Not one part of the plan went as anticipated. It didn’t even go to
alternate plan B or C. It was a miracle that the trip even made it off the
ground and that the passengers didn’t get stranded in the jungle and have to be
rescued by the military.
San
Cristobal de las Casas is a small mountain valley surrounded by hills on all
sides, in which live an indigenous population of Mayan people who are known by
the names of Tzotzil and Tzeltals. At a location of seven thousand feet,
clouds cling to the mountaintops in the early morning hours and temperatures
hover in the low sixties.
Every day but Sunday, there was a large Indian
market where the locals go to buy provisions for their daily needs, mainly
fruits and vegetables, while to the north of the main market was a large
building that primarily housed traditional butcher stalls. If you didn’t
have a strong stomach, it’s not a place you want to visit.
Canned
goods and regular household items were sold in small mom and pop stores, where
the selection was not terribly great. In the entire city, there was no
supermarket or large-scale grocery store. My Spanish-speaking helpers and
I ventured into this labyrinth of markets and small stores to make our food
purchases for a group of fourteen for seven days in the wilderness.
On my
scouting trip to Mexico in 1974, I had observed the native women making
tortilla shells with small balls of dough flattened with a metal tortilla
press. It looked simple enough and I felt confident it was something I
could do, so I planned a number of meals around tortillas filled with meat,
cheese, tomatoes, etc., like a tortilla one would order from Taco Bell or Taco
Time.
The meat
that we purchased was fresh, really fresh, and we had to get it on ice
immediately. Fruits, vegetables, and flour products were purchased from
the open-air market, or small mom and pop stores.
With the
food purchases complete, we loaded the items into the back of the pickup, took
them to the campground where we were staying and repacked the items into the
food boxes and ice chests, then we headed for the airport.
The
Islander was a light utility aircraft that could carry a crew of two and nine passengers,
or cargo weight of approximately three thousand pounds. I had no idea how
much our equipment weighed, but although a tight fit, we got it all into the
aircraft. The plan was for all three of us to fly to the landing strip
adjacent to the river and unload everything onto the ground.
The two
guides would then move the equipment to the water’s edge, while I flew with the
pilot back to San Cristobal. The tricky part about moving the equipment
to the river from the airstrip, was that the path to the river went right
through property of villagers who lived beside the river. I could only
hope that the guides would use diplomacy in moving the equipment to the river,
and not trample someone’s garden.
After the
plane was loaded, the guide with the offensive body odor declared that the
plane was overloaded and not safe, and he was not going to fly in it. It
was a standoff; I had to appeal to the pilot to assure the malcontent that the
cargo weight was within tolerance. It was for certain that I couldn’t
afford to hire the pilot and plane twice to make the round-trip to the jungle
airstrip next to the river.
To my
knowledge, I was only the third river outfitter to make this journey on the
Usumacinta River. From others who had made the journey a few years
previously, I learned that the cargo plane they used had been a DC-6, but it
had crashed in the jungle and was no longer available.
I was
sitting in the passenger seat next to the pilot on the journey over the
Lacandon Jungle to the airstrip at Tres Nacion (translated: Three Nations)
while the two guides sat in the back with the boating equipment. As we
lifted off the runway and gained altitude, ahead of me in the jungle lay the
remains of several wrecked airplanes, including the skeletal remains of two
DC-6s that apparently had crashed after takeoff. The Lacandon Jungle over
which we were flying was a vast area of green, forbidding wilderness, inhabited
only by a few indigenous people known as
Lacandon Indians.
Lacandons,
both men and women, have long, shoulder-length black hair that always looks
like it needs to be combed, and wear white tunics that extend below their
knees. They’re often seen around the ruins of Palenque selling their
homemade crafts to tourists. Their most notable craft item is a set of
bow and arrows that they hock.
No comments:
Post a Comment