by Levison Wood
‘So, you’ve been a free man since then?’ Alberto asked him.
Tony shrugged. ‘Nah, a few months after we escaped I was caught on the beach in San Juan del Sur – they gave me four years, because I was selling drugs there. It was good money, and it helped send my brothers to school. But unless you pay the police big bribes, they will always get you. But when I was in jail that time, I met my girl and now we have a daughter. My baby is three years old.’
‘So, is that what made you change your life?’
‘Yeah. Well, not just that. I was released last year and when I got out I found out that my other brother had killed himself, ’cos he didn’t have any money. His wife had stopped him from seeing his kid and said he had to pay more to support the child, but he didn’t have the money. He shot himself in his heart, just like our dad. So that’s when I decided that even if I had a job that paid less money, I would find a job to change my life and keep my family safe. So now I’m trying to stay straight and sell this stuff on the beach instead of drugs.’
Tony pointed out across the water, ‘This used to be a big smuggling route for all the crack coming from the south. Not just drugs either. People too. There’s thousands of immigrants coming from everywhere that have to come through Costa Rica and Nicaragua in their journey to the USA. I used to help smuggle them, too.’
He shook his head. ‘When I think about it now, I feel so sad for those people. They come from Africa and India and Cuba – all over the world. I guess they just want to pay for their families, too. I would smuggle them in boats across the lake, or put them in trucks and take them to Honduras. They paid good money sometimes.’
‘Sometimes?’
‘Well, some didn’t have any money.’
‘So what then? I suppose you didn’t help them for free.’
‘Of course not. It depended if they were nice or not. If they were nice, we would just take their phones and whatever cash they had.’
‘And if they weren’t nice?’ said Alberto.
Tony sighed. ‘Then we’d beat them up and steal everything they had and leave them at the roadside. I didn’t want to, but that’s what the gangs used to do. Poor people.’
Human trafficking and kidnapping had always been the sort of thing that I’d been horrified to read about in the news, but felt completely disconnected from – unable to imagine the reality of it. But as it turned out, these things were an everyday reality for the people who live throughout Central America. Tony had done some bad things, that’s for sure, but he also seemed genuinely remorseful for his actions and I believed him when he said that he’d changed.
‘And what will you do with your life now?’ I asked him, before we left.
He grinned. ‘I’ll take my family and try to go to the United States.’
Smuggler, it seemed, would now become smuggled. Let’s hope his karma had already been served.
A few days later, we crossed the border into our sixth country, Costa Rica. I was excited to be making progress, in spite of the fact my feet were still painful and Alberto and I were now mainly walking in silence. Costa Rica prides itself on being one of the happiest countries in the world and famously peaceful amid Central American civil struggles. It’s so peaceful, in fact, that the nation doesn’t even have an army. Perhaps we’d have an easier time of it here? Our route was going to take us off the tourist trail, but our first taster of this lesser-known side of the country came sooner than expected and was a stark reminder of the realities of ‘the other migrant crisis’ that Tony had warned us of.
Peñas Blancas is home to one of the biggest official migrant camps in Central America. As we passed through, it was home to more than two thousand people trying to reach the USA. They’d been trapped there since the Nicaraguans closed the border eight months ago.
Just outside the village where the main approved facility was, we stumbled upon a makeshift camp where several hundred migrants lived in abject poverty. They were all black Africans, it seemed, although there were some Haitians in there, too.
We met a twenty-two-year-old lad called Nickelson Augustave. ‘Call me Nicky, for short,’ he said in perfect English. He agreed to give us a tour of the muddy campsite.
‘Where are you from?’ I asked him.
‘Me, I’m from Africa; Brazzaville, in the Congo,’ he said.
‘How the hell did you get all the way here from over there?’ Alberto asked him. ‘How many kilometres have you travelled so far?’
‘Whoah, I can’t count. But I can tell you the countries. I fly to Brazil, then from Brazil I pass to Peru, from Peru I go to Ecuador, from Ecuador I get to Colombia, from Colombia I go to Panama, from Panama I walked to here. It’s been three months since I left Africa,’ Nicky told us.
We followed him into the camp, where it quickly became clear that the conditions were really bad. Hundreds of cheap tents were pitched haphazardly under a main shelter. There were rags and clothes hanging from poles and people lying around half-naked. Mothers suckled babies, men lay asleep amongst squalid filth, and children were left to fend for themselves. Nicky’s friend came with us, another Congolese, watching in suspicious silence as Nicky did all the talking.
‘So, why did you leave Africa?’ I asked him.
‘I left Africa because there was no opportunity in Congo. I used to paint houses back there, but I want to study, I want to study in West Beach, in Miami. Some of my family is still at home, we had to leave them behind. Maybe one day they can come to the US with us. My sister is coming, she is behind me, in Panama.’
‘Is it worth it? To get to the United States?’ I asked.
‘Yes, of course. I mean, it’s a serious struggle. We still have more than two thousand miles to go before we will get to America. And then we have to deal with the border police, or with the US asylum people. I have no money left, I had fifteen hundred dollars stolen a few weeks ago. But I don’t care, even if I dead, I die, because in my country, it’s bad. I cannot live.’
The further into the camp we went, the more obvious it became that it was utterly unfit to support the number of people living there. Thousands had been stranded at Peñas Blancas, some for more than six months. More migrants were arriving daily, stuck at the border, making the camp increasingly overcrowded.
‘People find space to sleep where they can,’ Nicky told us. Tiny little tents were all pitched side by side, with almost no space to walk between them. It reminded me of some sort of apocalyptic music festival, except here the only music was the cries of babies and abandoned women.
‘We have no space, no privacy,’ he said. And very few possessions, I noted to myself, as he showed Alberto and me his tent.
In the next-door tent, a baby suckled on a sleeping mother and her children played outside in the dirt. One of them was waving a rusty knife around in the air. Another woman sat with an uncast broken leg sticking out of her tent. Makeshift huts were dotted around the camp, surrounded by ditches filled with putrid water. A stale smell of human faeces and sweat lingered in the air.
The dream at Peñas Blancas was to reach the United States and secure a better, safer future. But the truth was that these people faced overwhelming odds. Nicky was travelling alone, but as we wandered around the camp, it was plain that hundreds were braving this journey with children. Some children were even travelling alone after getting lost from their parents.
‘No one is providing any aid for us yet. There is no support from the government, or any NGO yet, and no one is sending food.’ Unlike most of the camps I’d been to, there was no security or army to be seen. I knew that organisations like UNICEF were trying to help in other places, but the scale of the crisis was reaching unprecedented levels and there was only so much that they could do.
The only positive thing that I could see was that everybody seemed to be helping each other out with food. We met a man feeding a little girl, who was about three or four years old. I asked if she was his daughter. She wasn’t and it turned out that her mother had gone out
and although he didn’t know her name, he was looking after her as if she was his own.
I knelt to take a picture of her, and she scowled at me, out of shyness and probably nervous about what this strange white man was up to. I quickly turned the camera around to show her a picture of herself. With a little chuckle, her face broke into a huge smile – her beautiful eyes lit up, and I almost cried for the first time in a very long time.
I came outside to find Alberto choked up and silent. Having spent far too much time in migrant and refugee camps around the world, I’d forgotten quite how harrowing it is to see such horrible conditions for the first time.
‘Lev, I mean, it’s really shocking, what you see on TV is nothing like the reality. You can’t feel the smell, you can’t see everything. You can’t hear every story of the people here. And it’s really, really, really tough. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for these people, I can try to understand, but I think it never will be enough, you have to be in their shoes to really see how shitty is this place.’
A small part of me felt guilty for having shaken him up quite so much. But that’s the thing with travelling like this. There is good and bad, you can’t simply expect to saunter along down hill roads and for everything to be just dandy. For every sublime mountain view, there will be a harsh reality – and some of these experiences were big, and often life-altering firsts for Alberto.
Before we left, I had something that I wanted to ask Nicky. On his route, he must have passed through the Darién Gap.
‘How did you get from Colombia into Panama, because it’s very difficult there, isn’t it? Isn’t it just thick jungle?’ I asked him.
‘Yeah, we walked through the jungle,’ he told me. ‘It’s a very dangerous place. There are bandits along the road who stop you and ask for money. I had my passport stolen, by guys with their faces covered. They held a knife to my throat. Some guys who were ahead of us had everything taken, and when they asked for their money back, they were killed. And you can’t trust the police, they are even worse. They treat the migrants like scum and they are bandits themselves. I saw a lot of people dead, a lot of people dying. I seen some death, but I couldn’t do nothing.’ It sent a shiver down my spine, thinking not only what these poor people had been through, but selfishly, what lay ahead for us on our own journey.
‘Did you ever want to turn back?’ I asked him, wondering why he hadn’t given up and gone home.
‘Nah. We can’t go back, only going forward, ’cos if we go back, they’re not going to let us past the border.’
‘So, now you’re stuck?’
‘Yes, we stay here to die.’
I was in awe of the courage that it must have taken to embark on a journey like this. Whatever the rights and wrongs of illegal immigration might be – and it must be said that I didn’t meet a single migrant fleeing war or persecution, only economic hardship – the desire to better their own circumstances and seek a better life is something that the world can’t ignore. I suddenly felt that my self-indulgent mission to walk for the sake of walking paled into insignificance in comparison with the expedition that these people were on – adventurers of an altogether different kind.
16
Chirripó
We left the horrors of Peñas Blancas behind us and set off into Costa Rica walking in silence down the quiet roads. There was an air of despondency – maybe it was the humbling experience of meeting the migrants – many of whom would have walked this same route in the opposite direction, or the reality that we still had a mammoth nine hundred miles left to go.
Everything had taken on a wilder appearance here in the rugged tropical highlands of Costa Rica. The trees were taller and the bush thicker. Our route had also taken us into an altogether different climate. Here the rainy season had arrived in full and we spent day after day trudging along in pouring rain, soaked through to the skin. With the rain came the challenge of keeping morale high. The sides of the roads had turned into slippery quagmires and by night, the continual downpour would hammer down on the feeble roofs of the lodges and houses we slept in, keeping us awake. It was even worse when we were under canvas in the hammocks, with the incessant inundation making sure that we never got properly dry.
We decided that for the first hundred miles we would buy some pack horses to help us with the trek across the country’s northern region. It would be good to have these four-legged porters to help us with our bags. Ever since leaving Mexico, I’d harboured a slightly romantic vision of walking across the Americas with horses, just like the cowboys and conquistadors of old. Mules been a great success in my previous journeys in the Himalayas, too, so I suggested to Alberto that we find somewhere to buy a couple of the beasts.
An old farmer suggested that his neighbour had four horses that he’d be willing to sell for the right price. ‘I’ve never looked after a horse in my life,’ said Alberto, dubious about my plan. ‘I mean, I’ve ridden one a few times, which Mexican hasn’t? But looking after them is a different matter.’
I bought the lot for an extortionate sum, hoping to be able to sell them for the same price later on.
‘How hard can it be?’ I said to him.
With four horses we’d be able to give them light loads each and carry extra food and water for the high passes and the jungle valleys ahead, where villages were sparse, and I was confident that with a bit of research on the internet we could look after them between us.
I thought the two smaller animals could be called Stephens and Catherwood, after the explorers who’d inspired me in the Mayan world. As for the big white one, I optimistically named him Pegasus.
‘What’s yours called, Alberto?’
He pondered for a while.
‘Mine is Pancho. It’s a male, it has big balls and it’s Mexican,’ he said with a grin.
We set off south towards San José, and beyond that Costa Rica’s highest peak, Cerro Chirripó, with the horses in tow.
But it wasn’t long before I realised that perhaps we’d bitten off more than we could chew. Over the course of three days, the horses became slower and more temperamental. They tried to kick us and bite us whenever we got close and the bags kept falling off the saddles, so we’d have to walk alongside constantly shifting and shoving our packs onto their backs. We’d been slowed down to a fraction of the pace we could walk without them and soon they were more of a hindrance than a help.
‘We’ve been sold the worst horses in America,’ said Alberto. His patience had been wearing thin since we got lost in Nicaragua and the horses were the final straw.
‘Look, admit that this was a bad idea. These are shit horses and if we carry on going this slow then we’ll never get home,’ he snapped at me. I hadn’t seen him lose his rag before. But I was adamant at the time that we could learn.
‘Give it a few more days, I’m sure we’ll get the hang of it. Come on, have some patience.’
He huffed and stormed off, dragging poor Pancho by the bit.
At about five o’clock on the fourth day, Pancho, who was already moving achingly slowly, lay down. He was refusing to move and it was starting to get dark. The prospect of having to camp on the side of this muddy track, exposed to the elements, wasn’t particularly appealing, but try as we might, Pancho wasn’t going to budge.
‘Right, I guess we might as well start setting up camp here,’ I said to Alberto.
As I pulled at the ropes to remove our packs from Pegasus, I heard an engine in the distance. The headlights got closer and soon a 4x4 car had pulled up next to us and a man leaned out of the window. He looked sympathetic enough, if a little puzzled.
‘What are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere, are you out of your minds, it’ll be dark in ten minutes.’
We told him we were fine. ‘Just a bit of trouble with the horses. They don’t want to move.’
‘I’m not surprised. They’re skinny beasts and look like they’ve never carried anything heavier than a kid. Also, it’s not safe here, you’re on the
main track and anyone could see you and decide that they liked the look of your stuff, all your kit, or you.’
‘Well, where are you going? Are there any villages along this road?’ I asked him optimistically.
‘It’s a long way to the nearest village, but I’m a research ranger and work at the biological station a few miles from here. If you’re really stuck, I might put you up in our hut or something. Do you want to get in?’
Alberto and I looked at each other. Nothing was more tempting than the idea of speeding along this road, away from the rain, driving to a shelter with a reliable roof. But we had Pancho, Pegasus, Stephens and Catherwood to consider.
‘Thanks, mate, but we’ve got to deal with these horses, so we’ll have to do it the slow way.’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘OK. Well, don’t camp here. Keep walking and you can’t miss the research centre. It’s on the right-hand side in just over three miles. You’ll see lights and there is a hut, set back from the road. You can stay in the samples shed tonight. Put your bags in the back of my truck and it’ll make you faster with the horses.’
So that’s what we did, carefully and politely making sure we kept our valuables with us, and thanked him profusely, watching as his taillights disappeared into the darkening night.
We had a few more miles to cover and then we might get some good sleep. Alberto rode ahead of me, chasing the car to make sure the stranger didn’t disappear with the bags, and I dragged Pancho through the darkness. The rain pelted down relentlessly for the hour and a half it took to get there. The whole thing was completely surreal – like some horrid nightmare. We finally arrived at the hut in the pitch black. It certainly wasn’t much to write home about, but it would do. We put our sleeping sheets on the floor below rows of hanging plastic bags full of mushrooms and plants and weird-looking specimens that were dangling from wires and strings. Under the shelter we made a fire from some dry kindling to boil water, so that we could drink tea and get warm before dozing off to the sound of the pelting rain and the deafening bullfrogs.