Heart of Darkness

OK, maybe that title's a bit of an exagerration, but my first trip into the jungle, to take pictures of the vegetation, was still an eye opening experience. One day while I was still sick, Ben left me alone on the island for a few hours with very little food or water, and no insect repellent, probably hoping i would die. Although i needed a great deal of water due to being sick i wished more for insect repellent. I didn't have a problem with any ticks or large flying insects, but these sneaky little no-see-um type insects ate me up. Returning home i had dozens of bites on each of my appendages.


Although the rocky sunset picture is getting a lot of attention, this is my personal favorite from the trip. It looks great at a large size.

Inside the jungle it is ungodly humid, and I sweated more on that island than anywhere I’ve ever been. My equipment kept sliding out of my hands because I was sweating so much. There are insects crawling around on almost everything. You don’t really notice it until you stop and try to find somewhere to sit or kneel (as i often was doing) while you rummage around in a pack. Then you see huge frightening spiders wearing gloves, cute leaf cutter ants, and everything in between. I was reminded of Survivorman (the Costa Rica episode). It's pretty much exactly like that, except Costa Rica is a bit drier with the appearance of cacti as part of the flora. What i remembered about that particular episode, was how Les seemed close to freaking out once he saw how the the whole ground started crawling around at night. After that he moved to the beach.



As the days went by, the weather was almost too good. Ben got obsessed with sunset pictures, for which you need at least a few clouds. Each day we stayed on the island until shortly after the sun was gone so we could be sure not to miss a good sunset image.



One of those evenings, about 15 minutes after sunset, Ben had been boating at a high speed through some rather rough seas for the size of his boat. I didn’t like it because the last time I had been in that exact type of situation I ended up with two broken teeth (during a violent thunderstorm in a canyon of Lake Powell). At some point Jerrod exclaimed that there was an awful lot of water in the back of the boat. I turned around to see every single item behind me floating as if in a bathtub. Ben immediately cut the power, which caused a big wave to wash all those floating objects forward to the front of the boat, knocking against everything. As the wave settled the boat suddenlylooked halfway underwater. We even had to turn the engine off because it was mostly submerged. Acting very quickly, Jarrod emptied out some small coolers and began furiously bailing. I looked around. It was getting dark at this point. The rolling waves were half black, their shoulders midnight blue with highlights of peach and vermilion flickering across their crests as they rolled by.



The boat had a swimming pool of sloshing water in it. Water was threatening to come over the back. Although Jerrod was bailing very quickly, it was still taking an impossibly long time for the water level to go down. I began eyeballing the uninhabited islands that were nearby, stars appearing over the trees. I was seriously frightened for a minute or two, but then it hit me that I was not on a sinking boat in Alaska, where I would surely die. No, I was “luckily” on a sinking boat next to the equator, and even if I was too weak to swim half a mile to the nearest island I could float around in a life jacket all night and not get hypothermia. Whew! I felt so much better after that revelation.


One of the nearby islands with a very nice beach.


As you move in from the beach the trees grow horizontally towards the sea and sun. Some of the branches were half buried in the sand.

From there the trees change to a more vertical orientation and you come across a variety of palms.

The engine no longer wanted to run, but by moving slowly, and with frequent breaks for bailing to keep the engine above the water, we eventually made it to the dock under the cover of darkness (there were no lights on the boat). After showering and some dinner we returned to the dock to try and figure out what the problem was. Ben claimed he just had a poor bilge pump, but every one's got a bad bilge pump and I’d never seen so much water accumulate so continuously in a boat.




Once deeper inside the palm type plants disappear and a high jungle canopy emerges with old growth prehistoric looking trees.

The hosts of the lodge came down to offer assistance and in a little time it seemed clear that the water was coming from inside the hull. The boat was indeed sinking and needed to be removed from the water. We all walked up the dock then down to the pebble beach, and dragged Ben’s boat out of the water. I couldn't help notice how, even as they waded out into the ocean with flashlights, the number of stars in the sky was astounding for a place so humid.

Since it was low tide Ben and Jerrod had to take turns waking up every hour to go down and pull the boat farther on shore. The next morning we took it to a nearby mechanic. Once out of the water it was easy to see that the hull was cracked. From that point on we had to rely entirely on Cesar for our transportation. Cesar is the son of one of the local lodge owners. He grew up in Bermuda, went to college in Florida and is now living a pretty alternative lifestyle as a young man in the back country of Panama. He had a nice boat and if just dropping us off for an hour at at time he spent his time offshore fishing. As you can see below it was pretty roomy.

In addition to sunset pictures, Ben wanted some pictures of the Howler Monkeys that live on Palenque. I wanted to see some too, and even though we could hear them we didn't have any luck actually finding any until the end of the very last day. We spent quite some time looking for them in the high forest but the ones we eventually found were far out on a peninsula ridge top above the beach.



Some of these monkeys may have had no human contact until a few months ago. They were very upset about our presence and began aggressive posturing and howling. Silly monkeys, we weren't scared at all, and that fact deeply disturbed them. Although we never acted the least bit aggressive or antagonistic, they were visibly worried and became shy, climbing higher into the trees.







We were on a newly cut trail on a narrow high ridge, and the tree they were in was rooted on the side of the steep hill. Although this made it easier for us to see into the higher branches of the tree, it also meant i was limited to moving just forward or backward a few feet on the trail. Every time i got a view of them they would try to move behind something else so i couldn't see them directly.

We found them so late in the day that, like everything else, i had very little time, to try and get a shot before Jerrod made us head back to the boat to leave. It was very cool though, especially since we saw a baby monkey with it's mother. Also, although it doesn't show in the pictures, they were situated on a hill right over the beach. They had a great view of the ocean from where they were, and it was fun to imagine that they might sometimes venture down to the water.


The monkeys were on that distant ridge at the far left.

Palenque was a great adventure for me. I'm grateful for the opportunity to have been a tiny part of it. It's the closest to the equator i've ever been, the first time i've seen wild monkeys up close, the first time i've been in a country whose residents consider themselves closer to being Brazilian in culture than Latin American. In the coming years a world class resort will slowly take shape on the island and i look forward to going back sometime when it it completed.

The developer, Amble, has grand plans for the island. You can find far more details about the resort and the islands wildlife, history and the area in general at The Resort at Isla Palenque.


For me, this was the end of a wild adventure, but for Ben, Gerrod and Cesar it was just the end of a typical day of work.