned, but I bought up every pack I could, and by this devilish means or impressive gift of foresight and logistics I became at least the fourth- or fifth-ranking officer on the boat. The stretch of water we were in, between indigenous islands of Panama and Colombia, on the wild southern fringe of the Caribbean, was and is lawless ocean.
Stoned and drunk, it dawned on me that this is what a pirate ship would’ve been like. The crew would’ve smelled much worse. Their teeth would’ve been nastier, everyone would’ve been more plague-ridden, there would’ve been way less in the way of swimsuits. Also fewer hot blond women from Northern Europe. No women at all, probably. And maybe sociopathically violent. But still I bet they would’ve been skinny kids, about our age. Perhaps lured in by some shady procurer. Setting out for adventure at sea in jovial chaos until it got out of control and bloody and psychotic or the ship sank or was blown to splinters by cannons.
Skinny kids, drunk and out for adventure—that’s who I bet Captain Morgan had with him when he canoed and marched across the swampy isthmus and destroyed Panama. His trip got real dark real fast, I bet.
Luckily, on this boat, everyone seemed more into chillin’ and swimming around than raping and murdering and burning cities to the ground. So it was all good times.
Islands in the Stream and the Drug Canoe
There are something like three hundred fifty, three hundred sixty San Blas islands. Some of them are no bigger than a table. Some of them have five or six shacks on them. Some of them have one palm tree, like the desert island in a cartoon.
Anchored off one, we snorkeled and swam through the sunken wreck of an old boat, from the 1930s maybe, or the ’50s, or the ’70s, who knows? Hold your breath and you could dive down to the rusting hulk of its engine. On the shore, Guna women sat and smoked and chatted with each other in their language, next to woven molas of psychedelic sea life and plants and pan-eyed birds laid out in the sand. We swam and kicked a ball around on the beach, dove off the side of the ship, lay in the netting slung between the hulls of the catamaran.* We swam underneath it and climbed back on up to drink cans of Panama beer and eat bananas and chips.
By the second day, there was some antsiness, at first semiprivate but soon a shared discussion among passengers that we were out of drugs. Attempts to communicate this to the Guna island residents, seeking remedy, were optimistic but led nowhere.
In the waters between Panama and Colombia, lack of drugs is not a problem you won’t be able to solve. Under sail from one island to another, a wooden dugout canoe paddled by two Guna men waved to us and were hailed over. They were selling fish, and sure, yeah, we’d take some of those. It fell to Katie the multiracial sweetheart from a catalog to suggest in the Spanish she’d learned volunteering in an orphanage that maybe they might also sell . . . other things?
Yes, in fact, they had that, too. Under their pile of fish was a package in a Ziploc bag. It was told to me that these men had seen many bags thrown from a speedboat under pursuit by the Colombian coast guard. Once the chase passed out of sight, the Guna fishermen dove down and hauled up one of the bags and here it was, packed with marijuana and cocaine. A collection was hastily gathered and the Jacqueline passengers bought the whole thing. The afternoon, evening, and following day and night out on the open sea in a storm were thus much enlivened.
The A-Team
Everyone on the boat was pretty agreeable to me. I liked them all. What I was up to seemed confusing to the younger ones. I can’t blame them. I wasn’t totally sure what I was doing here myself, but it was good times and I was happy to keep going with it. Maybe the whole point of this trip was to find myself at sea partying with these strangers, I thought.
My favorites were the A-Team, the four Australians with their gorgeous half-Venezuelan translator and guide and den mother. I called them the A-Team because 1) they traveled together for months in a van and 2) they each had some special skill. Pyle, for instance, their most hippie-ish member, tripped out and shaggy, was a skilled fisherman who hauled in thin but tasty bonefish, trawling over the side with a thin line and hook he’d brought himself. Gale was their jovial accountant, he kept the books on this expedition, and while this might not seem like the sexiest job, he was respected by them for it. Their leader, James, was a Greek Australian. At night on watch he sat perched by the open deck chair, holding the starboard rigging wire, shirtless. Goddammit, I thought, again stoned and drunk, that must’ve been what Odysseus looked like. And sure enough he could tell a tale and wax on in near poetry. He told of trips out to council land, empty stretches of wild Australian coastline where friends camped and built great bonfires and took hallucinogens and fucked each other and reveled in the glory of life. Meanwhile, sure-handed Mitch rolled joints, skilled hands working precisely even as the seas bucked and rolled us and storms passed over.
On the last night we were way out on the open sea, international waters, no land for miles, tossing all over the place in a storm in the soaked darkness. The Australian dopes blasted the Avalanches from their speakers and ripped lines of coke off the wobbling table and we smoked weed and cigarettes and thumped the table with drinking games. Late late in the night, the dopes and I were the last ones standing, having a dance party.
When I went to sl
eep I’m not sure, but when I woke the sun was up and glistening off the glass of hotels. We were anchored in the harbor in Cartagena.
Port of Call: Cartagena
Since its founding, in 1533, a whole lot of money has passed through Cartagena. The Zenú people who lived around there before they vanished from the Earth buried their noble dead with all kinds of gold things. When the tombs were found, they were plundered, and word got out that if you could find secret tombs and rob them, there was gold to get in Cartagena. Slaves were brought to the port of Cartagena, some of them fated for the mines of Peru and Bolivia. Silver and gold were hauled on mule trains to Cartagena, and from there Spanish treasure fleets sailed to Havana and onward.
Now, all that treasure sailing along the wild coast tempted every pirate and semi-pirate on the sea. Sir Francis Drake, Jean-François Roberval, Martin Cole, Sir John Hawkins, Bernard Desjean, Laurens de Graaf, Nicholas van Hoorn—they were partners until the one killed the other—all the great pirates and privateers took a try at Cartagena. The history of the city is like a listing of raids and sieges. Some absurd amount of money was invested by the very wealthy Spanish in defending it. Engineers and masters of geometry and artillery were brought over from Spain and Italy to devise bastions and barbicans and fortifications.
By the time the War of Jenkins’s Ear broke out—you remember that, had to do with a sailor named Jenkins getting his ear cut off, which he displayed in a bottle, but deeper down, it had to do with the English wanting to continue to profit off selling slaves to Spanish America—Cartagena was shut up like a lock behind a fortress of stone walls.
