Sarah Woods - On a Wing and a Prayer: One Womans Adventure into the Heart of the Rainforest

ON A WING AND A PRAYER

ON A WING AND A PRAYER

One Womans Adventure into the Heart of the Rainforest

Sarah Woods

For my precious daughter Milly

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

www.bloomsbury.com

BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2015

text by Sarah Woods, 2015

All photographs in the plate section are Sarah Woods, with the exception of p1 bottom Alfredo Maiquez/Getty Images, p4 bottom Nina Raingold/Getty Images, p5 top Sune Wendelboe/Getty Images, p5 bottom Alfredo Maiquez/Getty Images and p7 bottom Jason Edwards/Getty Images.

Sarah Woods has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data has been applied for.

ISBN (hardback) 978-1-4729-1213-8

ISBN (paperback) 978-1-4729-1214-5

ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4729-1215-2

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Contents

Im in a taxi crossing Panama City, earphones filling my head with the mellow sounds of the Steve Miller Band. When I left London, my friends gave me a track list tailored to Panama, a cleverly conceived collection of downloads themed around hats, cigars, jungle and birds. At this moment the track just happens to be Fly like an Eagle.

The nation is preparing to party, now that news bulletins have confirmed what many Panamanians had only dared hope: that the Americans will no longer own, control and dominate a part of their country roughly the size of Barbados. The Canal Zone is being handed back to Panama. Within days, annual tolls of around one billion US dollars will go straight into the countrys purse, once Americas final rent cheque of a quarter-million US dollars has cleared. More than two million Panamanians are literally jumping for joy. Streets are festooned with blue, red and white streamers, flags and bunting. Political murals depict grotesque, fat American bigwigs sailing home in leaky rowboats. Slogans scrawled on walls throughout barrios in the city read: Finally we have achieved sovereignty a poignant reminder that Panama will soon have control over its entire land for the first time since independence in 1903.

Steve Miller and his flying eagle are still swirling around my head as the taxi screeches its way round a busy cross-town junction, navigating a 180-degree curve at considerable speed. Splat! A large poster, presumably liberated from a wall by a Pacific breeze, lands face down across the windscreen. It renders the driver blind in fast-moving traffic, and he screams as panic sets in. He flicks the wipers on, slapping the inside of the windscreen in desperation. With stoic que sera sera , I fix my gaze as blaring horns all around us warn of our imminent doom.

The poster stares back at me with a pair of penetrating steely eyes, a prehistoric-looking winged creature, unlike anything I have seen before. It is certainly an eagle of some sort. But one with dark, menacing features. A blade-sharp beak as black as soot, and a neck as thick as a tree trunk. Eyes wide, super alert. Talons at the ready. It looks as if it is about to strike. Christ, its one sinister bird.

And then it is gone, torn from the windscreen by the taxi driver, who has cajoled his pudgy hand just far enough through a gap in the driver-side window. I watch as the paper sheet barrels and cartwheels across a lane of cars before attaching itself to a custard-coloured school bus. The driver speaks to me through his rear-view mirror, swearing colloquially at the drama as sweat leaks through his wash-faded red T-shirt.

Whats the bird? I enquire when eventually he pauses for breath. Harpy eagle, its a harpy eagle, he confirms. Panamas national bird. Theres one at the zoo, maybe. Enormous. Flies as fast as a motorbike. Like a dinosaur with feathers. Kills anything, it aint afraid of nothing. No. Nothing. Scary shit.

It is barely 4.30am, and the sky is still a marbled inky black, but globes of sweat are already strung across my brow. I never struggle to make an early flight, but after a troubled night wriggling in damp, hot sheets I feel poorly prepared for the day ahead. The air is so cloying, I feel choked by its weightiness. Everything, bar the insects and my itchy feet, is silent and still. I have never felt so close to the equatorial belt as I do at this moment: everything I touch feels hot, humid and wet. Even my scalp is clammy. Panama Citys daily temperature hovers around thirty degrees Celsius for 365 days a year. Only rainfall denotes a change in season. Year-round, overnight, the cloud knits together to trap the heat. So, even then, it rarely drops below twenty-two degrees: the winter setting for my electric blanket on my bed in the UK. I breathe in a trio of steady, deep breaths then expel the air in a slow, controlled exhalation. Fearful thoughts flicker behind my eyes. My limbs seem weighty. I feel restless. It is time to move on.

Panama. The very name dances on my tongue. Pan-a-ma. I can remember first tracing the contours of this country with my finger on the map, running east to west, and marvelling at how tiny it is. This S-shaped land bridge between South and Central America, famously sliced in half in the name of sea trade, is so slight it is barely there. At just over 75,000 square kilometres, it is smaller than South Carolina and less than half the size of Italy. Yet Panamas stature is so much bigger than its size. Squeezed against Costa Rica to the west and the wildest of Colombias jungle frontiers to the east, Panama offers incredible biodiversity. Around 1,000 species of bird, more than 200 mammals, almost 250 reptiles and over 160 amphibians have a home in its tropical mix of rainforests, scrubland, grassland savannas, swaying crops and mangrove swamps, which are neatly intersected by the ridge of the Cordillera Central running like a backbone along the centre of the country.

When I first arrived in Panama City, in 1999, I had an insatiable appetite for its irrepressible salsa music, the collective human psyche of its peoples, its delicious regional foods and its landscape and architecture. I wanted to take photographs of a variety of different faces, from the black-skinned Afro-Panamanians on the Caribbean coast, descended from banana workers and canal labourers, to the pale-faced residents of Parita, with their angular Spanish features and bull-fighting customs, and the diminutive, creased-skinned Kuna people, whose bright, beaded anklets and colourful robes are as twinkly as their deep-set eyes. I wanted to pace around the places in which they lived and observe ordinary, daily life in the colourful backstreets of Panama Citys historic old centre, Casco Viejo. To watch queues of workers boarding the fume-spewing, gaily painted buses that swarm westbound along the streets of Avenida Central and the net-mending fishermen at the Mercado de Mariscos (seafood market). To witness the gigantic swarms of flies descending over the city beaches at twilight, like dark grey plumes of smoke or the swirls of starling murmurations that billow over Brightons west pier.