The Darién is the province at the southeastern edge of Panamá, bordering Colombia. It is quite remote and undeveloped, with lots of wildlife and virgin jungle. The Inter-American highway runs from Alaska all the way to the tip of Chile, except for a 150 km stretch, called the Darién Gap, where there are no paved roads. 90-some rivers, but no roads. The Colombian drug trade begets violence, and the region bordering the Darién province is often politically unstable, so the Panamanians like having this buffer zone, especially the indigenous Wounaan and Embaré Indians, who would like to preserve what is left of their culture and environment.
The region is not very touristed, in large part due to various safety concerns. The aforementioned drug traffickers and armed guerillas are part of that. There are very poisonous snakes in the area called Fer de Lance; I think those are one of those kinds where, once you are bitten, you count down the minutes or seconds to your own death. Bummer. And the indigenous tribes used to use poison darts, whose toxin was derived from the local exotic looking frogs called, not surprisingly, poison-dart frogs. Add to that the presence of P. falciparum which is the ‘bad’ malaria, dengue fever (another nasty mosquito-borne disease) and yellow fever, and you have a recipe that will induce apprehension in pretty much every personality type.
Some fellow cruisers, Mark and Sylvia of sailboat Rachael III, have friends living in Panama City who told them, “Just stay on the coast if you insist on going to the Darien. Don’t go into the mountains or you will be shot!” We really did want to see those jungles, have the experience of anchoring in the rivers there, exploring the rarely visited Indian villages, pick up some of those baskets they weave so finely that they hold water, perhaps even spot a rare harpy eagle.
So, firmly resolved not to venture into the mountains, we set forth, in the company of three buddy boats: sailboats Rachael III from the U.K, Lisa Kay and Eyes of the World, both from Ventura/Channel Islands area.
First stop: Isla Iguana, in the large bay of Golfo San Miguel. This is a convenient jumping off point to explore by dinghy some of the nearby mangrove-lined rivers and channels. There’s also a small town (not Indian) that we visited.
Lisa Kay: Lisa, Ben and Larry
Eyes of the World: Rick and Karen
Rachael III: Mark and Sylvia, boring and humorless as usual :-)))
Drifting up a mangrove channel on the rising tide
The village on the bay
Some of the houses are painted in cheerful colors with fanciful designs
After a couple of nights there, we braved some fierce currents through a narrow channel to anchor up the Rio Tuira near the region’s ‘major’ town of La Palma. No sooner had we dropped the hook in the muddy river bottom than we had a welcoming committee of locals.
Stan immediately went into Father Christmas mode, handing out school supplies and candy to the children. Wish we’d had some dentures to give to their poor mothers… maybe the candy was not such a great idea.
From here, we hired a cayuco (long, narrow wooden boat or dugout canoe) and driver to take us for a visit to a Wounaan Indian village up the Sabana river.
The men have quit wearing loincloths and sport mostly western clothing, often with necklaces or other jewelry. The women still wear their traditional native garb though, mostly. They are topless, in brightly colored wrap skirts, with tattoos painted all over their arms and chests from a vegetable dye called jagua (pronounced ‘HA-wa.’ The tattoos only last a few weeks so we each got one.
Lisa gets her tattoo
They live on subsistence farming of corn, rice, yucca and bananas, along with a bit of fishing and shrimping. There are chickens running around everyplace, and a few pigs. No power or cell service. But the government has provided these villages with some basics: a schoolhouse and teacher, a tiny medical building with no evidence of a doctor, and a single phone booth in the center of the village. A set of stocks serves as their ‘jail.’
They made us a lovely lunch of chicken stew and rice over an open fire… after which, yes, I most certainly did buy a couple of those baskets.
Then we took another Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride back through the channels, same wicked currents and whirlpools, to the southeastern side of Golfo San Miguel. We anchored close to the mouth of the river Mogué (pronounced mo-GAY,) which is near a large wildlife preserve. Sighting the great harpy eagle is rare, but if you are ever going to see one it would probably be here, where they have a nesting area.
First we waved down a passing cayuco from a small village nearby along the bay. Victor and his son Jose were happy to take all nine of us miles up the river to the Embaré village of Mogué, where we figured we could try to find out where to go to spot an eagle.
Ben, and Victor’s son José
The Embaré and Wounaan tribes consider themselves very separate and distinct from each other; but from our gringo perspective they seemed remarkably alike. Our unexpected visit was no doubt a big event in this village that sees only around 50 or 60 visitors per year.
Stairs lead to a 1 km walking path which ends at the village
Typical dwelling: all of them on stilts, thatched roofs and very little in the way of walls.
Coffee beans drying in the sun
Laundry is washed in the river
We met with the chief, who told us he had someone who could guide us the next morning to a nesting ground, where we might see harpy eagles. It would be a two hour hike uphill, leisurely he said, in the 90+ heat, then two hours back. Victor agreed to pick us up at 6 AM, when the tide would be high for passage up the river. The sun was rising there at around 6:30.
Suddenly the rest of us thought of very urgent and compelling reasons why we had to stay behind on our boats the next morning, leaving diehards Stan and Larry as committed as ever to what would soon be named ‘The Harpy Eagle Death March.’
Above you see a poster picture of a harpy eagle. They are truly huge and wondrous predators, each leg the size of a man’s forearm. Their main diet consists of sloths, which they pluck from the trees. But they also will go for adult howler monkeys, whose skulls they crush with their talons at 500 psi of pressure, so that they don’t have to deal with any sass from those monkeys as they fly them back to their nests for lunch. Harpy eagles don’t soar, but merely hang out in the jungle canopy looking elegant and wicked, waiting for a nearby sloth to… well, get slothful, I suppose.
The reason you are looking at a poster of an eagle is no doubt obvious to you by now. But hey, if you don’t do the tromp into the jungle, you have zero chance of seeing one, right? At least they gave it a solid effort.
The Embaré chief wasn’t wholly accurate in his assessment of the day’s journey, as it turns out. First off, Victor arrived in the anchorage promptly at the obscene hour of 4:30 AM. As it happens, he doesn’t own a watch or clock, so had no idea what time it was. Lisa and Larry fixed him breakfast to kill some time, then Larry and Stan headed across to the river mouth under the questionable power of Victor’s constantly stalling outboard motor.
Moon over the bay at daybreak
With Larry and Victor, heading upriver
The primitive trail they followed up into the mountains, sometimes less than a foot wide, was at least 1,000 years old. They came across the boulder in the picture below, carved by the Kuna Indians, a tribe that was driven away into the San Blas Islands by the Embaré 1,000 years ago.
Wait a minute, you say. The mountains? Didn’t you say there would be no wandering into the mountains… something about being shot?? With GPS, Larry was able later to pinpoint their location using Google Earth. Turns out it was NINE MILES up the mountain, then again back down. They got back at 5:30 in the evening, bruised and blistered, yet still very glad they had gone.
They did reach the nesting area, but the eagles were elsewhere at the time and nothing to be done. The most impressive wildlife they encountered along their way was a pair of young men armed with rifles and very mean dogs. Fortunately, these men knew Stan and Larry’s guide. But the rifles were for not for hunting. Perhaps a blessing, Stan and Larry were too distracted trying to keep from breaking an ankle along the irregular, steep and rock-strewn trail to worry about whoever these men felt the need to be armed against.
When they finally made it back to the anchorage, Stan had Victor wait while he ran aboard Pax Nautica and dug up the functional but basic, plastic-banded digital watch he used to wear before he retired. When he gave it to Victor with a laugh, the man was so surprised and touched he actually teared up, saying nobody had ever given him a gift like that before.
There are some amazing places we have visited on our travels, areas to which we are granted unique access by virtue of our ability to arrive by boat and stay awhile. Yet we invariably find it is these little unanticipated moments that end up creating memories that stick with us in a meaningful way, and make our life aboard that much more colorful.
Comments are closed.