Off and on for 20 years during the 1980s and ’90s, Martin Mitchinson concocted plans to visit the fabled Panamanian province of Darien—perhaps even to possess it in the way that ambitious and self-delusional young travellers tend to “collect” rare territories and deposit them in their backpacks.
But he never made it. On a succession of aborted trips, his car broke down, his wallet got stolen; he joined a Honduran circus instead.
And we are the beneficiaries. If, as a 20-year-old, Mitchinson had reached this remote territory just south of the Panama Canal—had he in effect got it out of his system—we would not have his fanciful and captivating new travelogue, a book that could only have been written by a man whose sensibilities have been honed by time and whose understanding of the world is no longer primarily about himself.
As we meet the author (40-something, melancholic, beset by self-doubt), he is alone near his thatched hut at Cavimál...
Charles Wilkins’s book Walk to New York: A Journey Out of the Wilds of Canada (Penguin, 2004) describes a hike he took in 2002 from Thunder Bay, Ontario, on the north side of Lake Superior, to New York City. His book Little Ship of fools, about rowing across the Atlantic with a crew of 16, will be published in 2013.
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