Kuna castaway
Story and photos by Ted Alan Stedman
Technicolor fish darting beneath the sapphire-hued surface seem like they’re flying as our cayuco dugout canoe motors over water so translucent it’s like peering into air. Stretching into the horizon I see ivory sand specks crowned with emerald green palms under a cerulean sky. I count maybe 17 dwarfish islands, uninhabited all except for the one dead ahead sprouting a collection of thatched huts known as The Kuna Lodge. We glide ashore on the one-acre islet called Sapibenega, and I’m greeted by brightly dressed native women who offer me a heady rum concoction in a split coconut that pacifies me like a dose of Prozac.
Nothing but postage-stamp sized islands, ankle-high waves sputtering over shallow fishy reefs and barely a soul in sight – not impossible propositions. But the fact I’m in the Americas, only a few air hours from Houston, teases my brain. The scene seems pinch-yourself transfixing, like stumbling into a painting. That wouldn’t be so farfetched, really. In 1887 French Impressionist Paul Gauguin sailed these same waters off Panama, before his celebrated artistic furlough in Tahiti. It’s just a guess, but I suspect the seeds of the painter’s iconic color-crazed inspiration germinated here.
After a month of sweaty jungle trekking and grimy volcano climbing throughout Panama, Sapibenega and its private Kuna Lodge are my Rx for something approaching an unrequited castaway fantasy. It’s one of just 49 inhabited islands in the San Blas Archipelago, a chain of nearly 400 islands lacing Panama’s Caribbean coast and part of the semi-autonomous Comarca de Kuna Yala. Picture the idealized islands drawn by cartoonists – the small dots of sugar-white sand with coconut palms arching over a languid sea – and that image is a dead ringer for San Blas.
As if to put an exclamation point on the obvious, my temporary island home of Sapibenega translates to “idyllic island that is the essence of life” in the local tongue.
And the locals are the other reason I’m drawn to this indigenous outpost. The Panama territory is home to 50,000 native Kuna Indians who called themselves Olo-tule, the Golden People selected by the Kuna god Paba Tummat to guard their paradise from outsiders – from “extranjeros” like me who aren’t allowed to own or develop property in the Kuna Yala. The effect is only a handful of remote Gilligan-esque accommodations exist here. There’s little to do beyond lazing in hammocks, visiting Kuna villages, and swimming and snorkeling off uninhabited islands – exactly the stuff for castaway wannabes with cultural curiosities.
I settle into my thatched bamboo hut, one of about 14 at The Kuna Lodge fitted with accoutrements such as solar power, flushing compost toilets and freshwater showers. Their simplicity matches the surroundings on tiny Sapibenega, and I quickly surrender to the notion of island time, where you toss the wristwatch and let the sun, tides, hunger and thirst dictate your schedule.
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When I’m not my shaded hammock, I try climbing the coconuts trees – part of a castaway fantasy that in my case amounts to comic relief for the few souls on Sapibenega who watch me. I’m not foolish enough to attempt this acrobatic maneuver that locals accomplish with a machete in hand, so I’m left to wrestle one loose while I skin my legs raw on the rough trunk. My limited success is enough that I’m able to mix my own cocktail after hailing a passing cayuco whose skipper is willing to part with some cheap Nicaraguan hooch.
As the sun draws low over the distant jungled mainland coast I hail a lone passing fisherman who sells me live lobster and octopus for a pittance. That evening I share my bounty with the Lodge’s cook, a man by the name of Rubilio Miller who’s half Kuna and earned his surname from an American grandfather. Neither of us has mastered Spanish, and his Kuna dialect to me sounds like a litany of sing-song phrases that somehow seem befitting of the Indian’s ancient Amazonian ancestry. I lay my frayed Panama map on split log table, and by buggy lantern light show Rubilio the Panama destinations I’d visited. We pencil pictures and figures to convey ideas, communicating like 2-year-olds and laughing into the night as the orange orb of the full moon levitates above the shimmering Caribbean.
The exchange with Rubilio naturally piqued my interest in the fascinating Kuna people. I take a timeout on Sapibenega’s therapeutic idleness and bag a boat ride to nearby Playon Chico, a Kuna island village where nearly 4,000 live close-shouldered on a piece of real estate roughly 600 by 1,200 feet in size.
Within minutes of landing I’m greeted by a sort of island emissary who steps forward from the 100 or so villagers who’ve come to check out the extranjeros. “I am friend. I show Playon Chico. One dollar,” he announces. Evidently, I have no choice in the matter, and he leads me into a labyrinth of narrow corridors hemmed by bamboo fences and thatched huts where exotic Indians greeted me from open doorways and chickens peck along dirt lanes.
The Kuna are striking. Stocky and said to be the world’s second-shortest race after African Pygmies, the bronze-skinned Indian are usually under 5 feet tall and lack body hair beyond their straight, luxuriant ink-black manes. Being fair-featured, tallish and hairier than necessary, there is no guesswork about my extranjeros status.
My walkabout on Playon Chico is engaging, intriguing – I feel like I’ve stepped back in time as inquisitive Kuna stare at me like I’m an alien. My new “friend” parades me through the dusty corridors, introducing me in his unintelligible tongue to his fellow islanders. The cultural safari continues like this for an hour, and I’m gradually drawn to hut where a number of women are wearing and displaying the Kuna’s trademark mola dresses.
Molas are their singular commercial link with the outside world, sold by craft shops in Panama’s larger cities and beyond. The artful dresses are a commotion of color, originating from body painting designs transferred to cloth. I’m certainly no couturier, but I can see why molas carry a degree of artisan heft. Each one appears as a total original, like a strand of DNA, displaying layers and layers of brightly colored patterns representing birds, beasts, men, trees and the like.
A day before leaving San Blas, I arrange for a half-hour dugout ride from The Kuna Lodge to Diadub. It’s an uninhabited island about double the size of Sapibenega, and fairly non-descript in that it’s as drop-dead gorgeous as just about every island I can see. My boatman’s English matches my Kuna, which is to say our communication gap amounts to a chasm. We pull along a schoal where I hop ashore and wade a short distance to the island, and then, surprisingly, he motors away. I have a day’s basic provisions plus snorkeling gear – enough, really, to cash in on this impromptu Crusoe adventure. And besides, he’ll be back soon.
If Sapibenega provided a measure of bliss, Diadub provided unadulterated ecstasy. I swim and snorkel solo over one of the most colorful and fishy reefs I’ve ever seen, a sensation like being in an enormous aquarium where every kind of tropical fish is included for my personal amusement. I spot a giant green moray eel, maybe 5 feet in length, that undulates past with its gaping toothy maw. I also make an abrupt beeline back to shore when a sea snake banded in nature’s infamous red-and-black “don’t mess with me” colors seems to veer my way.
I scout the island in less than an hour. The isolation could feel overwhelming, but instead feels like a balm that washes away anxieties. I hear a keel-billed toucan in the tree tops – maybe the only other creature on this Lilliputian island – and eventually spot the kaleidoscopic bird perched on a ripening bunch of green coconuts. We each go our separate ways, and I drink-in the complete solitude like a thirsty desert rat as the tropical rays gave way to the long shadows of the setting sun.
But as the hour grows late I begin to wonder if my castaway fantasy is going too far. The thought crosses my mind: surviving here is possible. I could go slightly feral, with a routine of nothing more than sleeping, gathering food, storing water and writing a journal. In a strange world, alone, unfiltered thoughts come easy. Then the distant buzz of an approaching outboard engine breaks the silence, and with it I stumble back to reality.
Getting there: The best way to arrive in San Blas from Panama City is to go directly to Albrook Airport to buy air fare tickets from Aeroperlas (507/315-0275, www.aeroperlas.comor) Air Panama one day prior to travel. There are daily weekday flights, most less than an hour in length, serving the airstrips in the San Blas Archipelago. Before departure, visitors must pay a one-time $20 visitation fee.
Staying there: There are a number of lodging options in the San Blas Archipelago, and it’s necessary to make reservations prior to travel. The gateway to Sapibenega, The Kuna Lodge, is a flight to nearby Playon Chico. A guide will meet and transport guests to the island, about an 8-minute ride on a motorized canoe. For more information on Sapibenega, The Kuna Lodge, contact (507) 215-1406, www.sapibenega.com.
More info: Panama's official Website is www.visitpanama.com.