the commander offered me a cigarette. and we started this conversation about politics. [ speaking spanish ] he wants to know what i think about the paramilitaries. pretty sure they are not the farc anymore. i told them what i thought about them. if they wanted to shoot me, they could shoot me. i told him the paramilitary was probably the biggest problem in colombia at that time. and i talked about the murders and the massacres. i just gave him a piece of my mind. i think i probably was ranting. and partway through the rant this commander kind of interrupts me. [ speaking spanish ] and pulls off his t-shirt. and like, there it is. we re paramilitary. the skull and cross bones is kinds of their little tag. what do you think about that?
take us as far as paya, which was the last panamanian village. inside days we would be inside colombia. i certainly didn t think we put the most difficult part of the trek behind us. we had yet to enter the border region, the real heart of the jungle, if you will. we hiked all day through the jungle. i remember victor kind of laughing with the guides about the amount of water we were drinking. and then we did run out of water. at first it s like wow, i m really thirsty. i would like some water. and then it s i don t feel well. i feel light-headed. we need to find water soon. eventually, we found a grove of green bamboo. bamboo.
of feature of vegetation, and you ll swear you already walked by it. we camped at night and expected to be in colombia the following day. the next morning we woke up, we had breakfast. hey, robert, are you all packed? all packed. what about your hammock? and we continued. we knew that we were probably going to cross into colombia that day. right around noon, we decided to stop for lunch. and while we were eating, three men we knew from paya passed us. they were headed to the same village, and they were moving quite quickly. they had heavy bags, but they were moving much faster than we were. exchanged pleasantries and they were off. we knew we wouldn t see them again until we got there.
i kind of road tripped down from colorado. that was an important part of the trip was to really get off the tourist track. i wanted to go back to colombia in a way that was meaningful to me. i can fly or take a boat. it was kung fu or something, this idea that i would be walking through central america. i felt there was some truth to this. you get on a road, and you can take it all the way south, but it ends in panama. that s it. but to cross into colombia, you have to cross the darien gap. the darien is kind of mythical. it s jungle for hundreds of miles. it was challenging, this idea to cross the darien. frightening. but why should it be easy?
i feel kind of in a weird way ready. i mean, maybe this is how it should have been. i mean, i m back in colombia, right? things have kind of come around, you know. you always think you try to run, grab a weapon or something. but oddly enough, that wasn t on my mind. i just figured that they were going the take me into the jungle and put me on my knees and put a bullet in my head.