by Roman Dial
Tropical wilderness can be a frightening place alone. Following a bearing by compass or GPS inevitably leads through impassible swamps, tangled vines, and other vegetation hiding poisonous snakes, painful stinging insects, scorpions, and centipedes, or the spines, thorns, and rash-inducing resins of plants. Nights are long. Big cats—and desperate humans—sometimes take the lives of solo travelers.
Camping his third night, the coldest yet, he stuffed plastic bags for insulation into his clothes. Up at three, he waited around a fire for dawn. “I decided that there was no trail to follow, I didn’t know what I was doing, and I should go exhaust my options on the jeep road.” But instead of turning back, Roman further explored the jungle. He caught a lizard and killed it. In his journal he wrote: “tried eating a lizard. Gross.”
He ended up spending about half the day around his campsite looking for a trail that might lead west to Naactun and El Mirador. There definitely was a trail there: an ancient Mayan road in the forest. It ran for maybe two hundred feet in a perfect line, six feet wide and three feet high—a raised walkway called a sakbe—that ended in a ruin excavated by looters. Intrigued by the ancient route, he went deeper into the jungle. He had plenty of water—almost thirty-five pounds worth—but his burden forced him to drop his pack while cutting trail and return to shuttle it onward with ants, spiders, dead twigs, and dried leaves stuck to his sweaty neck and arms.
One of his blazed trees wept white sap below the unmistakable V scars of rubber tappers. Encouraged he might still find a trail, he pushed onward until dusk. He stopped at the edge of a giant limestone sinkhole. Hoping to find water he found “nothing at the bottom but wasps, crumbling limestone mud, rotten logs, and the promise of never being found.”
That night, his fourth in El Petén, he learned that if he draped his plastic tarp over his mosquito-net tent he stayed warmer and slept well. Fire was tough to start in the dewy morning with his candle wax, but he found that the flaky, flammable bark from the “tourist tree” (so-named because it looks like a peeling, sunburned tourist) brought the fire to life.
“The next day I went exploring for four hours before deciding it was time to go back and find Dos Lagunas. The jungle was making me claustrophobic and I wasn’t sure how well I could follow my trail back out.” He discovered it was much easier to walk out than walk in: a trail that took two days to hack with a machete took just three hours to the jeep track.
Roman strolled into the Dos Lagunas ranger station just before sunset. There he found “an old white guy” wandering around and “four somewhat standoffish, if curious rangers. On a whim, I told them I was going to El Mirador. They said I could camp there.”
Pleased to be welcome and happy to have company after five days in the jungle alone, Roman dropped his big pack, wiped the sweat and dirt from his face, took a long draw from his water bottle, and pulled on a dry shirt, wondering what the other gringo was up to so far from the end of the road.
Chapter 17
Finding Carmelita
Campfire in Mexico, January 2014.
Courtesy of the author
A young ranger grilled Roman on where he was from, probably since the “old white guy” was a paunchy, middle-aged Russian without any Spanish. The rangers hoped Roman could communicate with him. But he did little better than they, learning only that the Russian restored museum paintings in St. Petersburg and hoped to make it to El Mirador by way of Nakbe.
In Spanish, Roman told the rangers what he had done and what he wanted to do. He showed them his sketch map and compass. In response, they gave him a recent, color map of the route between Dos Lagunas and Naactun. Over a shared dinner of beans, tortillas, and Nescafé, they told Roman that the rangers at Naactun would have better information about getting from Naactun to Nakbe. They asked if he wouldn’t mind traveling with the Russian. Roman explained he didn’t have enough extra food for the Russian’s slow pace. Knowing it was safer to travel together than alone, the rangers offered some of their food to take. Roman accepted a package of ramen noodles and said he’d watch out for the Russian by marking trail and leaving water.
Off by seven the next morning, Roman left the rangers Q50 (about US $6) and two packets of cookies. Guatemalans tend to be generous and he liked to reciprocate. He had discovered that he was often in someone’s home, not just their place of business, “so I try and remember the manners Mom taught me. Mostly washing dishes voluntarily. That has worked well for me my whole life, everywhere.”
Two hours out of Dos Lagunas, the head ranger rolled up on his dirt bike to ask if Roman wanted a ride. “Older Guatemalan men I’ve met, the ones that seem like old cowboys, tend to be very warm and fatherly. The jefe and other older ranger were no exception. Concerned, understanding, helpful, interested, with a twinkle in their eye and a knowing smile about ‘aventura.’”
Roman accepted the jefe’s offer and hopped on his dirt bike. An overloaded ATV carrying two more rangers plus the Russian, and a fourth ranger on another motorcycle, followed. “It was fun,” Roman wrote, “but also probably the most dangerous thing I’ve done here. I constantly had to dodge vines, scoot back on the seat to reduce my profile so my knees wouldn’t clip trees, and brace with my arms while lifting my feet up to avoid the sides of the deep ruts we’d sometimes fall into.”
An hour and a half later, Roman had completed the first leg of the M to the central crossroads of the ancient Maya: Naactun. The site has a higher density of ancient sakbe walkways than anywhere else in Mesoamerica. While there, he met a team of archaeologists led by a Guatemalan named Carlos Morales-Aguilar, a preeminent researcher in El Petén. Morales-Aguilar enthused over the significance of Naactun, the center of civilization for ten million Maya a thousand years ago. Roman spent hours wandering around the excavations and ruins. With a new map sketched in his notebook, he headed for Nakbe, the middle vertex of the M.
This leg in the remote heart of El Petén is rarely traveled. The trail grew faint and braided. Unsure where he was, he at least knew how to get back. For days he’d been learning to differentiate machete scars from natural damage to trees, and vehicle damage to roots from horseshoe damage. He’d learned to tell if a poacher’s dirt bike had been down a dry, hard-packed trail based on the patterns of broken termite tunnels on the ground.
Sussing out the tangle of footpaths and old ATV trails with his compass and newly sketched map, Roman left trail-blazes for the Russian as he hiked. That night, his sixth since leaving Lou’s place in El Ramate, he set up camp under fragrant lemon and grapefruit trees next to a large aguada. An exquisitely excavated Mayan wall stood nearby, sculpted in angel-like wings and other human and nonhuman forms. The dry season is terrible for ticks and chiggers in Central America, and Roman spent an hour that night picking off parasites. The itchy rash on his feet, he realized, was not a rash at all, but dozens of tiny ticks, each raising an angry little welt. And they weren’t just on his feet. They were everywhere: ankles, arms, crotch, armpits, belly. “I took a small bath in DEET,” a potent insect repellent developed by the military, “which killed them. They were easy to scratch off.”
Up at six to boil water for the day, he pondered his situation. If he was camping at La Muralla, halfway from Naachtun, he would reach Nakbe by noon. But he couldn’t be sure he had been on the right trail and considered the risks that he faced. “Worst case scenario I got bit by a snake and died slowly. Not much I could do about that. Second worst was wandering too deep into the forest, got lost, and couldn’t find water.”
He noted that by staying on the “cleanest trails and leaving blazes, and never venturing more than two days from an aguada” he could avoid getting lost and not running out of water. He also recognized there were wild fruits, like the sweet chicozapote, and plenty of snakes and lizards. “I think I could have foraged a meal every day just walking, if I didn’t mind skinny grilled lizards.”
He also worried that he had misled the Russian behind him. He left two quarts of boiled water for the paunchy painte
r, then pushed on, arriving at Nakbe in time for lunch. He shared his fresh limes and grapefruits with the rangers. They were astonished with his trek, but wouldn’t have done what he’d done, not alone: too dangerous, they said. His story of the Russian intrigued and humored them, but worried them, too. They decided to head back to La Muralla to find him.
During his few hours at Nakbe, Roman toured the ruins. From the top of its major temple, he could see the partially cleared pyramid of El Mirador rising 250 feet above the flat expanse of jungle that reached to the horizon. It looked distant, but in little more than two hours of fast walking he’d be there.
One of the rangers, Miguel, needed to make a supply run to El Mirador and invited Roman along. The ranger, who carried only an empty pack, was pleased with their rapid time and surprised that Roman—carrying a big pack—had kept up. Miguel’s pace left Roman dehydrated and hot, with big blisters on his toes and heels. “Oh well,” he wrote in his journal. “Only one more day.”
At El Mirador, Miguel shared Roman’s story with a cook who offered him a dinner of “beans, tortillas, and some delicious scrambled egg dish. I gave her the rest of my limes. The rangers at El Mirador were also interested to hear about the Russian, and had a laugh.”
It was good to see that Roman interacted with the people at every stop along the way and even better to find that he shared what he could with them: he exercised good wilderness etiquette. I was delighted that he cared for the Russian, too, whom he didn’t know, but realized needed his help.
On his last day, with a late start at eight, he took off to cover the final thirty miles to Carmelita. Half an hour out, a helicopter flew overhead carrying Richard Hansen, the famed researcher who’d put El Mirador on the map in the eighties. “It would have been cool to meet him. Maybe I should have stayed another day. But who knows? He’s probably sick of tourists. He had all semester to be asked stupid questions by undergrads.”
Roman felt the effects of the previous day’s race pace. The hours dragged on. His feet hurt and his chigger bites itched as he pounded the hard-packed trail. To ease his tender feet, he took softer, parallel paths. By nightfall he was out of water, thirsty and spent. Worse—because time and distance stretch in the dark and he hadn’t yet reached Carmelita—hobbling on sore feet through the night he worried he had taken a wrong turn in the dark.
While he was sure he was nearing Carmelita, he heard only what he described as “the primordial hoots and howls of the New World tropics.” Just as he was considering the prospect of a dry camp and calling it a very long day, he heard people. He followed their voices to a house and asked where Carmelita was. They laughed: he was in Carmelita. The husband led Roman to a tourist hotel where he quenched his thirst with bottles of soda, water, and Gatorade, and bought a bar of soap. “I took my last DEET bath, a mondi, then slept for the first time in 9 days without being cold. It rained that night, hard. I was glad I hadn’t stayed another night out. My tent would be miserable in a rainstorm, and the trail an abominable mud pit. I did worry a little about my Russian, though.”
At four the next morning, even after the marathon efforts of the last two days, he caught the “chicken bus,” one of the colorful local transports packed with people, arriving at Santa Elena six hours later. He spent the day washing clothes, limping, eating, and writing the story of his journey.
Few people have done El Petén’s M route. Fewer still have done it alone. Roman had proved himself in Central America’s biggest wilderness. I was impressed—also relieved.
After Guatemala, Roman visited Belize. “The only people I’ve talked to that liked Belize were the young European women that like everything, especially poor people, or white girls who smoke too much and don’t take care of their hair.” I chuckled at Roman’s distaste for “hippies,” whom he saw doing little more than drugs while lounging around their hostels. He headed south to Utila, Honduras. There, he paid $289 for an advanced diver certification, a lot of money, he said, but worth it. He was the only student in a course that included accommodation, gear, and seven dives on which he swam with whale sharks and made night dives.
A month after El Petén, Roman emailed plans and a map of eastern Honduras. Again, he lamented leaving his packraft behind. He envisioned a three-hundred-mile river trip down the Patuca River through the heart of La Moskitia, second only to El Petén as Central America’s biggest roadless area. The Patuca itself ends at the famed Mosquito Coast, shared by Honduras and Nicaragua.
Roman described his planned trip to his college friend Brad as “400 miles of jungle swamp without good maps through North America’s cocaine hub in the murder capital of the world.” He hadn’t shared that reputation with me. He wrote me that he was headed to El Salvador to look for a canoe for his river trip through La Moskitia, which I knew only for its biodiversity values, not its lawlessness.
If he had told me, I would have likely written him that lawless humans are more dangerous, more unpredictable than wilderness. Once a criminal breaks one law—like smuggling drugs—it’s easier to break another—like robbery or even murder. Risk management of mountain, river, and wild animal hazards is more straightforward than planning for outlaws. But after his El Petén trek, it was clear he could take care of himself. It sounded like he was ready for another full-bodied adventure and I looked forward to the stories he’d tell.
Chapter 18
South to Costa Rica
Scuba diving the Bay Islands, Honduras, May 2014.
Courtesy of the author
While in El Salvador looking for a canoe, Roman met Jeremy, a Canadian who was also interested in La Moskitia. Because they had found only sit-on-top kayaks, unsuited for their trip, the two decided they would rely on local transport instead. They headed for Palestina on the banks of the Patuca River in Honduras and boarded a sixty-foot cargo canoe, loaded with hundred-pound bags of rice, cases of soda, and leaky fifty-gallon barrels of gas. “All the necessities of village life,” Roman noted.
The boatman did his best to steer the canoe down the low, dry-season river, but the current pinned the overloaded craft on the rocks of a shallow rapid. The captain ordered the fuel drums jettisoned and the boat slipped off the rocks and headed downstream, where Jeremy and Roman helped retrieve the barrels.
Unlike the rest of Honduras, La Moskitia is indigenous, not Latino, and as they headed deeper into the region fewer people spoke Spanish. Eventually they heard only Moskito. At each passing village the big dugout canoe dropped off cargo and occasionally picked up new passengers. Stopped at a gold miner’s camp one night, Roman loaned his bug-net tent and tarp to a young Moskito couple. This earned him the respect of the boat owner, who later invited him and Jeremy to sleep at his house. Days later and downstream, the pair found lodging with an evangelical Moskito preacher whose amplified nighttime hymns and sermons drained the power from his little chapel’s lights. They had to wait for several days until a boat headed out; a gasoline shortage had stopped all river traffic.
From the start, Jeremy and Roman marveled at the display of weaponry along the Patuca. The teenage kid in the bow of the cargo boat had protected his .50-caliber Desert Eagle from a tropical downpour by stashing the hard-hitting piece in his backpack. Cowboys in tall hats tucked pistols in their waistbands. Honduran soldiers in jackboots and stocking caps brandished submachine guns, assault rifles, and side arms. In one village, Roman watched a shirtless man with an automatic pistol sandwiched between his brown belly flesh and pants trade gold flakes for Doritos and Pepsi.
It was hard to tell the narco-traffickers from the citizens who just wanted protection. Jeremy asked the canoe captain: “Why is everyone armed? Is it dangerous?”
“No, no,” the captain replied. “It’s quite safe out here. Everyone has guns!”
Everyone has guns because La Moskitia’s lagoons, wetlands, and rivers offer Colombian smugglers a place to refuel and hide out on their way to land routes through Guatemala and Mexico to the U.S. cocaine markets. Small, open boats with mult
iple outboard engines ferry the drug from its origin to landfall in eastern Honduras.
Jeremy and Roman talked their way onto another big dugout canoe with an outboard. This one cruised down the wide river in the dark. Hurtling through one of the most active cocaine transit areas in North America, the two ate cookies and looked at the stars as the captain texted, motoring at full throttle. The next day they boarded a twin-engine jet boat full of passengers. The boat followed narrow canoe trails through a swamp at high speed, then careened wide open around corners through the lagoons of the Mosquito Coast of the Caribbean Sea.
As I read Roman’s account, I could picture Jeremy and Roman looking at each other and grinning, shaking their heads during a “thrilling Disney World ride. Except the overhanging vines were actually close enough to hurt and the oncoming boat, also going at full throttle, came very close to being very bad.”
Arriving at Puerto Lempira, the largest town in La Moskitia, they looked for accommodation. It sounded grim: “100 lempira [$10] a night got you a soiled mattress, bug bites, and used condoms under the bed. 50 lempira was either malaria or getting stabbed in an alley.” A hospitable guy named Junior charged them one hundred lempira for the only clean place in town. Over beers, Junior barbecued chicken and cooked up a Honduran specialty of cheese over beans in a traditional clay pot. In the morning, they toured Puerto Lempira, where Junior pointed out the narco-traffickers’ kids, their bodyguards, even who’d been shot, how many times, and by what caliber bullet.