When we got back to the boats, we were warned that the owner of the pasture we were going to walk across had "wolf-dogs" and that we could not walk across it; it would be much better if we followed the family back to their house, only half an hour away (or 10 minutes, as they called it). We decided to face to wolf-dogs and the mean cattle farmer, and hiked across the pasture up the hill towards the road.
When we finally made it up to the house and apologized for not having asked for permission to walk on the people's land, they first showed the expected reaction: They were extremely friendly, said it was no problem, showed us where the gate was, and helped us with the boats. 

Then, they proceeded to invite us to stay at their house, as long as we wanted, and insisted that we at least stay for dinner. We did, and spent a couple of hours of nonstop rapid-spanish conversations... a very nice evening even though we only got half the jokes. The accomodations were wonderful, a little thatched hut all to ourselves, and I even had Internet reception, but no power to recharge my laptop. Surreal...

We ended up staying two nights, going on a hike to a waterfall with them on the first day, and building a mud stove with them for their kitchen on the second day. Along the way to the waterfall (which we never reached, but that's another long story) we took a little bath in a creek- notice the hand sticking out of the waterfall?

We went back the Rio Guabo canyon on the second day, and continued downriver on foot. In one spot, we had to use one of the throwbags to rope down a steep slippery rock, and in a few places wehad to jump from rocks a few meters high into water less than two meters deep. We took the son of the family along on this hike, and although he had lived there for 19 years, he had never been in this part of the canyon. It was quite an adventure for him as well.

After about two hours, we made it to the road bridge, and walked back to the house along the road in about 20 minutes.

A couple weeks later, I talked to ANAM -- and before I even asked about a dam, while talking about how locals perceive gringos in plastic boats, the guy I talked to asked if people assumed we were dam surveyors. Apparently, this is pretty common. He is investigating if there are any permit processes for dams pending, and I have not heardback yet.

The takeout bridge was a great place to bathe; there were some interesting fishies in the water that liked to nibble on people's legs. Cute.    

A very nice Colombian guy is starting a pineapple plantation near the bridge. He had someone watch the boats for us, while we went back to Miramar to get our stuff, and then we took off towards David.

The main people that I worked with are Man Hing, Emiliano, and Abelardo. Man Hing is the caretaker of the property and lives here with his family. He has a lot of experience building pangas (motorboats built of wooden slats) and cayucos (dug out canoes that may or may not use an engine, up to 42 ft long). Emiliano is his younger brother, who is also good at working with boats and is very skilled with woodworking tools. Abelardo is the chainsaw master, and can turn fallen tree into decent 2X4's using just that one tool.

We decided to use balsa wood because of it's buoyancy and because it would be easier to work with than one of the hardwood trees. Also, this being a prototype boat project, we didn't want to waste good wood. The balsa we chose had a base diameter of about 2 feet and was under 15 years old. It was growing at the very back of Rick's property, in an area overgrown by heliconia (a tall banana-like plant). This area had to be cleared anyway, because the small nispero trees that had been planted there were being overcrowded and there wasn't enough sunlight. 

The first obstacle that we ran into was that Man Hing didn't think that the tree should be cut down for another two weeks because we were at a bad stage in the moon cycle. There is some validity to this - apparently there are certain bugs whose life cycles are dependant on the moon and the amount of light that there is at night. We were just coming into the full moon, and his concern was that the bugs would be more active and would eat the fallen tree more quickly. We spent some time talking to him, and eventually the three of us decided that if we worked quickly on the tree after cutting it down, we would be able to carry it down to the water a few days after it was fallen, so minimal damage would be done by the insects. The tree was cut down the next day.

When the tree had been falled and we were able to measure it, we realized that the main trunk was 2 feet shorter than we had estimated, so the canoe would have to be a bit shorter than planned. Man Hing and Abe immediately went to work taking off the "top" of the canoe. They usually do this by simply making a long flat cut with the chainsaw, but because I wanted to boat to be raised at the tips they used an axe instead. The general idea at this stage was to take as much unnecessary weight off as quickly as possible so that we could drag it down to the waterfront where it would be easier to work on and there was access to electricity for the power tools.






Measurements were made using a string that had been soaked in used oil and the inside of D-cell batteries - it was run down the length of the trunk and then flicked so that it would mark the wood. 

The outer edges were outlined with a piece of heliconia branch with the leaves cut off. This gave it a nice symmetrical curve and was incredibly simple and practical.

Dragging the boat to the waterfront took a lot of effort. Fortunately, most of the distance was downhill and if the trail was clear enough things went well. The uphill parts were pretty tough.

A branch from the same tree was cut off for the ama (the "outrigger" part of the outrigger canoe).

Once the boat had been transported it was time to refine it. Man Hing and Emiliano did most of the work here, using a chainsaw to trim off the rough excess and then working with an adze to smooth it out. It would have been neat to have done this myself, but they're just so good and efficient at it that it didn't make sense for me to do it. Bit of a shame, really - next time I'll insist that I get a turn  =P  As it was, I did a bit of sanding and worked with a hammer and wood chisel.

The original plan had been to leave solid blocks in the hull for the seats and foot supports and the rest would be hollowed out to make the boat lighter. In the end, though, it made more sense to take out the foot supports and replace them with wooden slats that were nailed in. It would also have been better to have done the same with the seat. Not only would that make the boat even lighter, it allows the water to flow and pool in one area where it's easier to bail.


The iakus (wooden bars that support the ama) are lashed to the boat using rope. They sit along a flat wooden surface with a pegs to keep them seated in the right position. The ropes run through holes that were burnt into the hull using a hot piece of rebar. The burning process seals the edges of the hole to make it strong, but most of them are reinforced with a short length of PVC tubing just in case. The danger is that the string, which is pulled very tightly, could tear up through the top of the hole and damage the wooden support (balsa is quite soft, and the string is relatively thin and runs with the grain of the wood).

Lashed together, the boat runs incredibly well. It "feels good" - ie. it tracks well, steers easily (paddle steering, no rudder), and the weight is balanced. The iaku sits nicely in the water and gives plenty of support to the hull.

Man Hing made a beautiful strong replica of my wooden bent-shaft outrigger paddle out of a slice of hardwood. The wood already had the perfect curve in it, as it was cut from the joint where the branch met the trunk.

Before being fully functional, the boat still needs a canvas covering over the ends because even small surf can break over the tips and flood it with water. In this picture where I'm approaching the beach, you can see how the back end is completely full of water and I'm being pushed by the wave rather than surfing it. It's disappointing that I didn't manage to get this completed in time, because the boat feels like it will surf really well.

Another problem is that the sides of the boat are too low, and with the weight of two people it tends to, ah... become a submarine. Which is how at one point, Rick and I ended up paddling out into some big surfing waves, got the boat full of water, and ended up being pushed over shallow coral with the edges of the boat sitting two or three inches below the surface of the water! So next time, higher gunwales, lighter seats, and more bouyancy.

Sooo... Rick has this great idea of doing a 200km hike from Colon to Bocas (or Bocas to Colon), along the Carribbean coastline. MY idea is to do the trip in an outrigger instead. The boat would have to have considerably higher sides and a good canvas covering, but the basic design would be the same. There's plenty of gear space, and it's a very versatile craft. If you want a new, differently shaped ama or iakus, it's just a matter of how good you are with a machete! Boat leaking? Fill it with wood chips and glue! Anyhow, that would be a super-cool thing to do, so if anybody's interested let me know. It would be great training for the Amazon trip....

After passing through a channel with some interesting signage we spotted some men snorkeling looking for lobsters. They had bottles of bleach that they were using as poison to make their jobs easier. Lovely. Shortly after that we passed a large protected bay where there were a few small houses, made in the typical thatched-roof up-on-stilts style that the indigenous people here build. This was the island village, made up of 4 or 5 families. There was no school, and some of the children didn't speak Spanish. On the opposite tip of the island there is another small community of men from the mainland who are there to dive for lobsters - they paddle their cayucos over from the mainland and dive to a depth of up to 80ft. Pretty impressive.

Eventually we caught up to Ed and Marcella between some small islands where they had stopped to snorkel - and were finally able to drink some water. We then traded vessels, with them paddling and us motoring. When they got into the kayak, Marcella shrieked over its tipsyness and was talking about how she didn't like paddling and Ed would have to do all the work. So we were quite surprised when we couldn't find them shortly thereafter! We spent quite a bit of time going back and forth between the islands, making sure that they hadn't flipped somewhere.

Later that night we took the dinghy back to the little village to buy some nice fresh fish for dinner, and on the way we were stopped by the military-ish boat. It turned out to be the Panamanian Coast Guard, and they were very friendly and chatted with us for a while. We bought three large red snappers, a lobster, and a bunch of smaller fish from Don Pancho, owner of the "Fish Man" boat which is often seen in Almirante. It turns out that he makes a regular run between Escudo and Almirante. He sold us the fish for $0.80 a pound.  In Almirante it sells for $1.25/lb. Strangely enough, he also had a bunch of closed-cell foam - perfect for outfitting kayaks and hard to find in Latin America. He uses is for keeping the fish cold, but had extra so he sold us a large block of it for $2. On the way back we managed to get the propeller caught in an unseen fishnet and spent a while floating and shredding the skin of our hands trying to tear it off (where's the machete when you need it??) until the owner came out to help us. He was very nice about it - probably because it was an illegal net. But we gave him some gas for his troubles anyway, because we shredded his net. 

The next day we had to head back to reality. The winds were very light, so we had to motor most of the way, stopping briefly at Isla Tigres for a quick snorkel break. Shortly thereafter a school of dolphins visited us for a while, racing alongside and in our wake.

Back home again, unpacking was easier than packing as we simply piled all the cargo into the boats, tied them together, and ferried it all over to the dock.

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 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.

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.

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!

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:

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).