A tap on the hull woke us. Rubbing the sleep from our eyes, we stumbled on deck. Our early-morning visitor introduced himself as Victor and asked if we would like a ride to town in his panga, or perhaps a tour to the village of dancing indios. He then did a demonstrative little jig, with his feet shuffling along the wooden sole of his boat.
Eyeing the sun, which was just beginning to emerge over the horizon, we said sure, a ride would be great—in a couple of hours. Victor nodded, smiled, and threw a parting command over his shoulder: “Me da algo a comer!”
Give me something to eat.
After several pots of coffee, we had livened up enough to appreciate our surroundings. We were anchored east of the village of Punta Alegre, near the mouth of the Golfo de San Miguel. Our 32-foot 1971 Wauquiez Centurion, Wild Rye, sat blissfully still in a broad, flat expanse of water dotted with small green islets. On the mainland, layers of mountains appeared blue and blurred in the hazy morning air.
Punta Alegre was the first stop of a two-week trip up into the rivers of Panama’s Darién province. We had been cruising in Pacific Panama for several months, and this trip up the Darién marked the last of our adventures in the area before returning to Panama City to prepare for the Pacific crossing. Opinions we’d heard about this area ranged from “it was the highlight of our trip” to “you could be attacked by drug traffickers,” so we weren’t sure what to expect.
With its sparse population and miles of impregnable rainforest, the Darién region retains a sense of wildness and mystery that is hard to find in today’s thoroughly settled world. The area is perhaps best known for the Darién Gap, a swathe of undeveloped forest and marsh between the Panamanian town of Yaviza and the Colombian border, and the sole missing link in the Pan-American Highway, which would otherwise run all the way from Alaska to Argentina. The Darién’s scattered network of small communities is primarily linked by water, with rivers far outnumbering roads. Many of these communities are indigenous; the Emberá, Wounaan and Guna peoples have lived here for thousands of years.
After breakfast with Victor, we headed to shore. A walk into town revealed wide concrete paths with shells pressed into the borders, and small but airy wooden homes with curious faces staring out at us. We attracted a growing mob of children, most of whom seemed to be Victor’s grandkids. He marshaled them and had them take us to the beach. We vetoed the offer of visiting the dancing indios, with the COVID-19 pandemic still raging, and instead spent the day beachcombing with our band of tiny tour guides, who delivered gifts of pearly shells, hermit crabs, and handfuls of green slime. They seemed unconcerned by our inability to respond; after an animated half-hour conversation with one boy, a girl confided to me with a shrug, “He understood a little bit.”
Sunburned, pockets bulging with shells and pants streaked with slime, we headed back toward the village. Our guides scattered as a uniformed officer approached from Senafront, the Panamanian National Border Service. After looking over our papers, he gave us a stern order to check in with the base in the central town of La Palma as soon as we arrived so that he would know we hadn’t been kidnapped en route. “This isn’t like the rest of Panama,” he said. “It’s wild down here.”
We sailed off the hook that afternoon as the breeze filled in. Wild Rye flew along with just the jib, silent in the water, making 6 knots in barely that much wind as the incoming tide pushed us steadily upriver. Solid blocks of rain tracked across the horizon as we tacked up through strange boils of current, eventually coasting into a riverbend where the current was slight and the water was mirror smooth. Anchor down, we listened to the fabulously noisy backdrop of howler monkeys and parakeets, and watched tiny zephyrs of wind roll off the hills and across the glassy surface.
La Palma, when we eventually arrived, felt like a combination of jungle town and Wild West film set. Colorful clapboard buildings lined the single main street, which zigzagged up the hill into which the town was built. Buildings hung out over the water on pilings of welded steel barrels, with cayucos and pangas moored in every available space between them. When we dutifully presented ourselves to the Border Service office, the officer looked at us with a bemused smile. He was not in the least surprised that we had made it without being kidnapped.
Stocked up on provisions and with full water tanks (the public tap was broken, but our friendly officer at Senafront helped us fill a few jugs from the tap in their building), we left town to find a quiet anchorage for Christmas Day. Tucked behind Isla el Encanto in a peaceful nook surrounded by leafy-green islets and mangroves, with no sound but the chatter of birds, we felt like the only two people in the world. Except for the fact that we had full bars of cell service to call our families back in Canada.
We headed farther upriver, moving on the flood tide and anchoring on the edge of the river to wait out each ebb. Egrets and ibises glowed, bright spots of white in the dappled green. We watched night herons fish along the shadowed edges of the mangroves, and we saw cormorants dry their wings, motionless, atop tree snags. My partner, Liam, and I spent much of our time sitting in the cockpit, trying to match the stillness of our environment. One evening at sunset, we watched several hundred shorebirds gather in the trees. Even pelicans joined the rustling mass of feathered bodies. We sat for hours listening to the raucous chatter, and then watched the sky deepen from lilac to velvety darkness as fireflies winked into action.
We didn’t see many people in the following weeks, although signs of humanity were everywhere: the distant sound of an outboard as fishermen hauled in their nets; fishing weirs of tall, straight sticks across the mouths of narrow estuaries; the occasional small dugout canoe found waiting on the edge of the tide line.
We worked our way up and down the narrow Rio Iglésia before heading up the much grander Rio Sabana. The sailing was funny: Wind was out of the north every day but preferred to flow up and down the river in short puffs, so Wild Rye alternately tacked and ran downwind with little warning between shifts. The sails would shiver and go slack, and we would wait to see if we were about to get headed, or to do a surprise jibe. With the river current pushing us steadily along in the right direction, we hardly cared unless another boat came around the corner and saw us, sails awry, crew confused.
We sailed up the Rio Sabana until the depth sounder read 10 feet, and then dropped the hook and continued upriver in the dinghy. I wanted to visit Boca de Lara, where I’d heard it was possible to find beautifully crafted woven baskets and wooden carvings. I pictured a remote indigenous village, its inhabitants happy to trade artesanías for other useful items. We arrived and found a freshly paved road connecting the town to a highway lined with Toyotas. I stubbornly brought along my bag of trade items anyway—you never know—and we ventured to shore.
Several men emerged from a seafood restaurant to show us where to tie the dinghy. We admired their freezer full of the day’s catch of snapper, grouper, prawns and shrimp. When we asked about baskets, a teenage girl approached and said that she could take us to her family’s home. We ended up squatting in the doorway, haggling over beautiful baskets, masks of colorful, tightly woven palm fibers, and carvings of smooth cocobolo wood. The matriarch of the family insisted on cash as several of her daughters peered over her shoulder, babies and toddlers in tow.
We explored slowly for another week, enjoying the easy, drifting pace. In the heat of the afternoons, we escaped into the water, holding onto the jib sheets and streaming out behind the boat in the strong current. Mostly, we sat and listened, immersing ourselves in the resounding peace. At night, as the new moon approached and the tides were at their largest, logs that were several feet wide charged past the boat at anchor. In some areas, the shorelines were dotted with round, thatch-roofed huts. In others, we could see clearings of small farms planted with corn or bananas. We almost never saw people.
Our lasting impression of the Darién was that it’s the edge of the world—and yet much more connected than we’d expected. It felt as though hidden behind the mangroves and farther upriver was a secret world of people and a culture that was inaccessible to us. Perhaps that was in part due to the pandemic, or perhaps it takes more than two weeks to get to know a place.
Whatever the case, when Wild Rye sailed out the Golfo de San Miguel, this place felt just as full of mystery as it had when had when we’d sailed in.
