The Adventurer's Son(38)
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.