I spot a cayman a couple of metres away on the umber riverbank. It is as still as a park bench, its jaws wide open. I’m not describing a Porsche Cayman with its bonnet up awaiting a recovery truck, I’m talking about a crocodile with a hungry look in its eyes.
It surveys me with malintent. I’m chuntering down the Gatun River in Panama’s Chagres National Park at walking pace aboard a cigar-shaped boat. The water’s so shallow that at one point my guide gets out to push.
I’m not sure I’d risk my legs. We’re heading to lunch with an indigenous tribe who live on the banks. Barefoot, the Emberá women wear colourful dresses and the men loincloths which leave little to the imagination.
They live in stilted huts with thatched roofs, expertly carve wooden instruments and trinkets, and weave baskets and beads. They have an innate understanding of the land. The village elder, Aleppio, picks a plant called dormidera, which is used to aid sleep and reduce pain, and hands it to me.
I didn’t realise I wasn’t meant to eat it. Suddenly my entire mouth goes numb, like I’ve been prepped by a dentist. According to my guide, Hernan, NASA sent the Apollo 11 crew to this very jungle to learn survival skills from the Emberá before heading to the moon.
I hope the advice included double-checking first if you should put space stuff in your cake-hole. They’ll have been well-fed prior to the mission, anyway, if my meal of tilapia river fish, fried in orange-red achiote spice and.
