Panama to Costa Rica

Headlamp…warm, long-sleeved shirt…wool socks…earplugs…

I am running through my checklist of things that I need to keep handy for a nocturnal road trip on the Pan-Am Highway. There are few times when you feel the cold in the coastal lowlands of Panama. At this time of year the mercury is frequently nudging at 30°C even in the middle of the night.

But experience has taught me that – unless you are lucky enough to find a bus in which the air-con has finally been burned out – Latin American buses are almost always kept chilled to almost arctic temperatures. Perhaps the drivers deliberately keep to a level of frigidity at which sleep is impossible. Blaring salsa music invariably blasts out throughout the night for the same reason. Maybe it is because it is a safety measure that nobody ever complains. It’s all part of the experience of a Central American road-trip anyway and the thick wool socks and the earplugs (which just manage to muffle the din to a normal listening level) make it bearable.

As we pull away from Panama’s Allbrook Terminal the passengers around me cross themselves and utter little prayers for the road. For added security Latin America buses are often emblazoned with Madonna’s, saints and religious catchphrases: ‘Jesus Es Mi Copiloto’ or ‘Good Shepherd Protect Us.’ In Venezuela I once took a bus high up the windy roads into the Andes. It bore the legend: ‘Solo Dios Sabe si Regresarémos’ – only God knows if we will return. (“In that case,” I told the driver, “I’ll have a one-way ticket”).

Soon we are leaving the lights of Panama behind and are roaring over the web-like structure of the Bridge of the Americas. Northward from here the tarmac serpent of the Pan-American Highway ripples onward for about ten thousand miles, all the way to Fairbanks, Alaska. To the southwards though it deteriorates quickly (becoming almost un-passable in the rainy season) until it finally stutters to a halt altogether at the dusty town of Yaviza. Apart from a ramshackle collection of bars dispensing seco con leche (a particularly raw type of rum, traditionally drunk with milk) Yaviza has little to recommend it. It is amazing to think that this phenomenal feat of engineering would link Alaska with Tierra del Fuego if it were not for the entirely impenetrable and untameable Darien jungle.

The bus roars on through the darkness. The passengers are wrapped in all the clothes they carry and with ears muffled against the booming ‘entertainment system.’ In the first bleary light of day we arrive at Paso Canoas. The name Canoe Pass smacks of pure adventure and the spirit of Latin American exploration. Actually it is just a busy border post very similar to others all over the world. You concentrate on watching your bags and your pockets as you negotiate first the exit queues and then the entry queues. There are bag searches and (at the moment) forms to fill in allowing you to tick the appropriate boxes if you are suffering any of the symptoms of swine flu. (Strangely, the Panamanian officials are all wearing masks, yet the Costa Ricans aren’t).

I take a taxi the first few miles across the border to the town of Rio Claro where I head into the only eating place that is open at this ungodly hour and order mango juice, coffee (x3) and a plate of the ubiquitous gallo pinto. ‘Spotted cockerel’ is rice with refried beans, and is best eaten with liberal splashes of tabasco.

During the next month or so I will be following the Pan-Am Highway north from here all the way to Mexico City but for the time being my plan is to branch off and head over to the paradisiacal Osa Peninsula to visit some old friends. And to surf some un-crowded waves.

From Rio Claro I hitch a ride to Golfito and from there I take a boat across the gulf to Puerto Jimenez. Eighteen hours after leaving Panama City I finally jump off the rickety old truck that is the only public transport along the dirt-track that leads deep into the Osa. Finally I have arrived at Tierra de Milagros – Land of Miracles.

>><>><<><< THE END

Mark Eveleigh
Tierra de Milagros,
Osa Peninsula,
Costa Rica

 

 

Charlie Papas Day

 

The first time I arrived in Costa Rica I flew to San Jose from Miami. As
the plane banked over the Caribbean and began its descent I remember
hearing the pilot's voice crackling out of the speakers: "Those of you
sitting on the right side of the plane will now be able look down to the
Caribbean atolls of Costa Rica...those of you on the left have a view of
a female humpback whale and a calf."

It was the best possible introduction to Costa Rica. Since that
time I have been continually amazed by the abundance of wildlife in this
country. You can see more wildlife simply walking down the high street
of an average Costa Rican village than you can in the national parks of
many other countries.

Osa Peninsula in particular is one of the greatest wildlife
destinations in the world. I am staying in a bungalow at Tierra de Milagros, where the
invariably day starts with the rousing roar of the howler monkeys. From
that point on the patch of forest around my temporary home becomes a
constant carnival of wildlife.

There are no walls on the bungalow so as I lazily open one eye in the first light I can look out through the mosquito net to see what animals are on the move at this early hour. I
have formed a strange habit here: the first animal I see each morning is
the 'spirit animal' of the day. A sort of totem animal that signifies
what the day will be like. I am happy to say that I have so far avoided
'vulture days' and 'snake days.'

One morning the first thing I saw was a giant blue morpho
butterfly - as big as a saucer and glinting like neon. It flitted down
the path straight towards my bed and then veered at the last minute. I
saw it five more times before I had my first coffee (which is never far
into the day). Another day my single open eye focused on a movement in
the treetop canopy and, without moving from my pillow, I watched a whole
troop of squirrel monkeys (Osa has the world's biggest population)
parade past, with babies on their backs. Each one stopped to stare at me
and squeak an unnecessary warning. Spider monkeys, capuchin monkeys and,
of course, the howlers have already had their totem days - along with
squirrels, scarlet macaws, hummingbirds, iguana and basilisk lizard (the
weird Jesus Christ lizard, which runs on water).

There is no electricity here in the jungle until the sun comes
up and warms the solar panels sufficiently on the main building so I sit
on my terrace and write until my laptop battery also gives up. This
morning Charlie Papas the surf dog came padding by for an unusually
early visit and became the totem animal for the day. I had been sitting
there writing for just a few minutes when I saw something in my
peripheral vision and looked up to see a raccoon happily trotting down
the track towards me. He walked right past within six feet of my seat
without giving me a glance.

Then he passed again about twenty minutes later going the other
way. It was a blatant attempt but he was too late. It was already
officially Charlie Papas Day.

Christina's tale

 

Cristina tells the story of a typical rural family moving to old San Jose -
“We left Montezuma because I was unwell as a little girl. I’ve got too many veins. You can see them in my hands. I swelled up in the heat and itched and was always tired. The doctor said that so many veins were preventing the blood from reaching my brain and unless we moved to a cooler climate I wouldn’t survive. The village was all I knew. We always went to sleep when the monkeys passed on their way down the mountain – monos congos would howl at us and carablancas would go past one by one. “Adios,” we yelled.

“Papa caught a big cicada and tied it with string to the bed so that we’d be sure to wake up when it started singing about 4 or 5 in the morning.
“Me and my big brother and sister were excited about seeing San Jose for the first time but we were also sad because we had to leave our dog Rinso behind with Grandfather. We never realised that Rinso was a brand of soap until later in San Jose (Mama used seeds and washed in the river). I was also sad because I had to sell my pet parrot. It was my best friend and he could talk better than any parrot I’ve ever heard but I had to sell him because I couldn’t arrive in San Jose without shoes.

“I sold el lorito to an old man in the village for 7 colones and even at that I thought I was rich. I bought a tin of condensed milk and made myself sick. I had never worn shoes in my life and I was really proud of my bright red sandals when we left our house.

“I stumbled along for three miles to El Cruce, where we caught the bus, but by the time we got to the ferry terminal I was already carrying my new shoes. We said good-bye to Rinso when we got on the ferry and granddad held onto him until we had gone. We could hear him whining and barking over the noise of the boat’s engines.

“When we got to San Jose we went to stay with my mother’s sister and I could see that my cousin really liked the shoes I was carrying so I gave them to her. I didn’t want them but all I could think was that now I’d sold my friend for nothing!

“Papa found some work with my uncle and it seemed that the doctor was right because I very quickly got better. I put on weight and stopped itching. I even tried to wear shoes again and now years later, I don’t know why, but it’s almost an obsession. Whenever I get a pay packet from my reception job I just have to go and buy another pair of shoes.

“We heard that Rinso missed us terribly. Grandfather said that he wouldn’t eat and he went every day at exactly the right time to meet the ferry. One day he didn’t come back and Grandfather went to look for him.

“Rinso was just a bag of bones by that time and died halfway between the village and the ferry terminal.”

Nicaraguan bottle-shopping.

Carrying rum into Nicaragua is like taking tea to China. By a stroke of luck though I decided to buy a bottle of Ron del Abuelo at the Costa Rican border with my last banknotes. It’s not that this Panamanian rum is any better than the excellent Nicaraguan Flor de Caña (‘Flower of the Cane’), but there is a widespread boycott on Flor de Caña at the moment. You are not supposed to buy it due to some ongoing dispute about how this massive family-owned conglomerate (which also controls most of the coffee…and all of the Toyotas) has been treating its cane-field labourers.

There are also two main beer producers here: Toña is said to be the beer of the worker and the Sandinista and Victoria is frowned upon in some circles as the beer of the bourgeoisie. (Just to complicate matters Victoria is actually a far tastier beer than Toña, whichever side of the fence you are sitting on).

I was out shopping for a party in Managua and was struggling to weigh all these angles up. I’m not politically minded at all but everybody else in Managua seemed to have very strong opinions. Like many of my generation I grew up thinking that ‘War-torn Nicaragua’ was the name of the country – it was decades before a news-report finally referred to the country simply as ‘Nicaragua.’ These days Nicaraguans are among the friendliest and most easy-going people in Central America and it is a relatively trouble-free country to travel in but the Nicas fought for a long time for what they believed in and such partisanship dies hard.

I didn’t want to seem to be deliberately making a point by buying that strong, tasty (rightwing) beer and the delicious and smooth (but oppressive and elitest) Flor de Caña. I figured that a ratio of 6 Toñas to 3 Victorias more or less satisfied my own political sensibilities…and ought to more than assuage my thirst.

Flor de Caña virtually has a national monopoly on rum but there is, inexplicably, one other manufacturer that seems to have slipped through the net. So I bought a bottle of the fiery looking (but actually pretty ineffectual) Ron Plata and, on my way to the check-out, I picked up some Coca Cola to mix it with.

It was one of the most cautious shopping experiences I have ever had. It was only when the party was underway that I realised I was the only one to mix my rum with coke…that ‘icon of capitalistic Gringo colonialism.’

‘Down in the dumps’ in Managua

Surprisingly, Managua probably boasts what must be one of the most efficient recycling systems anywhere in the world. Every day as many as 1,200 tonnes of trash are added to the mountain of garbage on the shore of Lake Managua that is known as La Chureca.

As you travel around the undeveloped world you become more accustomed of the sight of people living in a level of poverty that would be unimaginable to most people in the cosseted ‘western’ world. You struggle against becoming blasé towards the heart-rending hopelessness of people living under plastic sheets on the streets of Kolkata. The growing townships of Nairobi or the flooded, ramshackle slums of waterfront Jakarta can become no more than just another fleeting hazard to negotiate. Now and again though you see a side of life that can once again shake you up and rattle your conscience with an idea of just what poverty means.

La Chureca, in Managua, is one such place. An estimated 3,500 people live and work on this 150-acre garbage heap, scouring through the refuse for any plastics, tin or paper that can be sold.

The landscape is like a backdrop for Dante’s Inferno: smoke and noxious gases ooze out of the hills of refuse during the long dry seasons. The first heavy rains turn the landscape to a poisonous, steaming mountain of black sludge. Children as young as four and five work with their families, sifting through the residue of the daily lives of the more fortunate inhabitants in this city. Scraggy, hollow-ribbed dogs and filthy cows scratch through the dirt and slime for edible morsels.

Twelve year-old Julio has never known another life. He works here ten hours a day, every day, and is already an expert at prospecting sellable items out of the smouldering heaps of garbage. Like most of the children here he suffers from malnutrition, parasites and a hacking cough that is brought on by the poisonous black gases.

I am here to do a story on the ‘Churequeros’ and the NGOs (see www.ohearts.org and www.dosgeneraciones.org) that are working to help them. I spend a morning with Julio and friends and co-workers on the dump. It is hard to speak amongst the stink of rotting vegetables and the swarms of hungry flies and I have to struggle not to cover my mouth. But I remind myself that these people have to deal with every day. For them it is, in fact, a relatively beautiful morning in La Chureca; there are days when the rains turn all this into a bubbling black swamp or when the wind whips up the fires so that you are half-blinded and constantly choked.

The ‘Churequeros’ rarely venture into the city itself, where they are invariably greeted with suspicion and fear. They are the outcasts of Managua but they ask for little beyond the one or two dollars they can scrape together for a little heap of beans and a couple of shreds of corn tortilla.

Life is hard down in the dumps in Managua.

‘Fire and Brimstone’:

 

A journey through Central America is a trip along the spine of one of the world’s most dramatic and spectacular volcanic ranges. I was already in El Salvador when I got an email from a friend back in Panama City. They had just gone through two big earthquakes she told me. The whole city had shuddered and seemed to drop a couple of feet – like the first sickening fall in a roller-coaster. Then all was quiet again. There were a few more cracks in the crumbling colonial plasterwork but even among the rickety shacks in the old town there was no major damage. This whole region has been quivering and shuddering since time immemorial.

In Managua there is a morbid museum where you can imagine the final horrific minutes of a small band of Managuan ‘citizens’ who roamed this area about 5,000 years ago. Their last footprints – as they were escaping a great eruption of Volcán Masaya, fifteen miles away – have been preserved in what was once a river of ash and molten rock. You can see from the widely spaced tracks that the people were running.

I once felt the tail edge of a powerful earthquake in Peru. I was camping on a beach a long way from the epicentre and it was probably only because my back was flat on a bedroll directly on the sand that I felt the vibrations. Meanwhile ancient buildings in Arequipa were crashing to the street. In Ecuador, on another trip, I slept straight through another ‘terremoto.’ This time it was my hammock strings that muffled the shock like a sailor sleeping through a storm. I woke in the morning to find a collapsed shelf and all my kit on the floor. The village dogs had been going crazy in the night apparently and I was really disappointed that I slept like a baby right through the ruckus.

During this trip the Pan-Am Highway has already brought me past more than a score of spectacular volcanoes as I’ve travelled northwards. From the flanks of mighty Baru in Panama I rattled through Costa Rica past Volcan Poás, Irazú and Arenal (which also erupted dramatically just as I arrived in the country). As you cross into Nicaragua almost the first sight you see are the dramatic cones of volcanoes Concepción and Madera rising out of Lake Nicaragua and Managua itself is surrounded by threatening cones. Then you pass through Honduras and the great volcanic ridge that is the El Salvador highlands. Boquerón (Big Mouth) is the local name for the deep crater that haunts the people of San Salvador.

Then you are in Guatemala. In the west of the country it seems that you are never out of sight of a volcano. On an earlier visit to Guatemala, several years ago, I climbed Volcan Agua and spent an ill-equipped and freezing night on the summit. On another evening I climbed Pacaya and (in infinitely warmer conditions) dodged flying ash and flames that shot hundred metres into the air. I sat to rest on rocks that were almost too hot to touch.

The Central American ‘land-bridge’ is one of the most active volcanic areas on our planet. There are no less than forty-two active volcanoes here, and eighteen others that are still in states of brooding, bubbling, threatening readiness. Central America rocks!

"Chichi" in Guatemala

 

For many of the travellers who are drawn along the tortuous, swooping road for the famous market days Chichicastenango becomes one of the greatest landmarks in any trip around Guatemala. More than that: a few days in this unique highland town is likely to be one of the most enduring memories from an Central American trip.

‘Chichi’ is the market town of an estimated twenty thousand Quiche ‘Indians.’ Every week a large proportion of these swarm into the town to trade. The majority of tourists only make a daytrip to visit the bi-weekly market but Chichicastenango deserves much more. You should (at the latest) arrive on the eve of the markets and watch the trading families arriving. The men marching up the road from their remote highland homesteads. Their women following behind loaded with the bright woven textiles, carved masks or clucking hens that they hope to sell. By early morning the stalls are already being set up. The chill mountain mist that sits heavily in the cobbled lanes and only begins to rise when the tropical sun begins to warm up. Bent-backed porters stagger between the stalls, groaning under huge loads, or line up along the roads waiting for work.

This market is older than the history of Guatemala itself and the indigenous people were coming here to trade long before the arrival of the Spanish. The guttural tones of the Quiche language are the norm here. When you hear odd clips of Spanish spoken among the market traders it still jars on the ear and, even after five hundred years, seems out of place.

The steps of Santo Tomas church (one of Guatemala’s oldest) seem to have taken the place of the sacred steps that lead up the pyramids of the Mayan forefathers. Quiche shamen pray amid wafting incense on the steps and tribal elders hold meetings here. (In a shocking throwback to the rough justice of earlier days a couple of local gangsters were even bludgeoned to death on these steps by a mob of these seemingly quiet and peaceful townsfolk not so long ago).

Chichicastenango is timeless in many ways. At the height of the market day trading, when the tourist buses have arrived, it is true that it can feel like business revolves around the gringo dollar. But you don’t have to wander too far back into the canvas-covered maelstrom to see that Chichi is still functioning essentially as a working local market.

You find everything here from hand-woven cloth and blankets to turkeys, chickens and goats, to farm tools and local medicine. In one corner a man offered me a handful of live chicks for a dollar – each of the (once yellow) fluffy little balls of down had been died a different day-glo colour. There are stalls here selling magic potions and talismans that will bring money, love, success. You can buy bottles of blessed water that will place a curse on your enemies…or protect you from their curses.

Chichicastenango has more than its share of charm, in every way.

 

The Teachings of Don Ignacio

The church of Santo Tomás was built shortly after the Spanish Conquest on the site of a Mayan temple-pyramid and perhaps more than any other monument in Central America it illustrates the confusion that Catholicism fostered in the New World. The Spanish padres directed their religious zeal into delivering the greatest number of souls from purgatory rather than wasting valuable time in instructing them accurately in the new doctrine.

When Aldous Huxley visited Guatemala in the early nineteen-thirties he found communities who, in their misguided fervour, actively worshipped Judas Iscariot as a god. Huxley also described a bizarre local festival based upon the belief that, on the night of the Crucifixion, Saint John and the Virgin had a love affair. To prevent a repetition of this shameful event the Indians locked images of the ‘lovers’ in separate cells of the town prison on Good Friday. The next morning the two fraternities would come and pay a fine to bail them out of captivity until next year!

The religious beliefs of many of the faithful at Santo Tomás have (to the eyes of an outsider at least) always been hopelessly confused. Nobody has ever been certain where pagan idolatry ends and Catholicism begins. On the church steps you can frequently see Indians burning incense for their ancestors and chanting prayers in honour of the Mayan calendar - just as their forefathers did on the steps of the old pyramids.

I was back in Chichicastengo to visit an old friend I had last visited about fourteen years ago. Don Ignacio is one of the leading shamen in the Quiche community and has complete knowledge of tribal religion, blessings, offerings and curses (although he tells me that, unlike others in the village, he refuses to work black magic).

For generations Don Ignacio's family at Casa de las Mascaras have carved and painted the masks for most of the region’s festivals. His 'house of the masks' is at the base of a sacred hill on which sits the ancient stone god they call Pascual Abaj. About three feet tall and resembling one of the uglier Easter Island heads, Pascual Abaj is believed to be over a thousand years old.

Approaching from the shade of the eucalyptus forest, Pascual Abaj's hilltop always seems to possess a powerful atmosphere. The last time that I had visited the shrine, I had been travelling with a girlfriend and we had arrived just before dusk to see wisps of smoke curling from a small fire. Five Indians were in attendance at Pascual Abaj. So, staying amongst the trees, we circled them and sat down quietly. An older man with a strip of tasseled cloth around his head and the scuffed clothes of a farmer appeared to be blessing - or cleansing – another, younger barefoot man, by stroking him with the flat edge of his machete. Three women sat nearby, patient but apparently disinterested spectators.

The older man began swinging a censer, made from a punctured tin can. Heavy blue-black smoke gathered in clouds, evoking spirits, around the idol. His face looked strained as he begged blessings for the earth’s fertility. I noticed that even to the Mayan god his conversation was peppered with words that had been imported from Spain.

The younger man bowed low and held out two eggs. Whilst the shaman-farmer shuffled forward and broke them onto the mouth of the stone idol his assistant hurried (it seemed important not to keep Pascual Abaj waiting) to their bundle of possessions.
My girlfriend gasped as he dashed back into the centre of the clearing swinging a fat brown hen by her feet.

Between them, the two men struggled to pour some clear liquid into the struggling chicken’s throat (probably corn liquor, to calm it). Then, chanting under his breath, the farmer started to saw off the hen's head with his machete. When the last tendons were severed the assistant dashed, with the body still twitching in his hands, to rub the gushing stump across the idol’s mouth.

They seemed to be physically force-feeding their god. The two uneven hollows that were Pascual Abaj’s eyes seemed to stare icily and the jagged gash below them was soon hideously streaked with scarlet. Rivulets of blood ran onto the ground.
I realised that we were seeing a ceremony that is perhaps twice as old as Christianity. If a poor campasino family today will sacrifice a fat, healthy chicken, then it is it is easy to imagine that the great Mayan Empire once regularly honoured the gods with the blood of their greatest warriors.

To us, sitting in silent fascination amongst the trees, things became almost surreal when the old man stooped forward again to rinse the blood from Pascual Abaj’s pouting lips...with two bottles of ‘Gallo’ beer.

Since the arrival of the ‘true faith’ the Mayan religion had been consistently persecuted and suppressed. For centuries Christian fanatics have periodically ransacked the shrine of Pascual Abaj. Each time his devotees wait until the trouble has passed before they return to patch up the idol.

The Indians of Chichicastenango have had to learn to roll with the punches. But now, after almost five hundred years underground, their true beliefs have re-emerged and they are free to worship as their ancestors did.

Pascual Abaj is once again king of the hill.

 

Latin American food

 

Latin America is not generally renowned for its great cuisine. There are exceptions: fantastic steaks in Argentina for example, and the excellent chilli dishes that make travel in Mexico such a pleasure. But, throughout much of Latin American, people eat because it is necessary. Only the privileged can afford to eat for enjoyment.

There are a few famous Latin specialities that demand to be tried…if only once. In the deserts of northern Peru, for example, they make up for a lack of fresh fish with lizard ceviche and in Colombia the giant fried ants are surprisingly tasty: a bit like beef flavoured planters peanuts (except you have to pick the legs out from between your teeth).

In poorer countries like Bolivia and Ecuador the food is basic in the extreme. The famous guinea pig is a delicacy that is saved only for special occasions but the layer of elasticated fat that you have to chew through to get at the few shreds of meat make it hardly worth it. Seco de chivo (‘dry’ goat with rice) is a slight improvement on caldos de chivo (goat soup or stew) since it is often the unrecognisable parts of the goat that end up in the stew. A last resort is caldos de patas – literally ‘hoof soup’ – in which an entire cow hoof is served up in what usually amounts to nothing more than greasy water.

Plantains are a good bulk staple in much of Latin America. Often they are served pounded flat and fried as ‘patacones’ but they are delicious when they are left to ripen and sweeten, then fried as platanos maduros fritos (mature, fried bananas). In Costa Rica it is hard to avoid gallo pinto. ‘Speckled cock’ is more appealing than it sounds but is actually just rice mixed with refried beans. It is hard to find a really enticing local delicacy in Costa Rica. Occasionally poached (no pun intended) protected marine turtle eggs are found for sale in local markets – an aphrodisiac apparently when drunk raw with rum – but thankfully bush meat is not often available. In Panama though hunting is pretty much ubiquitous in rural areas and almost everything is considered edible. I once made a three-week trek through mostly uncharted rainforest it was pretty much crucial that we shoot meat for the pot. On various days paca (like a giant jungle rat) and armadillo were on the menu but we had to work hard to convince our guides that, under no circumstances, were they ever to shoot a jaguar. They worked almost as hard to convince us that jaguar meat is delicious. They were from the Kuna indigenous group – the only people I have ever heard of anywhere in the world who regularly eat the meat of big cats.

In the big cities you will never come across bush meat and there are international restaurants of even the highest standard (for a price). Fast-food places are popular among young ‘Americanised’ Latinos. Dominoes Pizzas are a favourite in Nicaragua where word has it they even funded the construction of the national cathedral! And in Guatemala teenagers would rather blow a relative fortune in McDonalds or Taco Bell than to be seen eating relatively succulent local meat at the local comedores.

There is much that I miss when I cross the border from Latin America to Mexico…but, after three months on the road from Panama, it is good to be in the land of chilli con carne, fajitas and tequila!

Mexican Jungle

I am now en-route to the Lacandon Rainforest. Even the best maps available show very little detail of the ‘Selva Lacandones’ and, apart from a couple of the most famous Mayan ruins, the guidebooks give only the barest clues of what to expect.

I’ve been making expeditions to remote regions (usually jungles) for almost two decades now. A few years ago I would be entering an area like this with only the barest idea of what to expect. But now I have seen the whole region from the air as if I had spent several hours flying over it in a small aircraft. Given the heavy cloud-cover we should expect at this stage of the rainy season I’ve seen it more clearly in fact than I could have from a plane.

Google Earth has revolutionised the way we look at our world perhaps more than any other online factor. For adventurous travellers with a hunger to get off the beaten track it offers a hitherto unparalleled potential for planning.

Far from detracting from the thrill of exploration, increased access to all this information may actually make it easier for those driven by adventure to get farther off the beaten track. Many of those empty spaces on the world’s maps – what Joseph Conrad once called ‘a blank space of delightful mystery’ – are now revealed in all their glory…beckoning to the adventurous with their uncharted rivers and unclimbed peaks.

I plan to spend some time living and trekking with the Lacandon ‘Indios’ while I work on a magazine feature. The Lacandon are possibly Mexico’s most undeveloped – and certainly most threatened – ethnic group. There are only an estimated thousand Lacandones left in the jungles of Chiapas. They are a people who are, literally, on the verge of extinction.

I am hoping to reach some of their most isolated jungle hamlets. Chances are I will be following trails that have rarely, if ever, been walked by outsiders. There is no substitute for local knowledge and most jungle trips are immeasurably enhanced by travelling with knowledgeable and enthusiastic locals. But for added security – and for pure interest – my Garmin GPS is now loaded with waypoints for a series of remote villages, trailheads, lakes and mountains that are not even shown on the maps. Google Earth has enabled me to scout across the entire region – as if I was flying at an altitude of 80 metres over the jungle canopy – and I have been able to mark the position of even the most humble collection of huts. Maps are often prepared from earlier copies and remote pueblos where the people work from slash-and-burn agriculture have often shifted position three or four times before the map-makers catch up with them. But Google Earth also shows mysterious clearings in the jungle. I have marked these too…in this part of Central America such secretive ‘plantations’ are often best avoided.

In my last few expeditions I have also used an ingenious handheld device that would have been considered a science fiction artefact, or at least a James Bond gadget, a decade ago. But the Spot Tracker (www.findmespot.com) is increasingly becoming a standard part of the kit of the average independent traveller. It has several functions but in its most useful guise it is basically a satellite tracking device that will record my location every ten minutes during the entire time I am in the jungle. It sends the coordinates as a blip that eventually appears as a waypoint on a Google Earth page. I recently used this device on a trek across the Darien region of Panama, from Caribbean Coast to Pacific. In effect, it meant that even in totally uncharted rainforest – on trails that had never been walked by foreigners – family and friends (and rescue services) were able to look at an online map and zoom in to see exactly where we were.

Does such advance take away the delicious uncertainty, the element of trepidation that is one of the major motivations of a trip like this? Speaking as someone who for years deliberately ditched their cell-phone the moment they hit the tropics to avoid the ease of such communications I don’t think it does.

Use them carefully and these amazing tools of the electronic age can bring some of the world’s most challenging and exciting wildernesses within reach of the average independent traveller. Rather than making the access to the jungle too easy I hope that this preparation and these devices will help me to get deeper into the wilderness than I could otherwise have managed. But the element of doubt – the x-factor – will always be there. In the jungles of Central America nothing ever goes 100% according to plan.

In the next blog I’m sure I’ll tell you what went wrong this time!

The Lord of the Jungle

A cry rang out through the jungle night, piercing even through the shattering roars of the howler monkeys. It sounded like a cry for help. A human voice yelling out in fear or agony.

“Es el señor de la selva,” came the quiet explanation of my guide.

The Lacandon rainforest, in Mexico’s southernmost Chiapas region, is a mysterious place. And ‘the lord of the jungle’ was just another of the unfathomable mysteries that the Lacandon people seem to live with on a daily basis.

“It is not a man. Nor an animal,” Lukas continued, his faces shrouded in his long hair and shadowed by the flickering light of our dying campfire. “It is a spirit. It is calling for help to trick us. Anyone who mistakes it for a human and goes to try to help will be killed and eaten.”

I nodded and shrugged. Just another one of the things I was destined not to completely understand about the Lacandon and this remote jungle haven that they have called home for more than five hundred years. The Lacandon are the most direct descendents of the Mayan ‘refugees’ who fled south after the arrival of the Spanish. Other groups continued fleeing to Guatemala and Honduras where they were finally absorbed into other cultures (principally that of the all-conquering tide of Spanish). But the Lacandon turned aside in Chiapas to melt into the great expanse of rainforest along the Usumacinta River (biggest river in Central America). And there they stayed – to all intents and purposes forgotten – for the best part of four hundred years.

There are now said to be less than seven hundred pure-blooded Lacandon left. They are a people literally on the verge of extinction. They must marry outside the group to avoid inbreeding yet with every young Lacandon who leaves there is another step towards extinction. With them will disappear their last of the pure Mayan religion, their jungle medicine and survival expertise, and the last of the pure Mayan language.

When I hired Lukas to guide us here I convinced him to also bring along his ten year-old son Juan. I wanted Juan to see some of the jungle and to listen to the stories I was going to ask his father about the history and beliefs of the Lacandon people. I was impressed to see though that, even at this tender age, Juan would be more than capable of surviving alone in the jungle should he ever have to. We carried food for several days and a live hen that we could kill when the need for fresh meat became too much. Juan would dive for snails that he could use as bait and within an hour the pair had caught twenty tasty fish.

We were now camped on an island in Lagunas de Lacanjá. The island was about ten metres across and sometime – way back in pre-Colombian history, in a time even forgotten to the Lacandones – the entire island had been turned into a pyramid. The flat top where we now camped was once an important ceremonial spot. I had long ago been reclaimed by the jungle but it is still used by the Lacandon as a sacred place for worship and blessings.

The trek to the island turned out to be a challenging one: there were mosquitoes of a size I have only seen once before (on the Mekong); there were spiked plants that pricked your fingers should you grab for a handhold (a week later my fingers are still slowly festering from their poison); lethal scorpions and coral snakes lay on our path; we saw the spoor of a big jaguar; there is malaria and a particularly virulent strain of dengue. When you reach the lagunas themselves you find that they are surrounded by a barely impenetrable wall of elephant grass, which barely covers the acres of quicksand – actually black, liquid mud – which can swallow a man in a matter of seconds.

Nobody in his right mind would attempt all this without a good local guide. But Lukas led us undaunted through all these obstacles and we found his canoe, half sunk in the grasses at the edge of the lake. We watched while Juan repaired the holes with clay and then loaded our packs into the boat. It was not big enough to take us all so I volunteered to swim the two hundred metres to the island.

It was only when we were nearing the banks that Lukas bothered to mention the last – and most fearful – of all the guardians of the sacred lakes. The lake is also home to five metre alligators. According to him it is entirely safe in the daytime though and the alligators would only attack a swimmer at night-time…a story that, to me, seemed about as logical as that of the ‘señor de la selva.’