Walking the Americas

  Also by Levison Wood

  Walking the Nile

  Walking the Himalayas

  Walking the Americas

  1,800 Miles, Eight Countries, and

  One Incredible Journey from

  Mexico to Colombia

  Levison Wood

  Copyright © 2017 by Levison Wood

  Cover Photographs: © Simon Buxton (simonbuxton.com);

  Map: © Neil Gower

  All photographs © Levison Wood, except color insert page 1 (bottom), page 12 (top left), page 14 (top), and page 16 © Simon Buxton

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Hodder & Stoughton A Hachette UK company

  Typeset in Bembo by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: March 2018

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2749-5

  eISBN 978-0-8021-6564-0

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Alberto

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Levison Wood

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Introduction

  1. Hampton Court

  2. Mornings in Mexico

  3. The Americas

  4. Meeting an Explorer

  5. Departure

  6. Yucatán

  7. Ruins

  8. Trouble in Paradise

  9. Boot Camp

  10. Borderlands

  11. El Petén

  12. Barrios

  13. The Ascent

  14. Escape to Nicaragua

  15. Land of Fire

  16. Chirripó

  17. Paradise Found

  18. Panama

  19. Crossing the Panama Canal

  20. The End of the Road

  21. The Last Jungle

  22. The Darién Gap

  23. New Scotland

  24. Colombia

  Acknowledgements

  Photo Inserts

  Back Cover

  Introduction

  Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

  And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

  Round many western islands have I been

  Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

  Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

  That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;

  Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

  Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

  Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

  When a new planet swims into his ken;

  Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

  He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men

  Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –

  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

  Keats

  The young poet clearly did not know his history, or maybe he just didn’t care all that much. Of course, it wasn’t Cortés that discovered the Pacific for Europe, but Balboa, another Spanish knight in shining armour.

  My journey attempts to link the two. Mexico to the Darién, bringing out a little bit of the past along the way. This book doesn’t intend to present a comprehensive geo-political narrative, nor does it pretend to cover the vast history of this complex and often misunderstood region. It is, instead, a tale of adventure in the modern age.

  Perhaps the title is misleading. Those readers who picked up this book expecting a jaunt across the United States will be sorely disappointed. I don’t even set foot in that great country. Nor do I so much as peek a glimpse at anything in South America. Except literally dipping my toes into Colombia, this book is solely a journey through Central America. But, like Keats, in his bid to avoid an extra syllable, I decided that anything more than ‘Americas’ would be a mouthful, so I’ve left it at that. Moreover, for almost a hundred years after Columbus first laid eyes upon this verdant region, the Americas was Central America. For its formative decades, Central America and the Caribbean coastline was the hub of the ‘New World’.

  When a young Italian clerk embarked on a career in the merchant navy to go and explore the oceans of the West, he had little idea that his name would go down in history and become the basis of two entire continents and the most powerful country on earth.

  Amerigo Vespucci was born into wealth, but sought adventure. He worked for the House of Medici in late fifteenth-century Florence, and under their backing managed to accompany four expeditions to chart the recently discovered coastline of the New World.

  After Christopher Columbus had sighted land and discovered Central America for Europe in 1492, it seemed as if the Earth had changed forever. Suddenly an entirely new hemisphere had come into existence and it needed to be conquered.

  I can imagine that it must have sent young men all over Europe into a frenzy. There it was, a new horizon, hitherto unknown, ready and waiting. There were stories of wealth beyond dreams, pyramids made of gold, and all sorts of monsters and tyrants to vanquish. Until 1507, it didn’t even have a name. A German map-maker called Martin Waldseemüller decided that had to change and he called the new landmass after the Italian explorer. America was born.

  More ships set sail and it soon became apparent that the age of discovery had only just begun. Inevitably, with discovery came colonisation. After the maps were updated, the conquistadors followed. Hundreds of Spanish warriors sailed across the waves to set up new trading outposts in an empire that eventually stretched from Texas to Argentina. These early pioneers acted as agents of the Spanish Crown – instructed to find gold and riches, convert the native Indians to Catholicism, and destroy those who would not be subjugated.

  One of the first Spaniards to set out on the conquest was Hernando Cortés. Wildly ambitious, this was a man who, on landing on the muggy, mosquito-ridden coast of Mexico in search of gold in 1519, sensed that his sailors might be at risk of bottling. To prevent any such desertion, he bored holes in the hulls of all the ships so that they couldn’t sail, and instructed his men to march onwards.

  Like other Spanish colonisers who would follow, they advanced inland, razing forests, annihilating settlements, smashing ancient Mayan buildings to the ground and plundering gold. They demolished temples and put Christian altars in their place. They forced the people they came across to convert from their native faiths to Catholicism. While Mayan culture prized the capture of living prisoners above all, the Spanish had no qualms about killing the enemy – whether warrior or civilian – both on and off the battlefield. Cortés only let those men live who could be his interpreters, or those women who could act as his spies.
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br />   As the Spanish came cantering into American villages on horseback, the Mayans could be forgiven for thinking that the Gods had descended. In some settlements, as many as thousands of people would come out of their homes, lining their watery causeways in canoes to admire these mysterious creatures from heaven. Cortés was the first to bring horses to the American mainland and though he had only sixteen of them, the snorting and rearing of these vast beasts was a sufficient scare tactic to terrorise the unwitting native people.

  The Spanish also had the benefit of far more sophisticated weaponry – armed with iron and steel swords, lances and pikes, they were a tough match for the Mayan warriors, who had little more than flint-tipped spears, stones and padded-cotton armour. Everything about their technology was alien to the Central Americans: gunpowder, helmets, even the wheel. Once, when invited to meet a tribal king, Cortés ordered his men to disassemble the warships, smuggle them in piece by piece along a canal bored through the mountain, then reconstruct them and – like the Trojan horse – lay siege from within.

  As the conquistadors moved across Mesoamerica during the sixteenth century, they were often outnumbered – sometimes as much as ten to one – but here another factor started to come into play. Unknowingly, the Spanish had a secret weapon – disease. The inhabitants of the New World had no immunity to foreign and fatal illnesses such as smallpox and typhoid. As the interlopers ploughed through the jungle, resupplying repeatedly with infected soldiers and settlers, they brought an infinite number of viruses and bacteria from the Old World. Perhaps as many as ninety per cent of the indigenous peoples were wiped out in the first century of Spanish invasion, as the colonisers swept across the region.

  The Maya and other native populations had little choice between succumbing to a biological apocalypse and the violence of the invading Europeans. The Spanish inevitably won out, and for over 350 years dominated every aspect of life throughout Central and South America. The indigenous culture was virtually decimated. America became the playground of the Spanish Crown, in which there was little respect for the previous way of life. Traditions, languages, entire cities disappeared, and within the space of a couple of generations, five thousand years of history were forgotten.

  What became of those people, the ancient Maya, and tribes like them? What do the present-day Central Americans feel about their colonial roots and their indigenous ancestry? What impact do their northern neighbours have on the region, and how do they see the rest of the world? For centuries, Central America was the hub of the gold trade, facilitated by slaves and the trafficking of people; nowadays, how do cocaine and the other drugs define an entire sub-continent? And as for the people – are they still slaves, and who traffics them?

  These were but some of the questions I wanted answering, and which are the basis of this book. And even if no answers were forthcoming, I could still at least be silent upon a peak in Darién.

  1

  Hampton Court

  ‘Eight hundred pounds for a piece of glass?’

  ‘Yes, but you’ll need two,’ said Nigel the builder, his hands as big as spades, leaning against the crumbling remains of the bathroom wall, chewing on something inedible.

  ‘Do you want chrome or brass?’ shouted Danny from somewhere downstairs. Or at least, it would have been downstairs if there were any. Instead, I peered into a dusty hole where the stepladders melted into a grey, throat-filling cloud of evil muck. My head was spinning now.

  ‘Look, the carpet man will be here in two days, so that floor needs to be finished. Slate grey or natural oak?’ It was Nigel again.

  ‘Bollocks,’ squealed the electrician, as he cut through the wrong wire.

  Only Kevin seemed to maintain his sense of humour. He chuckled at Jeff’s misfortune, ‘You’re as shite as these southern fairies.’

  ‘Chuck us a screwdriver,’ barked Jeff, ‘and shut up.’

  ‘Tea, anyone?’ My poor mother levitated between the piles of bricks and plasterboard with a tray full of cups of tea and sandwiches. Somewhere in the garden, a radio pumped out 1980s power ballads.

  ‘Five days left!’ My dad bellowed above the noise of a drill. ‘Five days. What’s not done then, isn’t getting done.’ My heart sank and I jumped through the hole in a bid to escape the pandemonium.

  I had gone over my budget by half and there was no chance on earth that the house would be finished on time. I still hadn’t bought any furniture and I was living on a diet of cuppa soup and bacon sarnies that were covered in a fine layer of sandy grime. The property looked like a bomb had gone off, but it didn’t stop the builders living in camp cots among the debris.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ said Tracey, calm as ever.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be fluffing some pillows or something?’ Kevin winked at the interior designer. He looked like he was about to pat her on the head.

  ‘Piss off,’ she said, ever so politely. Then she smiled at me with the patience of a Buddhist monk, ‘Go outside, get some fresh air and plan a holiday.’

  ‘But there’s no bloody stairs yet,’ I whimpered pathetically.

  ‘It’ll be fine, I promise, these things all come together at the last minute.’

  I went outside into the garden, which I tried to imagine as a little haven of peace. It would be soon, I promised myself, when the massive pile of rubble and wood had been shifted. I wondered to myself who had lived in this place before me. The wallpaper belonged in a 1970s disco. ‘Who puts wallpaper like that in a seventeenth-century house anyway?’ I shuddered.

  ‘Don’t you worry, I have just the paint. It’s called Elephant’s Breath,’ said Tracey, without even a glimmer of irony.

  ‘Elephant’s Breath?’ my dad regurgitated, half-hanging out of the bathroom window. He’d been eavesdropping. ‘I’ve got one you’d prefer. It’s called Grasshopper’s Fart. It’s by Harrow and Balls.’

  ‘Farrow and Ball,’ Tracey repeated with a smile. ‘I’ll take care of them. Now you go for a walk in the park and I’ll sort all this out.’

  I left the troubled premises in a sullen mood and went for a walk around Hampton Court Palace Gardens. In through the massive gate topped by limestone lions, I entered the magical estate: rose bushes, apple trees; a wilderness filled with daffodils, criss-crossed with ancient paths and a hidden maze. The boughs of the willow trees in their spring bloom hid the red-brick chimney stacks and gargoyle-encrusted rooftops of the magnificent house. Deer, once the favourite sport of old Henry – when he wasn’t philandering – ran wild in the parkland beyond, and the Thames, that glorious river, was just a few hundred metres on the far side of the royal courtyard.

  I cheered up pretty quickly. I often had to pinch myself that I lived so close to Henry VIII’s old gaff – reminding me that I was very fortunate indeed. It really was quite astonishing to think of the history of the place; what scandals and love stories must have occurred within these hedgerows and ivy-clad walls. But despite the nostalgia, I couldn’t help but think of my bank balance, which was ebbing away with increasing alacrity. I winced as I totted up the daily expenditure and realised how woefully unprepared I was to take on the full refurbishment of a crumbling 300-year-old house that seemed to be falling apart.

  I took a deep breath. ‘It’ll be worth it,’ I told myself.

  In fact, the house was well over 300 years old, if the date on the deeds was to be believed. It said 1670, as a rough estimate. The land had been acquired during the reign of William of Orange by a certain Mr Abraham Fish, tree-planter-in-chief to the Royal Palace. It was all fields and hunting grounds then – the favourite palace of the lot, since it was far enough away from London to avoid the smell of the open sewers. It was my dream home. After six years of homeless vagabonding, sleeping on mates’ floors, short-term rents and the occasional squat, I had saved up enough to cover the extortionate cost of a deposit for a house and finally put down roots on the leafy fringes of my capital.

  In spite of the grandeur, when William of Orange, the Dutch prince, moved in
to the palace in 1689, he was not best pleased with his new lot. Obliged to become King of England after wedding Mary II – surely one of the oddest royal relationships in British history – he was envious of the neighbouring French monarch.

  King Louis XIV, who was well known for being rather flash, had created such delights as the Palace of Versailles, and this inspired a competitive spirit in William, who wanted to please his wife by doing some refurbishments of his own. He employed the services of the esteemed architect Sir Christopher Wren to knock down the majority of the original Tudor structure and rebuild it in a far more elegant and contemporary style. No dodgy wallpaper for this royal family. As I ambled past the ornate baroque fountains, I wondered if the Dutch King had to choose his own paint.

  ‘Gold or silver doorknobs, your Royal Highness?’ bowed Sir Chris, nine years later. At the grand old age of sixty-six, he was no doubt wishing he’d left on a high with St Paul’s Cathedral and the fifty-one other churches he had reconstructed after the Great Fire of London. It was 1698 and works had been going on much longer than anyone had expected. King William was beginning to tire of the refurb project (his queen had died four years earlier and it had been her idea in the first place) and he preferred the cosmopolitan living of Kensington anyway. The palace was finally completed in 1700, but only after poor Wren underestimated the budget (I could certainly sympathise) and got the sack, his deputy taking on the commission instead. For King William, the glory was short-lived. He fell off his horse in the gardens of his new palace only two years later and died.

  It was in 1700 that the world’s first piano was made in Italy. It was the year that Edinburgh burnt down, and the year that the poet John Dryden passed away. It was also the year that Spain handed over its crown to King Louis XIV, much to William’s annoyance, his blood pressure presumably reaching astronomical levels by now. But apart from that, it was a fairly uneventful year. And that is exactly how William wanted to keep things. There was a precarious peace with Spain and a small war with France – as ever. But, by and large, England was doing rather well, trading cotton, iron and spices in far-flung places around the world with the East India Company.