Panama: The Latin American dream
(telegraph.co.uk) With palm-fringed beaches, abundant wildlife and a rich history, there’s more to Panama than a canal, says Nigel Richardson.
After the boat had dropped us on the island of Ailigandi we were required to register at the administration office. I signed the visitors’ book while a plastic Christmas tree on the next table played We Wish You a Merry Christmas over and over. On the way out, a man called Ernesto Tejada pointed out a black-and-white photograph of the “Revolution warriors”, with their tunics over-painted in purple.
The revolution in question was carried out in 1925 by the Kuna Indians, who occupy an island archipelago off Panama’s Caribbean coast. This uprising (against the usual thing: a distant, heavy-handed, government that wished to suppress its culture) was a defining moment in the history of the Kuna, for it won them an autonomy that lasts to this day. The Kuna have representatives in the national parliament in Panama City and administer their own Comarca (autonomous territory), an archipelago of hundreds of islands stretching west for more than 200 miles from the border with Colombia.
This makes the Kuna a rare, if not unique, example of an indigenous people who have not been marginalised, demonised and impoverished out of existence by the greed and power of others. Their story was just one among many that confounded my preconceptions of Panama.
As the Darwin fraud case was hitting the headlines in the run-up to Christmas last year, the country where they went to ground — just like the fictional Harry Pendel in John Le Carré ’s The Tailor of Panama — was enjoying a surge in popularity among British holidaymakers. I was actually on a plane there as Anne Darwin was being flown back to Britain to face the music.
Was it really the “slice of undiscovered paradise” described in press reports? To find out I had started on the Caribbean coast among the San Blas islands, the home of the Kuna people. Getting there required an early-morning flight north-east from Panama City in a twin-prop De Havilland Otter — a thrilling hour spent skimming over mist-shrouded rainforest. The landing strip, I saw, as the plane banked on its approach, was like a needle in the hacked-back jungle, the needle’s eye being the turning circle in front of the thatched terminal building.
As we left the plane, tiny, delicate women swarmed past us, wearing the traditional Kuna dress of beaded leggings and armlets, appliquéd blouses and face tattoos (the men just wear jeans and T-shirts). They offloaded boxes of provisions from the nose cone, while we were collared by a dapper man in neat nautical ducks and pressed T-shirt – our Kuna guide, Ernesto Tejada.
Behind the terminal was a small jetty and beyond that the choppy seas and myriad islands — 365 is the official, rather-too-neat number — that make up the San Blas archipelago. Ernesto reckoned that 42 islands are inhabited, and that there are seven more Kuna villages on the mainland. In all, there are about 40,000 Kuna Indians living here, farming and running small-scale tourism projects on the mainland, with another 20,000 living and working in Panama City.
Ernesto led us to a motorboat and advised us to put on the oilskins he offered for the 30-minute crossing to our very own desert island. Tourism here is as low-key as it is possible to be. Some of these islands are little more than sandbars sprouting a couple of coconut palms, to which tourists are ferried for a day of sunbathing and snorkelling.
As the boat slowed, we saw that “our” island was just big enough to accommodate four thatched cabins, built on stilts over the water. A creaking wooden jetty, painted yellow and blue, led us on to a disc of pale brown sand less than 100ft in diameter, on which grew 19 palm trees, conveniently spaced to accommodate hammocks slung between their trunks. There was even a doormat-sized beach. And there were no other guests.
After breakfast of omelettes — Ernesto summoned us with a blast on a conch shell — we took the boat to Ailigandi island, the nearest Kuna settlement, half a mile away. This was the home island of the leader of the 1925 uprising, but it seemed an unlikely hotbed of revolution. Sandy “streets” divided a scattering of houses with bamboo walls and palm-thatch roofs. We passed an open window from which a tame parrot called Rico eyed us warily.
In 1925, armed Kuna attacked police stations on two of the islands and killed some policemen who had been persecuting them. The leader of the uprising — the Che Guevara of Kuna Yala — is commemorated on Ailigandi with a statue, which shows him, incongruously, wearing a lounge suit, a chestful of medals and a bowler hat.
He was called Olokindibipilele in the Kuna language, but was known as Simral Colman, a name probably given him by the crew of a visiting British ship on which he hitched a lift to Europe when he was a young man. Pointing at the statue, Ernesto said, “Maybe he find this hat in England”.
In the Museum Olonigli, a painting showed Colman in his trademark bowler and wearing a swastika (“Our flag came before the Germans’," explained Ernesto anxiously). The painting was done by Ernesto’s friend, Roy, who is “number one artist”. Around the walls, Roy’s wooden friezes and paintings celebrated important milestones in the history of the Kuna, starting with their creation.
The Kuna religion, called Ibeorgun, was just one aspect of a culture that the authorities in distant Panama City had wished to stamp out. Happily it has persisted. “We do not believe in evolution, as Darwin says,” said Ernesto with magnificent understatement, before embarking on a rambling creation story featuring a UFO. Roy had illustrated this with a painting of a circular blue spaceship with yellow spots.
Back on our tiny desert island we swung in hammocks. Ernesto suddenly became loquacious. He said that he was 64 and had lived in Panama City for 27 years, working as a chef in a hotel. All four of his children were born there and remained in the city, as did his wife. None had shown any inclination to live in Kuna Yala. But he came back seven years ago with a dream.
“I am not rich in material things, but I own an island,” he said. “This is my richness.” And he pointed 200 yards across a choppy channel to a sandy convexity rising from the waves. At the moment he goes there only occasionally, to harvest the coconuts that drop from the tall, swaying palms.
But his plan is to save enough money to build some tourist cabins there and start a modest business (the island we were on did not belong to Ernesto, he just worked for the owner). Then, maybe, his wife would return and his children would come, too. “I want to die here,” he said. “I don’t want to die in the city.”
As the slow archipelago days unravel, Ernesto’s gaze is constantly pulled back to the view of his island. He dreams of living there one day, united with his wife and children. He is also, he admitted, checking that no one nips across from another island to nick his coconuts. (Health warning: the drinking water we were offered was not bottled or properly purified, and one of us was very sick. Take your own, or insist that water is boiled first.)
Some places feel particularly atmospheric: their very stones apparently infused with the dramatic or bloody events that happened there. Nowhere have I felt this more powerfully than in the jungle-bound rubble that is all that remains of Venta de Cruces, on the edge of the Panama Canal.
This was one of the most significant towns in the Americas, occupying a crucial strategic position on the “neck” of Central America dividing the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Greed, violence and disease dogged its history.
In 1671, when the notorious pirate Sir Henry Morgan marauded through, the retreating Spaniards burned Venta de Cruces to the ground. But Morgan’s men found some dogs to eat and 16 jars of Peruvian wine to drink, before continuing on to the coast and sacking the original Panama City, now a campus of ruins called Panama Viejo, to the east of the modern capital.
During the Spanish colonisation of South America, treasures plundered from the Incas were held in the town for onward shipment in the dry season. And in the California goldrush of the 19th century the prospectors, or 49ers, crossing between the east and west coasts of the US, also chose this route, transporting more than 700 million dollars in gold through the town between 1848 and 1869. Thousands died of mosquito-borne disease.
In the early 20th century, Venta de Cruces ceased to exist when much of it was swallowed by the Panama Canal. Apart from the mozzies (very much still in business), all that remains are old stones in the leaf litter, the altar steps of the church, covered in emerald green lichen, and a palpable sense of past horrors that clings to the surrounding rainforest.
We stepped ashore on what is left of Venta de Cruces as part of a boat tour of the Panama Canal — itself a revelation. I had expected rampant commercialism, but the Canal Zone, which extends across the isthmus for 50 miles and for five miles on either side, is surrounded by 33,000 acres of national park.
The story of the canal, which opened in 1914, is an epic. Many thousands died, from disease and landslips, in realising the centuries-old dream of uniting the two mighty oceans. At Miraflores, where ships are raised or lowered 32 feet in a flight of two locks, we watched the grindingly slow passage of The Grand Cosmo, a vast maritime pantechnicon in blue and cream. The crew lining its decks in orange boilersuits appeared ant-sized.
Later, cruising the Canal’s backwaters in a small motorboat, we spotted three-toed sloths, howler monkeys, a keel-billed toucan and an osprey with a fish in its talons, and felt a sense of primeval timelessness — shattered by the view of a looming container ship stacked with coloured boxes and looking, beam-end on, like a Rubik’s Cube.
The resplendent quetzal is a bird so rare that it holds semi-mythic status for birdwatchers. And I have seen one, near Boquete in the Chiriqui Highlands in the west of Panama. Boquete is a cool jewel of a town, nestling more than 3,000 feet above sea level on the edge of the Volcán Barú National Park . Its climate is like that of a hill station in India — temperate and breezy, a perfect respite from the fierce summer heat of the plains — which is why its real estate sells like hot cakes to retired Americans.
We were driven up from the airport at Panama’s third -biggest city, David, climbing through coffee-perfumed air and the fine, wet mist, known as bajareque, which cooks up beautiful rainbows across the steep-sided valleys and the sheer basalt cliffs cloaked in green.
This region is Panama’s allotment. Vegetables and citrus trees grow in profusion, but the most precious crop is black gold: coffee. We stayed at Finca Lerida Ecolodge, a private estate in the national park owned by a Panamanian-American called John Collins, which has 110 acres of coffee plantation, 650 acres of rainforest reserve and 11 guest rooms.
Our visit, in December, coincided with the start of the coffee-picking season, and the estate was teeming with seasonal workers: Ngobe-Bugle Indians from the Central Province and from Bocas del Toro who stay till March, some women toiling all day on the steep slopes with their babies. They are paid piece rates; the fastest picker can expect to make US$10 (£5) a day.
Their exertions can make you feel guilty as you walk up beyond the steep coffee terraces and step out on the rainforest trails. My guide, Cesar, was determined to find me a quetzal and he immediately began his quetzal imitations — a series of short, dying whistles. No reply at first, but the big and small of the rainforest — the strangling fig that grows up trees like an exposed bicep, squeezing the life out of its host; a spider’s web, illuminated by moisture, that looked like the grooves of an invisible LP — were utterly absorbing.
Then, among the leaflitter, Cesar spotted the green and red avocadillo fruit, which look like jellybeans and are a favourite food of the quetzal. He scanned the canopy, and motioned. A female. Not the male, with its beautiful long tail, but splendid enough cloaked in her livery of green and her reclusive air.
You can fly to Bocas del Toro — you can fly just about anywhere in this mountainous, heavily forested country — but I’m glad we took the exhilarating “dry canal” road (from Boquete). This highway crosses Panama from ocean to ocean near the border with Costa Rica, traversing a landscape of streams, orchards, grazing cattle, steep, forested mountainsides and precariously sited homesteads. We crossed the continental divide at a height of just over 3,600 feet, the Caribbean becoming visible as a ghostly scarf of light some 25 miles north, and hit the coast at Almirante, a scruffy fruit-processing port with a Texaco garage.
Here we were picked up by a motorboat and taken out past wooden waterside houses built on stilts, past solitary fishermen in dugouts and into an archipelago of wooded islands called Bocas del Toro. The main town, on the island of Colón, is also called Bocas — a cross-hatching of streets lined with jazzily painted wooden houses with deep verandahs and tin roofs.
The town was built a century ago by the United Fruit Company of Boston, Massachusetts, to house workers in its banana plantations. Once a place of industry and exploitation, nowadays it is a laid-back retreat of West Indians, Latinos and tourists, all of whom move languidly in the humid climate.
We stayed at the Bocas Inn, a wooden affair of verandahs and hammocks right on the waterfront, and took boat excursions to near-empty beaches where we followed handmade signs that said “Cold beer” and “Restaurant Jasmin, seafood a speciality”. And in the evenings, back in Bocas, we shopped for startling animal masks, made by the Embera Indians from the far-east of the country, and Panama hats (the real thing, just US$10).
We reckoned this was as laid-back as it gets, but we hadn’t counted on Punta Caracol, where we stayed for the final two nights, a hotel moored off an uninhabited shoreline in the far south of Colón. Built on stilts in the water, it consists of a bar/restaurant, a reception hut and eight green-and-yellow hardwood cabins accessed by a curving jetty, so that in aerial photographs they look like pods dangling from a stem.
Steps from a private deck lead into a shallow sea the colour of lime cordial. Tangerine-coloured starfish lie on the sandy seabed, while a barracuda patrols the kitchen area. We drank Atlas beer, ate paella with lobster, snorkelled a bit, then did absolutely nothing. The only sounds were the gently lapping waters and the merest click of the solar-powered hot-water system as you turned on the shower.
Nigel Richardson’s trip was organised by Last Frontiers (01296 653000, www.lastfrontiers.com). A similar, 14-day itinerary, taking in Panama City, San Blas, Boquete and Bocas del Toro, costs from £2,660 per person including international and internal flights, private transfers, breakfast (all meals in San Blas) and some tours, eg of the Panama Canal. Further information: www.fincalerida.com; http://www.puntacaracol.com
http://www.nigel-richardson.com
