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November 23, 2005
Paddling the Changuinola River
There are a number of rivers in the province of Bocas del Toro, but access to them is very difficult. The lower stretches are used for travel by motorized canoe, but the upper parts are very isolated. In November 2005, we set out to explore one of them, the Changuinola river.
Looking at the map, the most reasonable access point for a first trip seemed to be via the Rio Robalo. The map showed a community called Norteno about 2km up the Rio Robalo from the road bridge, and from this community it was 15 or so km to the Changuinola headwaters. Part of these 15km follow along the Cano Sucio river, which gives hope for the existence of a trail at least part of the way.
We
took Izmael and Choni with us; the idea was to leave the boat at
Izmael's grandmother's place and then walk to the road (10 minutes
which turned out to be 30) and take a bus or taxi to the Rio Robalo
bridge about an hour towards David. After 10 minutes on
calm ocean water, we went up the creek through pretty mangrove to his
grandmother's house. From there, we hiked up to the road in about
half an hour, giving us a chance to get a feel for the weight of the
boats.
We
waited along the road and chatted with a few indigenous people who were
taking
cacao beans to Almirante to sell them. But soon a taxi came by, so we
stopped it and had the guy take us to Rio Robalo. He was English
speaking, and it was as usual very entertaining to listen to
his accent. At one point I asked him something about "the little bus"
which he did not understand even after I repeated it twice -- until I
translated it to "de liki bos". I love their accent...
He had a 4WD truck, but was apparently not used to dirt roads, so given the "bad"condition of the road from the Rio Robalo bridge to Norteno he eventually refused to go further. Very strange; the road really wasn't all that bad. Oh well, it just meant 15 additional minutes of hiking with boats.
The
Rio Robalo was very pretty, and soon we got to Norteno and the
confluence with the Rio Cano Sucio. We followed a trail along the Rio
Cano Sucio (to the
right after the bridge over the Rio Robalo). About an hour and many
stream crossings later, we reached Filo Verde. From there, it was
another hour to Loma de Agua, a community of about 100, with a new
school built from cement under construction. Six hundred bags of
cement, plus bricks and other building materials, had been brought in
on horseback and carried by hand to build the new school.
Here,
we managed to hire a horse to help us carry the heavier bags on to La
Pista (another 2 hours). In La Pista, two very nice young men named
Benjamin and Simon offered us a
house to stay in and themselves as guides for the next day. Good news:
There is a trail all the way to the river! They said
it would take 4 hours to get to Corte Culebra (they called this part of
the Changuinola river the Rio Culebra). There are two trails
to get to the river, one of which was a bit longer and met up with the
river further down, where it was not as wild. Of course we ended up
choosing the
shorter, wilder alternative - a good decision, as it turned out.
Choni and Izmael went and got some firewood so we could cook something, but then the decision was made to accept Simon's invitation to cook in his kitchen. As I found out when I was done setting up the hammock, nets, thermarest, etc, "using" Simon's kitchen apparently meant Simon telling one of his two wives to cook on a fire under their house, with a good 20 people total watching her... It made me a bit uncomfortable, feeling like the reason that she had to do all this work even though I never asked her or Simon for it; I would have preferred simply doing our own cooking or chipping in some ingredients and eating whatever the family was eating that day.
So we provided rice, traded some more rice for some squash and some breadnut, and since there was no salt we gave the cook our salt container for the trip which contained enough for about 50 meals or so. I had a hunch that this was a mistake, and indeed, the container came back empty. Fortunately, there was a little tienda that sold me 10 cents worth of salt to refill the container. A little later, Izmael asked if we wanted some coffee, mentioning that they could not use their locally grown coffee. Izmael then asked if we had a little bit of sugar, we did, and because I am soo slow to catch on, I gave him the whole bag -- one pound. A weird sense of deja vu came to me when the coffee turned out very sweet. Sure enough, a little while later I found myself giving Izmael money to buy another pound of sugar... An interesting aspect of local culture; things are used when available, not when needed. Makes a little bit of sense in an environment where nothing lasts because of the humidity and heat. But is that enough reason for salty rice and overly sweet coffee? A matter of taste, I guess.
The
house we stayed in was a classical traditional hut; the posts were made
of wood split with an axe, the floor and low walls from Jira (a palm
that can be split and flattened out -- a bit like bamboo but much more
durable), and the roof from Penca palm fronds. The whole structure was
built with a machete and, in lieu of harder-to-obtain vines, the
ubiquitous red and white twine the banana company uses to tie their
banana plants up so they don't fall over in the wind. No chainsaw, no
nails, no hammer, no wooden boards. No wire, no hinges, no screws, no
cement. They might have needed a shovel to dig holes for the posts
(which were split with a machete or maybe an axe. Ok, so machete, axe,
shovel, and twine. Very impressive; it was nice to see that that here
people have preserved their traditional construction methods.
The
next day, we left the unnecessary gear with Choni and Izmael, which
they took back with them for us the same morning. We continued on with
minimal gear that fit into the small whitewater kayaks.
Simon and
Benjamin dragged the boats most of the way, laughing out loud a couple
of times on the downhill sections when one of them was knocked over by
a boat sliding down the hill behind him. We paddlers carried the gear,
partly simply by wearing it (PFDs and, in my case, helmet, which added
safety anyway) The uphill sections were very exhausting and all four of
us took turns with the boats. It was quite a
mudfest, and my soaked hiking boots doubled in weight; the trail is
apparently used to move cattle.
This,
by the way, was one of the most surprising things about the trip. I had
expected that 2 hours or so from the road, there would be no more
agriculture of any sort and was hoping for virgin rainforest. Instead,
there was a cattle farm at the end of the trail, along the Changuinola
river. Along the way, however, the trail crossed through virgin forest
for about 3 hours. Very pretty.
The plant with the interesting
root system behind the tree with the flowers in the picture on the left
is Jira; the same plant the floor and walls were made of in the house
we were staying in the night before.
The
trail was clearly heavily used, and it appears that it had been there
for a long time. Apart from the muck, it was actually a very good
trail. It supposedly goes all the way to Boquete, 2 more days of
walking.
Seeing this gave me an idea... most of these trails are ancient and have been used for generations. However, they are not mapped anywhere, and even the names of the communities do not appear on the military topo maps we were using.
So, wouldn't it be fun to explore this trail system with a GPS and add the trails to the maps? Where else can you find hundreds of km of maintained jungle trails connecting small communities? (Ok, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, maybe Costa Rica, certainly Colombia). Still, pretty cool...
On the other hand, the entire
area is part of the Comarca Ngobe Bugle, sort of an indian reservation;
people are very weary of strangers and it would probably hard to
convince them that you are walking around with a GPS to map trails and
not to steal their land and sell it... And, more realistically, they
might object to having this information publicly accessible.
The trail went mostly southwest, which meant we were putting in much higher than we planned to. Good, more whitewater that way.
Before reaching the Changuinola/Culebra river proper, we came to a creek that we decided had enough water for us to paddle.
Simon and Benjamin had wanted to try out the boats, but just as we arrived at the creek it started to rain, so they changed their mind since they were already cold. Also, all of us where equally exhausted after the long trip, and they had to hike back while we had a few hours of whitewater ahead of us,
The creek, probably Quebrada Romero, was a fun little creeking experience to warm us up. We had to walk around part of one rapid because of a nasty decapitating rock overhang.
It was obvious from the river that
this was a rapid that needed to be scouted though, so not too
much
danger here.
The
Changuinola river turned out to be beautiful, with clear water and fun
class III rapids and countless waterfalls coming in on the sides. The
first 2 hours of the run we were in a canyon with no sign of
civilization, after this, the valley opened up and there was a cattle
farm on the hillsides and some signs of people living there (mostly,
Pifa palms which have been used for food since ancient times in this
area).
The
rapids were mostly straightforward and boat-scoutable, and there were
surprisingly few trees in the river. This can, of course, change
rapidly; we were just lucky. For the first day the rapids were quite
consistent and there wasn't much flatwater between them at all - fun!
The
toughest rapid on the river definitely required
scouting, and
even though it was only class IV we decided to walk part of it,
because
of the remoteness of the place and the consequences of injuries. We put
in below a drop that could
in the have possibly flipped us and put us into a
bad spot lower in the rapid. The lower part
was fine, we ran a sneaky line down river right.
Our
first camp was on a little island. It's usually a bad idea to camp on
an
island, but the spot was very high and we thought it would be extremely
unlikely for the river to flood so rapidly that we would get stuck. Our
options for camping were pretty limited -- all we had was the tarp and
hammock, so we needed a spot with trees to tie things to but preferred
not to be directly in the jungle with all its bugs.
Getting water was a bit of a problem; the river had become muddy with runoff from the cattle farms (did I mention I hate them?), so we had to find a clear side creek to get water from and treated it with bleach (fortunately we had noticed at home that my iodine tablets were spoilt -- the lid was corroded).
Because of limited space in the boats all we had to sleep in was one hammock to share, which worked surprisingly well once we had found a comfortable position (heads by feet worked best), and until we heard a scary sound and found ourselves falling fortunately only about 2 inches onto the rocks. The branch I tied to had broken...
The
second day brought us mostly class II rapids in an open valley, with
good current. We found some very conveniently accessible good water,
and
passed the community of Guayacan (just a few huts). Shortly before
reaching Guayacan was when we started to see a few people on the side
of the river. For the rest of the trip we would spot a person every so
often, usually fishing. Every once in a while we'd stop to ask somebody
for information about the river.
In this kind of situation, the way you ask things is very important... If someone is sitting in a cayuco, we might ask him if he had gone down the river, how long, and what place he got to; not much sense in asking somebody on foot about the distances on the river, or asking someone how long it takes to get to a place they have never been to.
Then we'd ask very specific or comparative questions, such as "Is the current stronger further down"? "Do people paddle this section in cayucos"? "Are there sections where they have to get out and push the boats?" etc, etc, etc. By asking several different people we could usually get a good rough estimate of how long it would take us to get from one town to another (none of the towns or anything were on our map).
We were getting low on food, so we decided to prepare some bananas and bread nut that we had found along the way during the day. The bananas were still green, so we baked them in the fire and they tasted like potatoes.
The next day finding water became a priority. We soon found this lovely little creek, and once again there was no need to get out of the boat to fill the Nalgene.
After
2.5 hours on the third day, we reached Corriente Grande, the largest
comunity so far. Lots of kids were playing in the water and happily
posed for pictures.
We wanted
to take out it El Nance/Risco, but
managed to paddle right past the town without seeing it. So we ended up
having to paddle
all the way to El Silencio, another 3 hours or so. In El Silencio, I
called Man Hing so that he could meet us in Almirante at 5pm, then
bought some food and
water in a little supermarket right by the river. We were trying to get
a taxi from there to Almirante, but very few taxis went by and when we
found out it was only 20 more minutes by river to the road bridge to
Almirante,
we decided to paddle further in spite of the rain and cold.
On the river we chatted with a few guys who had built little rafts from
balsa wood and some young guys from Changuinola who were floating down
the river in inner
tubes.
Finally, after about 8 hours (15km) of hiking, 15 hours (80km) of paddling and 4 days total, we reached the bridge, exhausted but happy. I'd love to do this trip again, though it might be worth investigating to see if it is possible to put in higher up by starting on the Pacific side, hiking across the continental divide with the boats, and then put in. So much to do, so little time...
River description:
Times and flows are rough estimates on the day of our trip; the parts with whitewater can probably be paddled quite a bit faster if necessary. If you do this, email me, and please remember to respect the locals and always ask for permission to take pictures.Put In: Take a taxi to Norteno. From the end of the road, walk to the bridge, cross it, and instead of going left into Norteno go right, up the Rio Cano Sucio. Pass Filo Verde and Loma de Agua, arrive in La Pista after about 4 hours. In La Pista, get a guide, since the trail leaves the creek and is hard to find.
Take out: Bridge
Almirante-Changuinola, or, earlier, at El Nance/Risco (supposedly
requires a 15 min hike up the hill with the boats to get to the road).
| Minute | Flow (in cfs) | Description |
| 0 | 100 | Put into Quebrada Romero |
| 12 | 100 | Dangerous rapid; tight chute with undercut rock, walk on right |
| 20 | 800 | Confluence with the Changuinola / Culebra River |
| 60 | 800 | Right bend before a tall canyon wall, class III rapid, large beach on the right. |
| 80 | 800 | Class IV rapid, many boulders, walked part of it. |
| 120 | 900 | Canyon opens up, rapids get easier, II |
| 150 | 800 | We camped on river right here, on a little island. |
| 320 | 800 | Fun class II rapid |
| 330 | 800 | Nice waterfall on left |
| 360 | 1200 | Confluence with the Rio Culubre (from left) |
| 540 | 1200 | Camp |
| 690 | 1300 | Community of Corriente Grande |
| 700 | 1300 | Fun II-III rapids |
| 720 | 1500 | First motorized canoes. El Nance/Risco with road access. But still a few good play waves below. |
| 880 | 2400 | El Silencio, confluence with the Rio Teribe |
| 900 | 2400 | Take out bridge along road from Almirante to Changuinola |
Posted by rick at November 23, 2005 01:44 PM