The Adventurer's Son(40)
Roman emailed me June 6: I’ve spent the last week or so trying to figure out how to do the Darien gap and it’s starting to give me bad dreams. He wrote his college friend Brad:
Seriously planning a trip through the Darien Gap. It’s fucking stupid and there’s a really good chance I die or get kidnapped. Senafront, the Panamanian border police, doesn’t let foreigners cross the Colombian border over land. My plan is to get permission to go to Darien National Park, dip out on the rangers, follow a river south up into the low, extremely steep limestone border range, cross it into Colombia, then follow a river down to an Indian village and hire a boat out.
I shared Roman’s sentiments about the Darién. It sounded too dangerous to try. But while part of me hoped that he wouldn’t, another part hoped that he would. In my younger days, like many adventurers, I had imagined its wilderness as a worthy challenge to travel. But its social hazards of lawlessness and paramilitary groups had made it too dangerous for me. If we as parents live vicariously through our kids, then after Roman crossed the Darién, my empty ambition to try wouldn’t matter. On the other hand, I knew well its reputation.
On the Fourth of July 2014, and still in Nicaragua, Roman asked me in an email, Do you have any super-secret access to topo maps of central american countries?
I wish, I wrote back. Try googling ESRI world topo. Better than nothing. I checked the world topo’s version of Corcovado to compare it to somewhere we’d been. It identified the Osa Peninsula as part of the canton of Golfito.
On July 6, Roman arrived in San José, the capital of Costa Rica, and bought a backpack that he planned to use in Corcovado and farther south. Roman’s bulky Mexican pack held his insulated pullover, a thin summer-weight sleeping bag, two stoves, and our old Kelty tent. He also carried Forrest McCarthy’s small yellow duffel as a daypack. On Tuesday, July 8 at eight in the morning, Roman left San José on an eight-hour bus ride headed for the Osa Peninsula.
His destination: Corcovado National Park.
Chapter 19
“The Best Map Yet”
The Osa Peninsula and Golfo Dulce, Costa Rica.
Courtesy of the author
The Osa Peninsula, situated just north of Panama’s west coast, separates the muscular Pacific from the calm Golfo Dulce, Spanish for “Sweet Gulf.” The Osa’s main road is a two-lane highway that parallels Golfo Dulce as far as Puerto Jiménez. There the pavement ends. In the nineties, the Osa’s remoteness, abundant wildlife, and sparse population drew a cohort of North Americans and Europeans who settled and started businesses that thrived until the recession of 2008.
Today, a collage of billboards greets travelers at the end of the highway promising “waterfalls, tours, and massage” and “Affordable Beachfront Luxury!” Also available: “sport fishing,” “sea kayaking,” even “zip-lining.” These tourist establishments are small, family-run operations that contribute to the economy and English fluency of the locals, but hardly qualify the Osa as a tourist mecca like those farther north.
A sleepy town with colonial roots dating back to the mid-1800s, Puerto Jiménez’s economy evolved from banana farms to gold mines. Its commercial district spans six blocks where dogs lie in the street and free-range chickens scratch in the dirt. Scarlet macaws—red, yellow, and blue–colored parrots the size of ravens—squawk overhead. There’s a hospital, a police station, an office for Cruz Roja (Costa Rican Red Cross). A Catholic church fills a city block–sized campus. Young men play soccer at a fenced-in field on the edge of town.
There is one gas station, two banks, a farmacia, maybe five bars, two supermarkets, and a hardware store. For tourists, there’s a surf shop, a handful of restaurants with English menus, shops with colorful toucans carved from wood, tour centers with grease boards announcing the day’s activities, and hostels that eagerly invite backpackers.
A block away, the gentle Golfo Dulce laps at a sandy beach that opens into a channel lined with mangroves where an occasional heron patiently fishes. Around the point, beginner surfers try their hand at a left-hand break. Beyond town, the dirt road bumps along for forty-five minutes to Matapalo, a diffuse beach community centered on the best surfing on the Osa. Another forty-five minutes past Matapalo, the road ends alongside a long paved airstrip at the village of Carate, on the opposite side of the Osa from Puerto Jiménez. Beyond is the most remote beach in Costa Rica, twelve short minutes from Panama by small plane.
On any given day, Ticos and Ticas—local Costa Ricans—saunter down Puerto Jiménez’s sidewalks, where they stop and gossip in greeting. Old cars and dusty SUVs pass each other with inches to spare. The ancestors of Puerto Jiménez included pirates and Indians, convicts and civil war rebels, squatters, gold miners, crocodile hunters, banana farmers, cattle ranchers, and those who fled San José’s crime and Nicaragua’s revolution.
Tourists—especially clean-cut, evenly tanned, lithe young men and women wearing flip-flops, tank tops, and sun hats—sit at open-air restaurants and page through their Lonely Planet guidebooks. Most come to the Osa to stay at an eco-lodge or to visit Corcovado National Park, considered the country’s crown jewel of conservation. Large by Central American standards, the park sprawls across 100,000 acres with big Amazonian animals to match: jaguars, tapirs, harpy eagles, crocodiles, bushmasters.