The Darien

      The Pan American Highway begins in Alaska, travels south through the Americas across great plains, rivers, swamps and jungles to its end at Tierra del Fuego on the bottom tip of Chile in South America. The only wilderness that has been too savage to be conquered by the highway, and man, is a 200 kilometer stretch through the virgin jungles of Darien; it is called the Darien Gap. Here you will find the greatest variety of ecosystems anywhere in tropical America. There are 56 species of animals that live in the Darien that are endangered everywhere else in the Americas. If you want to take your car to South America you have to ship it from Panama to Colombia because there is no through road.
The northern 100 kilometers of the Gap is the Darien Jungle of Southern Panama, some say the wildest jungles in the Americas. The southern 100 kilometers of the Gap is the Orinoco Swamps of Northern Colombia. It is said that you can submerge a twenty story office building into the swamps and it would disappear.
     Construction of the road to bridge the Gap is highly controversial. The Gap has served as an impassable geographical boundary to keep diseases (like hoof and mouth which affects cattle and pigs) in South America, and out of Central and North America. I don't think there is anyone who wants to see the road built, with the exception of possibly the Colombian government. They believe that the completion of the road will help open new markets for Colombian products, and that they will be able to get goods to the north faster. There have been several ecological studies done on how the road will affect the animal life of the Darien, as well as the Chocó Indians. I know the Panamanian government was not too keen on the construction of the road because of the initial cost as well as the expense of the ongoing maintenance of the highway.
     As a result of pressure from the Colombian and United States governments, the Panamanian government tried to build the road from Panama City to Yaviza, Darien while I was there. I think the Panamanian government also thought that a road through to Yaviza could possibly help develop the primitive Darien, one third of the land mass of the entire country, which supported only about one percent of the population of the country. This was a brilliant effort on the part of the Panamanian government. They divided the road into three segments, and contracted out the first two segments that were the closest to Panama City.
     The company that had segment number two completed their section of the road.
     The company that had segment number one (the segment that abutted Panama City) went bankrupt.
     So they had this beautifully manicured gravel road cut through the dense jungle that went “from nowhere to nowhere!”
     When I went back and saw the road several years later, the jungle had already come back to reclaim its own. There were many parts of that second segment of road that were virtually impassable due to the growth of dense foliage.
     When my doctor heard that I was going into the Panamanian jungles he told me that I would need a 'few' shots. I think that it took about a month of weekly visits to the clinic to receive all of the 'few' shots he spoke about, before leaving Michigan. I think that he inoculated me against everything known to mankind. I was sick for several weeks following the barrage of needles.
     One of the first stops in the preparation process was at an Army Surplus store. We purchased rain ponchos, hammocks that were enclosed with mosquito screen, a portable gas stove, and so many more supplies that we thought we would be needing for the adventure. Five years later the rain ponchos and the hammocks were still godsends in helping us to survive the rugged conditions of the Darien jungle.
     When I left Michigan I was determined to stay healthy, so I brought malaria pills, and a powder that we would dissolve in your drinking water to make it safe to drink. That attitude lasted only about a month. The malaria pills gave me nausea, and the powder made the water virtually undrinkable. I finally resolved that if I were going to live in the jungle, I would take life as it came. Caution had never been a strong suit of mine, and if I were going to truly enjoy this unique experience this was certainly not the time to start being cautious. Besides, if it was good enough for the indigenous people to eat and drink, I figured that it was certainly good enough for me.
     There is only one flight into and out of the Darien a day. If you miss it, good luck until tomorrow. The planes are called Islanders, seat eight people including the pilot, and have a small storage space in back for the luggage. The planes were very rustic and it was not unusual to have a live chicken under your seat during one of these flights. These planes fly out of a small airstrip about five miles outside of Panama City called Patilla Airport. The plane generally flies into El Real and La Palma, two of the three biggest cities in the Darien. The third largest city is Yaviza, but there doesn't seem to be much air travel there, as stops there are infrequent, and the tall primary growth jungle canopy trees at the end of the runway make landing and taking off a little scary. The flight takes about an hour, barring any unforeseen difficulties.
     The bush pilots who fly these planes have incredible flying skills. I remember one time we were flying into El Real and the cloud cover was so thick that you couldn't see ground anywhere. I happened to be seated in the front seat beside the pilot, Valderama, who I grew to know very well. As we circled near where he thought the airport was, we both saw it at the same time - a small patch of the clouds had momentarily parted and you could see a tiny patch of what looked like brown river water through the small hole in the clouds.
     Valderama put the plane immediately into a nosedive; we went through the hole in the clouds and came up about five feet above the surface of the river water. If there had been a Banana Boat coming down the river we would have flown right into it.
     The plane wound its way up the river, just above the surface of the water and just below the low cloud cover. We came to the Boca, the mouth of two major rivers, the Tuira and the Chucunaque, which is very close to the entrance to El Real. Here the pilot hopped the plane back up into clouds just over the tops of the trees of the jungle canopy. Flying through dense cloud cover from memory he put the plane right back down out of the clouds and onto the airstrip at El Real.
     The airstrip at El Real was always an adventure. It was a grass field carved out of the secondary growth rain forest. On one side it butted up against an area that was used for grazing cows. Once in a while you could not land until they cleared the cows off of the strip. There was a small shelter at the field, a block house with a thatched roof to protect passengers from the rain while they were waiting for the plane. There were always children waiting at the strip in El Real when the plane landed. For a quarter they would carry anything the half mile walk to city of El Real. You didn't wait for a taxi to come by to pick you up.
     If the airstrip in El Real was an adventure, the strip in Yaviza was an example of a disaster waiting to happen. At one end of the strip there were many very tall (approximately 100+ feet) trees of the jungle canopy, and the other end of the strip butted up to the river embankment of the Chucunaque River. While coming in for a landing the wheels of the plane would clear the tops of the tall trees by only a few feet. As soon as we were clear of the canopy trees the pilot would stall the plane and it would drop almost straight down. Your heart would plummet into your shoes. At what seemed like the last moment before we flew into the ground, the pilot would level out and then slam on the brakes, hoping that the plane would stop before it went over the embankment and into the muddy waters of the Chucunaque.
     The take off was the same heart attack in reverse. You would back up to the edge of the tall trees, rev the engine up to maximum, and hope you got up enough speed to be able to lift off before you went over the cliff and into the Chucunaque River at the far end of the runway.
     The population of the Tuira/Chucunaque Basin of the Darien is split roughly in thirds. There are approximately equal numbers of Panamanian, Colombian, and Chocó Indian. The racial mixtures are interesting. You could almost tell where someone came from by the way they looked. The Colombians from the south of Colombia (like Cali) were very light skinned. The Colombians from the north (like Bogota) were dark skinned. The Panamanians had more of the Spanish and Indian influence in their backgrounds and had a light chocolate-colored skin. There were many Panamanians of direct Spanish decent who also had very light skin.
     The Colombians and Panamanians were referred to as Mestizos (mixed), and their towns were separate from the Choco, void of any Indian inhabitants. The Mestizos looked down on the Indians and called them “Cholos and Cholas.” These words were spoken as a derogatory term to belittle the Chocó. The Chocó did not like to be referred to in this manner, and preferred to be described as “Chocó.” I have, however, heard the term “Cholita” used in an endearing fashion. So, it seems to depend some on the usage as to the exact meaning. In any case, a caring person would never use any of these terms around the Chocó Indians. After learning the true Darien meaning of these words, I became very sensitive to them, and forbade my employees from using them in my presence.
     I realized very early on that the key to getting the cooperation of the Choco Indians was “showing respect.” I went out of my way to treat all Choco with respect whether male or female, and demanded the same from all of my Mestizo employees. When visiting a Choco village, I always paid a visit to the house of the elder of the village, simply to say “hi” and show my respect and thank him for allowing us to come into his village.
     The Mestizos, on the other hand, seemed to have no racial, cultural or class barriers among themselves. All Mestizos were thought of as equals with all other Mestizos, regardless of where they came from or their racial or cultural background. The Darien is definitely split into these two distinctly different class groups; Mestizos and Chocó.
     The main cities in Darien are La Palma, El Real and Yaviza, and they are populated by the Panamanians and Columbians. The Chocó Indians live in small villages, based around their family lineages, located on the banks of the various Darien Rivers. Each Chocó village is a walk of several hours to the next village or about an hour and a half to two hours by piragua, a motorized dugout canoe.
The city of Yaviza is about a little over an hour ride from El Real, up the Chucunaque River from the Boca. The Chucunaque basin begins at Yaviza and continues upriver with three smaller rivers branching from the main Chucunaque. The first branches off a short distance upriver from Yaviza and is called the Rio Chico. The other two small river branches are the Tuquesa and the Tupisa, with the mouth of the Tupisa about three hours upriver from Yaviza by piragua. Each of these three smaller rivers has three Chocó Indian villages on them.
     Probably the most remote Chocó village that I saw while in Darien was the third, and last, village up the Rio Tupisa. The village was very small, approximately 10 huts, and set against a picturesque backdrop of the Serrania Del Darien. If we left our house at the crack of dawn, we would arrive at this village in darkness. By the reaction of the children in this village to us, I believe that they had never been exposed to a “Gringo” before. Seeing how the children were either afraid of us, or wanted to come up to us and touch our skin or hair, I imagined how the original Europeans, encountering these people for the first time, must have felt.