Jungleland (10 page)

He was also incredibly superstitious. As Pancho climbed into the truck, he said, “Do you want to hear a story about Ciudad Blanca?” I would learn over time that Pancho was a man of few words. You had to listen when he spoke. He didn’t repeat himself.

“I was out hunting where people talk about the lost city. It was very far out in the jungle,” he said from the backseat as Chris started up the truck. “I had been out there for days, but then I began to get very tired. I had slept but not very much. So I sat down in a clearing, and eventually I fell asleep.”

How long he slept, he didn’t know. But when he woke up, it was nighttime and he saw a man. “His back was to me, so I couldn’t see his face. But it was like he was always there. Like he was sleeping next to me,” he said.

Pancho paused and looked out the window at the passing blur of banana plantations. “When I stood up, the man left. I never saw his face. He disappeared,” he said.

So who was the man? I asked. Pancho didn’t know. “Maybe it was the jungle. The jungle has different forms. Sometimes it is a man, sometimes a woman or even a child,” he said. But the man without a face was not his point. His point was that the place we were headed was deceptive. The jungle plays tricks on you. “Do you understand?” Pancho asked. “Strange things happen out there.”

WHEN CHRIS HAD
initially approached Pancho about the trip, he had been hesitant to join us. Not many knowledgeable locals wanted to go where we were going—and for so long. Pancho had other reasons to resist. He had spent a good part of his life in the jungle, and the jungle where we would begin and end our journey, a place known as Olancho, had damaged him. It had stolen many of his friends and family.

Olancho is the largest territory in all of Honduras, about 15,000 square miles of rugged mountains and dense forest. It is larger than the entire neighboring country of El Salvador. For years, it was a place where you could get free farmland. It was too isolated, too buggy, too muddy, and too primitive to appeal to very many.

Still, some like Pancho settled there. “Freedom,” he said. He went first with his parents and lived with his seven brothers in a two-room hut they built in two weeks out of pine and palm tree leaves. He fell in love with a woman from the area and soon married her. Later, he constructed his own house. He bought some cows; tilled the land; planted coffee, manioc, and corn, among other staples; and lived off the harvest. He had eight kids, and welcomed more of his relatives who followed his example. For a time things were good. But Pancho’s prosperity did not last long. Big ranchers, with their big trucks, moved in, and along with loggers they cut away the jungle. There was no military, no police. The law was fluid—which is still the case today.

In time, two of Pancho’s brothers were shot dead. One was killed in a land feud. The motive behind the other’s demise is less clear. Pancho moved twice, trying to stay away from village wars and feuding neighbors. Along the way he buried two of his children, who fell sick and died before they could be carried the many miles through heavy jungle to a hospital.

There was a saying about the region:
Olancho es ancho para entrar, y angosto para salir
—Olancho is easy to get into and hard to get out of.

Pancho didn’t care to talk much about those days other than to say that it had been a good time and then a sad time. It was hard to leave, but eventually he did. His last home had been in a tiny village called Bonanza. When he moved away for good, he left behind a dream of owning land, of being a farmer, a man with cattle and independent means.

His new house is on the east coast, far from Olancho. Although it was a rental and much smaller, with a lot less land, there were no more greedy ranchers or crazy pioneers. It was a safer place. “I have six children now,” he said. “They’re all grown up.” He smiled at his son Angel, who, like the five others, drove four-wheel-drive trucks of merchandise and passengers up and down the coast.

Over the years, Pancho had returned several times to Olancho, but he had mostly avoided the villages where he had lived. He had not visited most of those places in years. But Chris had persuaded him to come along. Now he headed back home.

CHRIS EXPLAINED THE
first leg of the trip to Pancho as we drove: we would take a truck straight across the country to the city of Catacamas and then drop down to the Río Blanco, where Morde had set up his main camp. Whereas Morde had made his way up to the Blanco by the Río Patuca, we were going to get there by land and then visit the Patuca later, on our way out. The one road across the territory was about 225 miles long, but it wasn’t so much a road as one long dusty creek bed through high, isolated mountains.

We could not take the rental truck either; our rental agreement forbade us from driving to that part of the country, and after thinking about it Chris decided that he didn’t want to risk its being hijacked. So that afternoon we dropped it off back in La Ceiba and started talking to drivers about getting over the mountains. The first few men rejected us outright. No one seemed to want to go to Olancho. The one gentleman willing to make the trip asked for $400, more than we were willing to pay, which was his way of underlining our lunacy.

The road was more than just treacherous. In its report about Honduras, the U.S. State Department warns travelers to steer clear of the region: “In Olancho, on the road from Juticalpa to Telica, and from the turn off to Gualaco on Route 39 to San Esteban and Bonito Oriental, rival criminal elements have engaged in violent acts against one another.”

Some locals referred to the road as
callejón de los bandidos
, or Bandit Alley. There are stories of carjackings, kidnappings, and murders. Gangs were rumored to hide in the rocky shadows, waiting for targets. A month or so before we arrived, a group wielding AK-47s had reportedly stopped a truckload of people, seized all their valuables, and then shot all of them dead, except for the driver.

After we had spent a few hours talking to taxi drivers and making phone calls, one man finally agreed to make the trip for $100. His name was Juan; he was twenty-six, short and on the flabby side, with shiny black hair sticking up at illogical angles. He had never been on the cross-country road before, but he said he was eager for the experience. He had just started working for a man who ran a network of taxicabs a month before, after years of working in a Pepsi bottling plant. “I am free now and want to see all of the country.”

Juan was certain he could borrow a 4×4 pickup, the preferred vehicle of the hinterlands, but the next morning he arrived at our hotel with bad news: the truck had fallen through. It was not, of course, advisable to take the road with anything less than a rugged all-wheel-drive vehicle, but he insisted that we go in his sedan. “
No problema
,” he said enthusiastically, drawing us out to the street. “Good car!”

He wore pressed white jeans and a new-looking baby blue T-shirt, as if he were planning to attend some special event. His teeth were sharply white, and he had shaved his face to a perfect sheen. He smiled a lot, even as sweat dribbled down his face in the hot air.

Out on the street, there it was: a new white Geo Prizm, with tinted windows. It reminded me of the tiny Nissan Sentra sedan I’d had as a teenager—cramped inside, with the suspension of a horse cart. He opened the front door, turned the ignition key, and pointed at the CD player, which was blinking purple. “It’s new,” he said. “Very loud!”

That was when it hit me that Juan had absolutely no idea what he was getting himself and the new car into. Not only that, the car wasn’t even his; it was his boss’s car.

“This isn’t going to make it,” I said, turning to Chris. The wheels were as smooth as pancakes. The car was practically plastic, and its carriage was too low to the ground.

“Well, this is it,” Chris said. “We don’t have any other choice.”

Pancho stood quietly off to the side with Angel, who was making last-minute calls to girlfriends back home.

I shook my head. “And it’s too small! It’s a fucking breadbox. How are five people going to fit in there and then drive for five hours?”

But we squeezed in anyway, three in the back, me up front, my knees squished against the dashboard. Once we shut the doors, Juan cranked up a reggae mix and made a magician’s gesture at the blinking purple lights, as if to say, Can you believe this radio actually lights up? Soon enough we were jetting down the road, heading for the lost city at a swift fifty-two miles per hour.

“The Last Outpost”

T
HE TREK TO
the Patuca was harder than Morde and Brown had imagined: the rain, the bush, the damn mud. When they finally stopped that night at a tiny camp of Miskito Indians, forty or so miles from the sea, they were wrecked. It was May 3, almost a month after they had first sailed into La Ceiba. “Half our gear is soaked, bags caked with mud, covered in bites,” Morde wrote. “So tired.”

The camp of about a half-dozen huts slouched along a strip of land on a curve of the river. Compared with the other indigenous tribes, the Miskito are considered relative newcomers to the area—the result of the older tribes of Pech and Tawahka mixing with the English, who had occupied the Mosquitia in the seventeenth century, and the Garifuna, who were the offspring of runaway African slaves. Early on, the Miskito accompanied pirates who roamed the nearby waters. Generally thought to be adventurous, they knew the contours of the sea like the palms of their callused hands.

The explorers asked if they could stay for a couple days, and a family of six took them in. Morde and Brown slept in their hammocks, and Burke took the floor. When they weren’t resting, they broke in their boots and walking sticks, tested their rifles, and sought out a boat to take them upriver. From the Indians, they heard vague stories about ancient artifacts hidden to the west and of another American seeking gold who had died the previous month after a snake bit him sixteen times.

The Indians called Morde “doctor”; he bandaged their cuts, caused by falls and mis-swung machetes, and disinfected some sores, healing acts that were perceived as minor miracles.

The explorers traded salt and sugar for eggs. They ate meals of beans and rice and tortillas, until one night a man surprised them with a white-faced monkey. Jamming a stick through its midsection, the man cooked it over the fire until its skin burned off and its fat crackled.

One afternoon, Morde and Brown decided to do some exploring and trekked away from camp in a northerly direction. Soon they wandered into a narrow box canyon with steep sides that rose high into the sky. On the canyon floor, they stopped at a long, unusual mound of vegetation. Curious about what was underneath, they set about digging away layers and layers of brush and timber. They were encouraged by what they found.

Inside the tangle, large blocks of stone extended some thirty to fifty feet ahead of them. Excited about their find, they excavated and examined the ruins. What were they? Could they be the foundations of ancient structures? Perhaps the footprint of a tiny river village? And if a village, was it related to other villages nearby, or perhaps an outpost of a bigger city somewhere else?

Whatever the ruins were, it was the first sign of ancient life they’d come across on their journey. It was also a very real indication of how easily the wilderness devours everything in it, how over time some things just vanish, leaving hardly a trace of their existence.

ON MAY 6
, Morde and Brown finally located a boat—a forty-foot mahogany pitpan with a flat shovel bow, powered by a three-and-a-half-horsepower engine. They had to build up the sides another five inches to protect them from the growing rapids. And then on May 7, after packing up and saying good-bye, they set off up the Patuca.

The rain came, the sky almost always the gray color of ruined metal, and the river swelled at times to more than a hundred yards across, quickly turning into a tumult of crosscurrents and frothy churn. Morde steered, while Burke manned the bow and Brown fended off rocks from the middle seat. When the river quieted, the men noticed the ghostly landscape—the flat, unpopulated grasslands that stretched for miles like the Great Plains.

Somewhere along the way Brown’s wristwatch broke. For the Americans, it was the last connection to the civilized world and its schedules. Cutting that tie was probably a good thing, but in their account they attached no larger significance to the watch’s failure. They lived according to the cycles of the day, rising with the sun and sleeping when it was dark, just as the natives lived.

A few last expat outposts stood between them and the borderlands that Captain Murray had mentioned and Mitchell-Hedges had written about. Living simply, those dropouts inhabited thatched huts, which they had built with their own hands, at the edge of the world, a remote constellation of outsiders, each man on his own personal journey.

There was George Brayton, a cranky fifty-year-old American. Morde and Brown made it to him after eight hours of paddling and motoring. His two-story hut stood by itself atop a forty-foot bank. It was a home and also a commissary for traffic on the river. “He buys crocodile skins and gold from the Indians and sells them salt, rice, machetes and tobacco,” wrote Morde. “He pays the river price of $15 an ounce for gold and sells it for $25. He pays 20 cents per foot for crocodile skins and sells it to a merchant in La Ceiba for 45 cents.” His profits, rolled into sweaty wads, were buried in tins around his hut like time capsules, perhaps never to be located again.

Posted on his front door was a sign:
EVERYONE WELCOME—EXCEPT EXPLORERS
. Brayton lived alone with two colorful macaws he had taught to wisecrack, “Get the hell out of here.” Still, he seemed to enjoy company. “He keeps three cots set up and almost anyone is made to feel a real welcome to bed and board,” wrote Morde. To the natives, he was Dama, meaning “venerable old man” or Sir.

Every day, an Indian woman from down the river brought him meals while a “bright-eyed little Indian girl” kept his house; he told the men that he was planning to marry the younger one as soon as she learned a bit more English, maybe around Christmas. While Morde and Brown bought a few last-minute provisions, Brayton talked about his old life and how he’d left the States behind because he couldn’t find a job. “What good was I back there?” he asked. “No good at all!” On the river, he could “just sit here and the money comes.” He didn’t miss home at all.