Panama City, Banana God, and a Twelve Year Old Warrior
After El Darién, the body breaks in Panama, Costa Rica plays tricks, and Nicaragua begins
On 21 March I published the previous chapter from my book By Bicycle from Chile to Alaska, Crossing El Darién. That was where the road ended between Colombia and Panama and where the bicycles stopped being bicycles and became weight.
This is what came next, still on the same journey in 1986 to 87. Translated and tightened for Substack, but told as it happened.
Panama City
We roll into Panama City on the bicycles.
The city hits like a wall. Exhaust, dirt, stress. Faces from everywhere. Towers trying to look modern. The air feels used up before you even breathe it.
I am already sick when we arrive. Not tired, sick. The kind of sickness that turns your body into weight and your head into fog. It makes you short-tempered. It makes you mean. It makes you ashamed.
Ed leads us through narrow alleys toward a hotel opposite a cathedral by Plaza Central. It must once have been exclusive. You can still feel the old pride in the height of the ceiling and the size of the entrance. Now the wallpaper is peeling and the place looks tired.
Ed demands a room. The men behind the desk stare at us with open contempt. Ed does not back down. He pushes, insists, refuses to be dismissed. In the end we get a key.
The elevator does not work. Four floors. Eighty dollars a night.
We haul bicycles and bags up the stairs, step by step, one load at a time. When everything is finally inside the room, I collapse onto the bed.
For a week I hardly move.
A doctor tells me what I do not want to hear. No fat. No alcohol. I live on boiled tomatoes, cucumber, rice. Ed eats what he wants.
Then Ed collapses.
He screams and holds his lower back. He begs me to help him up. I drag him upright and he folds and hits the floor. For a moment he lies still enough that I think he has died there. I shout his name. I slap him until he complains and returns.
A doctor arrives, dark-eyed and indifferent. The kidneys, he says. Ed needs rest.
This is where our road together ends. Panama City is the last place we share the same room. After that we leave separately, and I never see him again on the journey north. It is strange how quickly a person can vanish from your daily life when the road decides so.
Out of the City
When I finally get moving again, the world opens up the moment I leave Panama City behind.
One evening by the sea I watch a pelican dive like a spear and rise with a fish. My own dinner boils between stones around a small fire. A light breeze cools my face. I am still weak, still sick, but the air is air again.
Roadblock
The road blocks.
Hundreds of people with signs. A woman pushes a placard close to my face about Noriega and freedom. Someone says it is a general strike and it may go on for days.
An old man stands behind a cart full of bananas. If you get stuck, he tells me, there is one salvation.
His bananas.
He raises his knotted hand toward the sky and says God eats my bananas. He says it like it settles everything. It is so absurd I laugh.
Costa Rica
At night in the tent a scream rips through the darkness. It comes again, closer. My heart hammers so hard it hurts my ribs. Sweat pours. I cannot find the matches.
It must be a jaguar, I think.
In the end I force myself out because I have to urinate. I jump out ready for the worst and meet a face full of teeth.
A small howler monkey.
I stand there shaking with anger and relief and feel stupid in the way you feel stupid when you are still alive.
Cerro de la Muerte
The climb comes. The Mountain of Death.
At one point a thought arrives sharp enough to be dangerous. If I cannot handle this, I will hitch a lift into San José, buy a ticket, and go home. El Darién taught me something I did not know before. You can give up without losing your self-respect.
A filthy truck stops. A man steps out, disgusting in a way only a stranger can be when you are exhausted. He spits, drives off, then returns and walks toward me with bananas on his shoulder.
Only twenty kilometres left to the top, he says. He congratulates me and presses the bananas into my hands.
I blush with shame. Will I never learn.
At the top fog makes it impossible to see anything far. Light rain. Wind. For the first time in a long time I freeze. But it does not matter. I am up there. I do not have to quit.
Santa Rosa
In Santa Rosa National Park the jungle becomes theatre.
Wild pigs come to a muddy waterhole and glare up at me when I scramble onto a stone. After them come monkeys, screaming, acrobatic, cruelly happy.
Then I see bandit faces and long tails between the trees. Coatimundis. A whole group scatters when I shout without meaning to.
For a few days my body slowly comes back. The fever loosens its grip. The mind becomes clearer. The road becomes possible again.
La Cruz and the Border
At La Cruz, near the Nicaragua border, I see the first serious cluster of uniformed Costa Ricans. Until now Costa Rica has felt almost empty of police and military. Only here do I understand how much that mattered.
People look at me and ask if I am Japanese. The sickness has painted me yellow enough that they cannot place me. A hotel owner asks if I can teach karate.
I smile and keep moving.
Cordobas
At the border the currency becomes theatre.
A man offers five thousand cordobas for one dollar. He wears a cap that says Viva Los Contras. He carries a big bag of Nicaraguan cordobas.
I lie awake with doubt. Is it a moral mistake to use the black market here. But I need money I can use. I need to eat. I need to move.
I exchange twelve dollars.
Soon I am riding with a bag full of cordobas into Nicaragua.
Nicaragua
It feels like stepping a hundred years back in time.
Houses of thin wooden boards and dried clay. Stamped earth floors. Animals inside the same space as families. And still, friendly, humorous eyes.
A farmer shouts Viva la vida americano. I answer Viva la vida ruso and ride on, even keeping to the left side of the road because the surface feels better there and the traffic is so sparse it does not matter.
Two red tractors pass with Cyrillic letters on the side. The drivers stare straight ahead as if the world is fixed.
I see my first real car, an old Buick held together by wire and hope. A plate reads The Free Nicaragua. A Coca-Cola sign hangs like a promise.
Everything is finished, the shopkeeper says before I can speak. Try further down the street.
In a dark bar a soldier sits cleaning a modern automatic rifle. He does not look up. Men stare at me like I am an object.
A woman offers homemade liquor. Otherwise nothing.
Then she offers chicken with rice and a warm Coca-Cola.
It costs five thousand cordobas.
She tells me why. This week they only got sugar. No rice. No meat. Only sugar.
When I pay from my bag full of cordobas, the men whistle quietly. The room watches me.
Lake Nicaragua
Wind tears at my tent by Lake Nicaragua. Waves crash close.
Above me a huge billboard shows the captured American helicopter pilot Hasenfus being dragged forward by soldiers.
Behind me a small hut. A father sits outside with a loaded rifle, warning about bandits and gangsters.
After dinner I lean back and feel it clearly.
This is what I know.
Managua and El Chepito
Managua is the strangest city I have met. No one knows the street names I ask for. No one seems to know where the centre is. The city feels scattered. People everywhere. Red and black everywhere.
I search for El Chepito, the legendary place for travellers.
When I finally find it, it boils with life. Youths on cement floors, discussing everything, in shifting languages. The air is thick with conviction.
Then I hear Swedish.
Homesickness hits like a punch. I am too tired, too dirty, too thin to introduce myself. I lie down and fall asleep.
Intercontinental
In the luxurious dining room of the Hotel Intercontinental, some of the most fanatical residents from El Chepito eat pâté. They stare at me with contempt in my worn clothes. A meal here is paid with black-market dollars.
Someone talks about guilt, about beans and rice outside, about the right way to live.
I look around the room and notice something that bothers me more than the food.
There are no Nicaraguan women in there.
The Village
I stay in a village and try to get close to the people, the finest and most humble I have met.
Doña Sabina is the hostess. Don Estevan is the village leader. He tells me life is simple, shoes and clothes are a problem, but nobody lacks food or a roof. He says the difference now is literacy, even the old can learn to read and write.
A young woman tells me quietly that for young women it is still hard. After compulsory school, they are pushed back into kitchens and households.
When I pack to leave, Doña Sabina rises on her toes and whispers a warning into my ear.
Watch out for the Contras. They kill the country’s sons.
Estelí
I roll into Estelí at dusk.
Every wall is marked with red and black graffiti and bullet holes. The town is dark. No streetlights. No water. No electricity.
A small newspaper seller explains it. The Contras blew up a transformer station outside town.
The only hotel that will take me is expensive and locked behind a high fence and a huge padlock. The owner stares at me like I am a problem.
He calls me a volunteer for the regime.
Then he explodes when he sees the bicycle.
Russian, he screams, kicks it over, drives away the children, and punches me hard in the back as he storms past.
No water. No shower. No light. Dirty and now beaten too.
Then the next scene is even stranger.
A boy poses for my camera dressed like Rambo with a rifle almost as long as his body.
He tells me he is twelve and asks for cigarettes.
Then he drops the mask for a second and warns me to hide the camera.
In that warning you can hear it. A child who has learned to perform war, and still knows when it is time to be afraid.
A red military truck with Russian markings roars past carrying soldiers toward the front. They wave and smile.
I wave back.
And I keep rolling north, toward Honduras.
