My gloved hand bristled with spines and my cursing drowned out the roars of the howler monkeys in the jungle canopy above us. Roland, my fellow rider, had warned us, “don’t grab trees for balance unless you check first, because some of them look like this”, pointing to a “spiny palm”. One of nature’s cruelest creations, these trees brandish a dense coat of four-inch needles, the botanical equivalent of a porcupine. The problem is, when you’re about to fall off a unicycle, you don’t have time to check what your grabbing. I extracted a couple dozen spines from my hand, some of them shockingly deeply imbedded, and I vowed to stop grabbing trees and to instead fall to the ground from then on.

The idea to mountain unicycle (or “muni”, for short) across Panama began innocently many months earlier when we learned that Kris Holm Unicycles, (www.krisholm.com), the premier muni manufacturer, was offering an “Evolution of Balance” award, a grant awarded to a team proposing a difficult, creative and remote mountain unicycling adventure somewhere in the world. My riding buddy, Roland Kays, is a biologist and often studies mammals in the Panama rainforest. He suggested a crossing of the Camino de Cruces, an ocean-to-ocean trail made by the conquistadors in the early 1500’s, as an objective to propose for the grant. The exercise of writing up the grant application was amusing, free from the responsibility to actually follow through. I had no real expectations that we would win the grant and have to execute the trip, but win we did, and five unicyclists, Roland, Perry Woodin, Brad Stratton, Vince Lemay and myself (Steve Relles), began making plans and reservations for a trip to the tropics.

Even before winning this grant, all of us already owned Kris Holm (KH) unicycles, which are state-of-art aluminum frame munis, with fat tires and splined cranks, which utilize robust BMX bicycle parts and are practically bombproof. With all the abuse these cycles take, essentially the only problem we ever have is flat tires, so our heartfelt thanks and kudos go to Mr. Holm and his meticulous manufacturing process. His Evolution of Balance Award provided us with a good chunk of cash and, along with Unicycle.Com, access to plenty of wholesale unicycle equipment. Nathan Hoover and family, internationally prominent in the unicycle world, kicked in a bit more cash for the grant, and we also received a generous gift certificate from Horny Toad Clothing to round out the award.

We arrived in Panama on Saturday, January 10, 2009, each with a big suitcase and a knobby-tired muni. Roland, already there on a mammal research project, picked us up at the airport with Marcos, a young Panamanian man who we hired to be our driver and “goto guy” for the week. At customs in Panama, the last step (or so we thought) was sending all bags and luggage through an x-ray machine. When my KH24 unicycle came out the other side of x-ray, the official pointed to it and spoke a Spanish phrase whose large number of words tumbled out in approximately three quarters of a second. Understanding next-to-no Spanish, I managed to catch the word “fumigation”, which was accompanied by the official pointing to the bits of dirt in the tire’s tread.

Perry’s and Brad’s cycles were similarly singled out and we wheeled them over to a side room, where another official rolled them out of our sight. My unicycle re-appeared in about five minutes. It still had all the dirt, and had no odor or other evidence that anything had actually been done to it in the back room. I turned and wheeled it out of the customs room where Roland met me. He cracked up when I told him about our fumigation, and he said in fifteen years of coming to Panama many times a year, he’d never had anything fumigated. Further hilarity ensued when Brad and Perry rolled theirs out a moment later, telling us with some chagrin that they’d both been charged $10 for the process. I have no idea if this was standard practice, or they got scammed. My shoes also had traces of dirt, but were treated in no such way. Team Personal Rollercoaster – Roland, Vince, Brad, Perry, and myself – along with Marcos, Laura (Perry’s wife), and two more friends, Michelle and Aissa, and tons of luggage, all piled into our rented van, stopped for groceries, and headed for our rented house in Gamboa, about 45 minutes north of Panama City. Waiting in plain view on the kitchen counter, as if placed there just for me, a confirmed insectophobe, was a cockroach the size of a small dog. Ugh. It took me a while to get to sleep that night, sweating in the 80 degree evening heat and trying to convince myself that those things would never crawl onto my bed.

Over breakfast we watched a pack of agoutis, ugly, rabbit-sized rodents wander around our backyard searching for food scraps. The agoutis and some parakeets and parrots were our first rainforest wildlife sightings. We cycled a kilometer, immediately drenched with sweat by the 90-degree humidity, to the Gamboa Resort, along the way racing a couple tourists on their resort-supplied Segways. Heading back the house, Perry’s 29-inch tire went flat, a bad omen for the week ahead.

Perry’s tire patched, we took our cameras and unicycles and headed into Panama City for a day of sight-seeing. On the way into town, there was a traffic snarl caused by a three-toed sloth crossing the road. There was a man trying to push it out of the way with a stick. Roland parked, jumped out, and simply picked the thing up by holding under its arms. We spent some time looking at this cute, very weird animal, then Ro put it on a tree and it slowly climbed away, though it was apparently sprinting, for a sloth.

In the city, we had a delicious lunch at an open-air fish restaurant, and then drove to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). Our access to the STRI parking lot was one of many benefits bestowed upon us by virtue of traveling with the well-connected Doctor Roland Kays. We made a plan to rendezvous later with the ladies and the team went off to play around on a bunch of cool obstacles and ride the Avenida Central, a long pedestrian thoroughfare though the downtown area. Most of the locals had probably never seen a single “monocicletta” before, and five of us riding together garnered endless astonishment, whooping, many thumbs up, and kids running along in our wake.

There is a vast range of socio-economic strata to be seen in Panama City, and heavily armed national police are an obvious presence everywhere. On their way to meet with us, Laura, Michelle and Aissa walked down a street and actually heard gunfire. As they fled, they saw police chasing and arresting a suspect, and, as one would expect, they were quite shaken when they met up with us. Relieved that everyone was OK, we all took some deep breaths to calm down and watched from the Casco Viejo railing as the sun set over the Pacific Ocean.

We got the ladies a cab back to STRI and rode back along the darkening, but still busy, Avenida Central, once again enjoying all the attention. The heat was getting to me by now, and both of my thighs were cramping so hard I couldn’t stand up, though fortunately I could still sit and pedal. I hadn’t planned on so much riding that first day and I became determined to eat plenty of bananas and electrolytes and drink ample fluids so this wouldn’t happen to me again. We all met at the van, drove back to the house and went to bed, ready for an early start the next morning.

Rising before the sun, we crammed some breakfast down, packed our gear, food and water, and Marcos drove us northward toward the Atlantic Ocean and the start of our ride. Heading northwest toward the city of Colon, we passed myriad rows of tin-roofed shacks and people waiting at bus stops, starkly contrasted with hundreds of billboards of scantily clad women advertising designer clothes, fancy watches and other luxuries which the people we saw could likely never afford.

We wanted our cross-Panama ride to closely approximate the route taken half a millennium earlier, but those explorers and pirates sailed up the Chagres River for the northern half of their route. We chose to begin at Fort San Lorenzo and follow the Chagres, which meant that our first day, we’d simply be riding on a paved road heading back southwest and ending at the Gatun Locks on the Panama Canal.

Team Personal Rollercoaster at Fort San Lorenzo, on the Carribean Sea
Steve, Roland, Vince, Brad, Perry

Today, the fort is crumbling ruins, with stairs, walls and tunnels, or, in the eyes of keen unicyclists, a veritable playground of hopping, riding, and photo opportunities. We played and dropped and rode around these ruins, fielding questions from a group of elderly Americans touring the site. Eventually we realized we had to get going to make our meeting with the boat which was meeting us at Gatun Locks, so we made our way down to the water at the mouth of the Chagres River for the ceremonial wheel dip into the Atlantic Ocean.

After ceremonial wheel dip in the Atlantic, Fort San Lorenzo in background
(local woman who was sure we were insane gringos) Brad, Vince, Roland, Steve, Perry

At about 9:30AM on January 12, 2009, with salt water dripping from our knobbies, we embarked on our journey. Immediately climbing a long, paved uphill, none of us but Roland was prepared for the amount of sweat that was streaming from our pores, our riding clothes already sopping wet. Going from sub-zero winter weather to the steamy equatorial heat hit us like a splitting maul. At the top, we rested and regrouped, and were startled by the thunderous roar of a howler monkey somewhere in the treetops nearby. The stifling heat and that monkey were loudly and irrefutably telling us, “you’re not in Kansas anymore! Wake up silly unicyclists, this is the jungle, for real.”

Even though this promised to be the easiest part of our expedition, the equatorial sun reflecting off the blacktop was crushing, and we were drinking from our camelbaks at a furious rate. We had a water purification pump for removing micro-organisms and replenishing our water supplies, but the only nearby water bodies were brackish. Our pump would therefore render only pure, salty water, so we only had one pack full of water each for this day’s ride. At one point we did a nice head-dunk in the ocean next to the road, cooling us off temporarily, but thirst was still the word of the day. We all soon ran out of water, and sent Marcos ahead with the van to find a store and buy us some more fluids.

The infinitely energetic Roland gallantly switched cycles with me, taking my slower 24-inch wheel and letting me ride his faster 29-incher. After a while of forging on through the sizzling heat, our mouths parched, we spied the Panama Canal and the end of the day’s ride shimmering in the distance. Brad got his first flat tire here, and around the same time, Marcos returned with water, Gatorade, and Coke and we all took a welcome rehydration break before spinning the final few kilometers to the canal. There we had a short wait as the oncoming traffic crossed the one-lane bridge across the lock, and then, not allowed to ride over, we pushed our unicycles across, marveling at the huge doors holding back the water of Lake Gatun.

Our next step was to wait for a pre-arranged boat ride to take us across Lake Gatun to the Smithsonian (STRI) complex on Barro Colorado Island (BCI), where we were to spend the night. Our boat driver picked us up and we cruised through the wide lake upstream of the Gatun Locks, past unimaginably huge ships. Viewed from water level in our tiny motorboat, the cargo ships, stacked high with giant containers, a couple car-carriers, and one passenger liner towered over us like a floating city of giant buildings. As we passed the various islands on the way to BCI, Roland, a catalog of knowledge, pointed some various exotic birds species flitting through the canopy.

Panama Canal/Lake Gatun boat ride from Gatun Locks to Barro Colorado Island (BCI)
Steve, Perry, Brad, Vince

Our female co-travelers had arranged to meet us at the island with our clothes and toothbrushes, and, as we approached, Laura came tearing down to the docks to photograph our disembarking, lest a minute of our journey remain undocumented. The community on BCI is made up exclusively of support staff and scientists studying the intensely diverse plants and animals on this protected rainforest island. The biologists are from all over the world and the many PhDs and post-docs working there made me, with only a four-year college degree, feel woefully undereducated.

Roland gave us a quick tour of the facilities, including our accommodations. Tourists may visit BCI, but not stay overnight, so this was another perk were enjoying due to being friends with Roland. We saw the pesky spider monkey that steals food off the balcony, and which the BCI people shoo away using a Super Soaker squirt gun, and also capuchin and howler monkeys, geckos, fishing bats, basilisk lizards and too many bird species to remember.

At dusk (we’re going into the jungle at night?!?) we walked to one of the canopy towers, and saw a tamandua, an anteater which Roland says was a lucky sighting as it’s a fairly shy animal. The tower was made of small scaffolding, a square of maybe only two meters on a side, and the endless stairs inside rose about 150 dizzying feet above the forest floor, to just above the tops of the trees. We drank a beer and watched birds and monkeys in the canopy, and ships passing through the canal as the sun set over the jungle. Wow.

Climbing Roland's canopy tower on BCI

In my room that night two big geckos one large beetle were running around on the walls. The larger of the geckos began chasing the beetle, but stopped when it saw that the beetle was two large to prey on. I was somewhat uneasy falling asleep that night.

We got an early breakfast at the BCI cafeteria, made some sandwiches for the upcoming day’s ride, and headed down to meet our boat driver at the docks. As I was rolling my unicycle down to the docks, I felt something kind of prickly under the seat. When I realized it was moving I let out a manly, little girl scream and dropped the unicycle like it was on fire. Out from under the seat fell a plum-sized beetle. I heard laughing in front of me and Roland confessed to putting the huge bug there. Thanks a lot pal.

I was already keyed up because today was the first real meat of the adventure, actual jungle route-finding with a no-nonsense, for-keeps overtone to it. Roland had heard that there was a path down the middle of the Buena Vista peninsula, but neither he nor the boat driver knew where the trail started. We motored into a cove, looking for a possible clearing from which to enter the woods.

“A qui, a qui”, (here, here), shouted Roland, pointing to the shore at a place that looked to me just as choked with dense foliage as any other spot. Sure enough, though, as the boat maneuvered into position, I did see a faint trail into the forest. “I want to go home”, I bravely said, just before we leaped off the bow of the boat. We thanked the boat drivers, handed them commemorative t-shirts printed for just such an occasion, and turned away from the water, (and away from our last link with civilization), and mounted our KH munis.

A short bout of pedaling brought us to a slightly more obvious trail, onto which, at the suggestion of our cartographer, Brad, we turned left. This was easier to ride on and we made good progress until, “wait a minute, we’re going the wrong way.” Turning around we made equally good progress back the way we’d come, though I was no longer brimming with the confidence I’d shown earlier with my “I want to go home” plea. In any case, we were moving well now, supposedly in the right direction, when Roland stopped with a shout of “FLAT!” Sticking out of his tire was a thorn the size and shape of a railroad spike. He plucked it out and we all gathered around and helped patch and re-inflate the tube.

Back rolling again, the trail begin to rise and fall, and we began to relay the information back and forth whenever we spied thorns, spiked vines, spiny palms, or any other flora with tire-flattening potential. We lost the trail a couple of times here on Buena Vista peninsula, often because of a downed tree or two. Due the lush growth here in the rainforest, it wasn’t always easy to reacquire it, and, each time, while I was busy seeing my life pass before my eyes, Roland would coolly thrash around and save us once more by finding the trail again.

Then we really lost the trail. Consulting Brad’s GPS for direction, we pushed through undergrowth in a generally northeast direction (though non-intuitive, this was the heading this part of the ride had to go) until we came to a break in the trees at what looked like a power-line right-of-way. It was not, in fact, a power-line, but a sightline cut through the jungle during the building of the Panama Canal. Maybe 100 yards away, on the other side of this sightline, resumed the jungle. As I once again began mentally writing out my last will and testament, Roland climbed up a tree to scout our path.

“Steve, there should be a trail between the short grass and the higher grass. Walk out there and see.” Right. Valiantly setting aside my vow to never be the lead man of the party, I pushed my wheel ahead of me to flatten what I could of the “shorter” grass and waded out into the deep meadow. Silently questioning how 6-foot deep grass could be called “short”, I was foolishly reassuring myself that there were no dangerous forms of life crawling under the opaque vegetation around me. When I reached the taller grass, at least ten feet tall, the first thing I noticed was the conspicuous absence of a path. Maybe there should be, but there wasn’t, which, once again reaffirmed my feelings that this would be the last day I would spend on this earth.

At least now my brothers-in-doom were behind me as Roland assured us, now descending from his arboreal perch, that the path would continue “just a bit further on”. In a single file line we crossed the field to a steep ravine at the edge of the jungle. Roland left his unicycle with us and told us to wait while he crashed down the slope, jumped across the stream, and climbed the next hill, disappearing from view in search of a path.

Perry, Brad, Vince and I spent the next few minutes looking at each other, and I felt like Frodo, who says to Sam as Mt. Doom is erupting, “I’m glad you are here with me, Sam, here at the end of all things.” But then, as seemingly miraculously as the eagles saving those hobbits, came Roland’s muffled shout from the top of the rise, “Found it!” We were dazed by our new lease on life, and I picked up my cycle and Roland’s and pushed into the forest, climbing up to rejoin him.

Which way? That way...no, wait, that way!

Sure enough, as unlikely as it seemed, there was another path. We re-mounted and began riding the increasingly hilly terrain for a good while, and eventually rode to a “T”. Choosing the more obvious easterly direction we were treated to a good kilometer of fast, twisty downhill, at which point the trail ended at the water. The good news was we could see the railroad track, which was the first major objective of the day. The bad news, however, was a bit more plentiful.

First bad news: though we could see the railroad, we couldn’t get to it from here, at least not without swimming through crocodile-infested Lake Gatun. Second bad news: Perry’s wheel was dead flat. We found a hole in the tube, patched it, and as we pumped it up, we realized that, though the tiny air pump I was carrying worked fine, it took something around 400 pumps to fill the damn tire, which was somewhat fatiguing for the pumping arm. We took turns doing 100 pumps each into Perry’s tire, and it immediately went flat again. We found another hole, part two of what was obviously a pinch-flat (a flat caused when a soft tube gets pinched between the rim and a rock or log). After more patching and pumping, we turned around, due to the first bad news, and started back up the long hill we’d just flown down. Perry soon realized that his tire was still not holding air and this time we found a thorn in his tire. We eventually surmised that he’d gotten the thorn first, and as the tube was losing air, he’d then gotten the pinch-flat.

Fixing a flat tire. Note the spiny palm on the ground in front.

Perry’s triple flat tire fixed, we resumed climbing up the hill that had been our wrong turn. Since the trail was covered with leaves and the ascent was fairly steep, we had to shoulder our unis in shame and hike back up, silently begging forgiveness from our benefactor Kris Holm. This was far from the last time we would be carrying or pushing our cycles, instead of riding them.

After the hot, arduous uphill, we regained the “T” in the trail, with no option but to try the direction we’d not yet taken, though it seemed to be going southwest, which was not the right way. Riding again now, the single-track trail obliged by curving back to a more agreeable easterly heading and we enjoyed another long downhill run plunging us back toward water level. Our energy level was boosted a bit by the knowledge that we were approaching the railroad tracks, across which there was rumored to be an ATV trail offering supposedly easier riding than we’d had up until now.

Then we lost the trail. Again. This time we forced our way eastward through the dense undergrowth by compass heading. Climbing over and under logs and down into and up out of a muddy ravine, we came at last to a very steep embankment and, wondrously, emerged blinking into the sunshine of the Panama Railroad. Vince, our most skilled rider, (in fact he was in Cirque du Soleil) practiced riding a “skinny”, in this case a rail of the tracks. It was a calming distraction, as we fretted about finding our way through our next section of jungle, to see him, without a care in the world, arms out, balancing on that metal rail no wider than his tire.

Roland had vague directions to the ATV trail, and, as he went off to find it, the rest of us reapplied sunscreen, then scrambled down the bank to refill our now-empty water packs, pumping from a shallow stream running under the tracks. We had to trust that the water pump, which, with cruel irony, required the exact same arm motion as did the tire pump, was at least doing its job removing micro-organisms. The water tasted warm and swampy, but we had no choice at that point.

Water packs refilled, we climbed back up to see Roland returning, reporting that he wasn’t sure but he may have found the ATV trail. A train zoomed by from which we had a fleeting glimpse of a face peering out a window, completely perplexed by our waving unicycles at him, then we went off to see if we could continue our journey on what Roland thought might be the path. Once again, Roland plunged into the jungle at a spot which looked utterly identical to any other, and climbed up another steep hill leading east and away from the tracks.

Sure enough, he uncannily found the trail, or at least a trail which seemed to be heading our intended direction, so we mounted up once again and resumed our travel. This new path was wider and we were able to ride continuously, though now that we’d been riding about four hours, we were walking more of the uphills. The more open path also presented us with several wildlife sightings. Riding at the front, I caught a glimpse of a peccary, a furry wild pig. Vince and Roland rode past a fat, brown snake which shot into the bushes with alarming speed, and Roland pointed out a long nest of azteca ants hanging from a tree branch. These ants feed on secretions from the tree’s leaves, and they, in turn, protect the tree from destructive insects and vines. It seemed every new species we learned about was more fascinating that the last.

Frequently, we’d look down and see a green stream of thousands of leaf-cutter ants carrying bits of leaves to their nests, where they make compost piles to farm and eat the fungus that grows. The stream of ants also clears all the debris in a three or four-inch wide path and many times we were treated to a smooth, deserted single-track down the middle of our ATV trail, made by these industrious ants at some time in the past. We grew to love these little creatures, and always hopped over their active trails when possible.

After a couple hours on this trail, we came out on a rough dirt road, which Roland identified as Pipeline Road, another key objective of today’s ride. Though Roland never seemed to be worried (after all his research sometimes involves tracking wildlife through the forest at night without a trail), the rest of us were relieved at this sign of civilization. Now having ridden and hiked for six hours, we took a well deserved break before heading southeast on Pipeline.

Taking a break upon reaching Pipeline Road after 6 hours of jungle thrashing

After a fast downhill, we came to an old structure and a dammed stream called Agua Salud. Roland said, “I’ve got good news and bad news.” The good news was he knew where on the road we were, but the bad news was we still had 18 kilometers of rough, hilly dirt road to get back to Gamboa. More good news, however, was that we could swim here. The water was nice and cool as we submerged our overheated bodies, and I was delighted to discover that the fish swimming here were cichlids, a type of tropical fish which I used to keep in an aquarium. Here we also saw a nearly hand-sized spider on the dam wall, which Roland identified as a fishing spider. Great, as long as it doesn’t like the taste of cyclists.

Refreshing and refilling at Agua Salud

Our pumping muscles got another workout as we refilled our water packs, and we got ready for the long, final stretch of today’s ride. Unfortunately, Brad was experiencing the blinking lights he knows to be an onset of a migraine, so he started walking down the road to get a head start. The rest of us mounted up and rode over the Agua Salud on a very rickety bridge, with large spaces between its horizontal slats, giving a thrilling sense of vertigo.

The hills on Pipeline Road were long and frequent. Of course we got some return on our climbing investments in the form of several lengthy descents, though those of you who understand unicycles realize we can’t coast because our pedals run in lockstep with the wheel. Our speed on downhills, therefore, is limited to how fast we can spin our pedals, and we can’t just rest, but must use our leg muscles to control our speed. Down one of these hills, I experienced what is known in cycling as a “pedal bite”, in this case the worst I’ve ever had. The pedals on our munis have small metal bits sticking up to prevent our shoes from slipping around, but a bump in the road shook my right foot off the pedal and, trying to run out of it, my foot planted in the dirt in front of the pedal, which came around and scored my lower calf with a handful of deep, parallel gouges. The jungle insects feasted annoyingly on my blood that day.

At this point, many hours into a hard day of muni, we were all dealing with various stages of exhaustion, and only Roland and sometimes Vince were really trying to ride the big uphills. Brad was walking, quietly dealing with his migraine, Perry was just about cooked, and I was somewhere in between. Making the long walk to the top of one of the big hills, Perry showed just how tired he was by lying down on the road and claiming that he was now considering camping out instead of trying to finish the ride. Camping in the tropical jungle with no tent and little food seemed insane to me, and Perry’s actually considering it as a viable alternative demonstrated more vividly than words that he had hit the wall.

I dug deep, rode on ahead, and caught up to Roland and Vince where’d they’d stopped to wait for the rest of us. I relayed to them Perry’s condition and we discussed our options. Perry is the biggest guy of our group and getting him far enough down the road under his own power, hopefully to a place where a car could drive in to meet us, was the only thing to be done.

Roland’s friend Christian Ziegler, incidentally a world famous nature photographer, had planned to drive up Pipeline Road as far as he could to take pictures of us, and Roland had taken advantage of cell phone coverage on a previous hilltop to let him know we were on our way. Luckily, after cajoling Perry a few more kilometers, we saw Christian’s truck coming, a welcome sight for all of us. Christian and two friends, Adam and Golgi, had courageously driven through some sketchy parts of the road and made their way pretty deep into the woods. The relief we felt huge, and we gratefully chugged the cold Gatorade and Coca-cola they’d brought for us, a pleasant change from the swamp-water we’d been living on for the past several hours. Perry jumped into their pickup truck-bed, as did Brad, now coming down from the worst of his headache.

Meanwhile, Christian wanted to take some pictures of us riding over the various bridges, so we went back and re-rode them a few times while he snapped what seemed like hundreds of pictures on each pass. Eventually I became too tired to re-ride the bridges, so I continued cycling while Christian snapped more shots of Roland and Vince. Sometimes Perry and Brad jumped out of the truck and rode for the photo shoots, but I just wanted to be done at that point and steadily gnawed away at the distance separating us from the day’s journey’s end.

Christian must have taken a lot of pictures, because, riding ahead, I was alone for quite a while, spinning as fast as could manage, semi-consciously registering the kilometer markers as I passed them. I realized I was becoming accustomed to the jungle, but I did entertain brief worries that I was quite exposed if any of the larger denizens of this jungle, like cougars or jaguars, decided I looked like food. My mind wandered through vague plans about how I’d have to use my trusty KH24 unicycle to fend them off, should it come to that.

Eventually the truck caught up with me and drove by, Perry informing me that it was nice and comfy in the pickup bed, then Vince and Roland caught me a while later. Pipeline Road seemed to stretch on endlessly and I vowed to accept a ride once I reached the end of it, rather than pedal the couple remaining paved kilometers to the house. Marcos, Laura, Aissa and Michelle drove up in the van just as we all got to the end of the dirt road. I threw my unicycle in the van and chugged a quart of Gatorade, and no amount of cajoling by Roland could convince me to keep riding. I was hammered.

Back at the house, Perry got a second wind and cooked up some pasta for everybody. I was starving, but also felt a nasty heartburn from exercising all day in the heat. Still, I managed to force down a bunch of food and drink copious amounts of water before crashing hard into my bed. No worries of crawling bugs kept me up that night. I slept like I was dead.

The next morning, we packed up and rode down to the nearby shore of the Chagres River, where we were to get a boat ride across from the local Embera Indians, whose village is on the river near the Gamboa Resort. Across the river is where the actual Camino de Cruces began, at a place called Venta de Cruces, and Christian was going to cross with us to photograph our starting the historic route. Our pre-arranged ride never showed up, but a group of Embera women happened by in their boat, a rectangular aluminum rig with a small motor belching acrid, oily smoke. Roland spoke with them and convinced them to take us across. We had budgeted cash for this crossing, and the 18-year old female pilot was more than happy to make some easy money from the crazy gringos.

We crossed the wide river, and edged into a narrow channel through the weeds on the far side, unloading our cycles, paying the woman cash and one of our commemorative t-shirts. Roland asked her to wait a few minutes and take Christian back across with her. On the shore we were now in Soberania National Park, and there was a big sign describing the history of the Camino de Cruces, along with a short set of crumbling rock stairs which Roland and Vince promptly began hopping up and dropping off. It was amazing to realize this staircase was constructed in the early 1500s. Christian took some excellent action photos on the steps, along with a great group shot of Team Personal Rollercoaster in front of the sign.

Group shot at Venta de Cruces, at the head of the Camino de Cruces
Perry, Vince, Steve, Roland Brad

Christian and Perry, who decided to take it easy today, returned on the boat, while Brad, Vince, Roland and I readied ourselves for the day’s journey. From the top of the stairs, as we started riding, we realized two things right away. One, down here in the swampy lowlands by the river, the mosquitoes were really bad, and two, the riding today was going to range from difficult to impossible.

The conquistadors employed thousands of slaves to pave the entire route with smooth, round river stones, with sizes ranging from softballs to soccer balls, a momentous amount of work. Over the centuries the stones have shifted and settled and we were trying to ride a constant, jumbled rock garden. Adding to that difficulty, the trees here in the wetter lowlands had dense and complex roots intertwined in and around the rocks, leaving absolutely no even ground for riding.

In addition, tens of thousands of mules were used to transport stolen gold from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The centuries of foot and hoof traffic wore down the path so that much of the Camino de Cruces runs through 15 and 20-foot deep canyon beaten into the jungle floor, the bottoms of which were no more than a foot or two wide. There were even particularly difficult sections of trail where historical markers pointed out deep, semi-fossilized hoof-prints where the mules followed each other, placing their hooves in the hole left by the animal in front of them.

At first, we tried to ride through some of these almost vertically walled, rock-garden paved canyons, punctuated with frequent downed trees, thick vines and other undergrowth, but it was essentially impossible. Especially because we all still felt considerable fatigue from the previous day’s ride, we soon gave up and shouldered our unis once more. Even hiking proved tremendously difficult, but our one consolation was that carrying unicycles through the tangled, rough terrain was many times easier than carrying bikes would have been. We feel it’s unlikely that our first cycle crossing of the Camino de Cruces will be one-upped by mountain bikers riding this tricky route.

Refilling water from a stream along the Camino de Cruces

We rode this route when we could, but we hiked a big portion of the ten kilometers this day, though we were more at ease with the relatively easy-to-follow route. There were more informative park signs and kilometer markers so we could measure our progress, a snail’s pace though it was. A couple of bushwhacks were required to navigate around piles of downed trees and brush, but we never had the uncertainties of the previous day.

I was here that I made my ill-fated grab of the spiny palm tree. I still have seven or eight spine-tips embedded in my right hand as I write this two weeks later. Regrouping a little while after the spiny palm incident I felt a sting on my leg. Expecting another of the day’s many mosquitoes, I was surprised to see a medium sized ant biting me. “Get out of there, Steve, those are army ants!” Whoa! I looked down to see that I was standing in a dense flow of the creatures, and jumped to the side quickly. We watched as they marched purposefully across our path, and Roland pointed out some nearby ant birds, which follow the army ants and eat all the insects dodging and fleeing the relentless ants, yet another marvel of this diverse, natural world.

The kilometers slowly crept by, and at the three kilometer mark we were surprised to see Marcos, who had hiked in to meet us. We rode and walked the remaining 3 km with Marcos filming us and soon reached the van, parked on Madden Road. We quickly determined that we were done for the day, both because we were quite tired, and because the trail had taken so long that there wasn’t enough daylight to consider doing the next 10 km section.

With a little more time, we were able to go back and relax a bit more than on the previous two evenings, and we drove, with cycles, over to the base of the Gamboa Resort’s Rainforest Canopy Tower, a huge structure at the top of a big hill near our house. The ramp leading to the top was long but gradual enough for us to ride all the way up, with Christian snapping photos of our ascent. At the top, we sprawled out on the deck, enjoying a few beers and a 360 degree view of the jungles below, the Chagres River, and the Panama Canal. As the sun set over the horizon, a nice breeze cooled us and kept the mosquitoes at bay as we chatted easily with several of Roland’s scientist friends who’d walked up to join us.

The tension that had consumed us earlier in the week, with all the uncertainties we’d faced, was gone. The last day’s ride had a ten kilometer trail which was more well known, and we’d paid a machete team to make sure it was open and ridable. The off-road section was to be followed by a series of roads which would take us through Panama City and down to the Pacific Ocean at the ruins of Panama Viejo National Monument. Our spirits were high and we allowed ourselves a little more partying that night.

The next morning Marcos drove us back to Madden Road, where we’d left off the previous day, and we found the trailhead, now a double-track, fairly easily. We started ascending immediately, and we climbed up and up for maybe two kilometers, probably the most vertical of any hill which we’d seen the whole week. Soon entering the Camino de Cruces National Park, we began noticing signs of recently chopped vegetation by our hired machete team the week before. This hill was barely ridable and we all rode and rested intermittently, except for Roland, who I’m pretty sure did the entire climb in one go.

What followed was a huge downhill, a total blast to ride except for one thing. Flat tires. The machete crew had done an awesome of clearing the way, but the leftover bamboo stumps poked up a couple inches and functioned as effective tire spikes, and the downed stalks of various thorny vines were also plentiful. Perry’s tire went flat first, we patched and pumped it up, then it flatted again, then Brad’s tire, then Roland’s in a nearly constant series of flats. The only ones who escaped flat tires that day, indeed, for the whole week, were Vince and I, both of us riding KH24s, with three-inch wide tires, with thicker rubber than the others’ KH29ers, and more air cushioning to absorb without puncturing. I’m sure I speak for the whole team when I recommend the KH24 muni as the goto rig for all your jungle riding needs. Other anti-flat tricks like tape or goop or extra thick tubes likely would have helped, but we didn’t think to try them.

Fixing one of a bazillion flat tires; Brad, Vince, Steve

Another problem with the freshly cut path was the potential to be impaled by a spike in the event of a wipe out. One fall I took sprawled me onto the ground in a full Superman-style lay-out, a couple inches from a stout, sharp four-inch stump which may not have killed me, but I’m sure a hospital stay would have ensued had I fallen onto it. Perry also had a thunderous fall, after which he lay on his back for a long moment, taking a mental inventory of his body. “Are you OK?”…“I’m not sure.” After a long, scary moment, he got to his feet, bruised but not broken, to our great relief.

There were no other big climbs this day, and the ten kilometers of trail were wide and easy, however what would have been a three hour ride took five hours instead, because of all the time we spent fixing flats. Toward the end of the trail, we met a park ranger who had come out to guide us the rest of the way to park headquarters. He led us through some narrow paths where the encroaching side vegetation enveloped us as we pushed our way through. Earlier in the week I’d been hesitant to push through plants like that, afraid of what bugs and spiders I might pick up by doing so. Now, I was way too tired and calloused to care.

We came out on a wide dirt road at a reforestation headquarters where we stopped to eat lunch, and the ranger with us prepared to mount his motorcycle that he’d apparently left there on his way to meet us. Vince and Roland rode on ahead to find cell phone coverage so we could do a promised radio interview with Public Radio International’s (PRI) “The World” show, while Brad, Perry and I worked on their inner tubes, which were still losing air. We pulled no less than three thorns out of Perry’s tire tread and one from Brad’s. After all that work, we were gravely disheartened to discover we still hadn’t solved the problems. Once again, I rode ahead to catch up to Vince and Roland and relay the bad news that Brad and Perry would be hoofing it out from then on.

Again, riding alone and mentally rehearsing my unicycle-wielding jaguar defense techniques, I was beginning to wear down from the heat of the nearly vertical noon-time sun. The trees opened up on my left to reveal a landfill of nearly infinite size and the road split in two, leaving me unsure as to which way to ride. There were four men sitting in the shade of a lone tree nearby, casually sharpening machetes, and I rode up and asked, “Chivo chivo?” which was the name of the town road at our destination. They immediately started speaking in supersonic Spanish, and I had to stop them, saying “No hablo ingles.”

I repeated my question, “Chivo chivo?” They nodded and signaled straight ahead, to my relief, because that is the way I thought I needed to go. But without stopping they then signaled a left and another left, leaving me wallowing in a sweltering pool of sweat and uncertainty. I decided to wait for the ranger and my two walking teammates.

In a few minutes our ranger, who spoke less English than I spoke Spanish, rode up on his motorbike. “Chivo chivo?” I asked him. He signaled straight ahead, without the left-hand turns that the machete sharpeners had indicated. Whew. I sucked the last of my water out of my pack, mounted up and rode off. I began seeing easily identifiable unicycle tracks in the dirt road, so I was reassured of being on the right track, and after an unbelievably hot few kilometers, I saw Roland and Vince sitting at a shady spot ahead of me.

I reached them and begged some water from Roland, who never seemed to run out. They had reached the PRI folks on Roland’s phone, and were waiting here in the cell coverage zone for an interview to commence in fifteen minutes. Very soon, to our delight, Marcos drove up the road to meet us and we sent him onward to pick up Perry and Brad. Brad rode up, having finally fixed his flat tire and then the ranger reached us and Marcos returned with Perry inside the van, still working on his inner tube.

Marcos, as usual, brought us fluids and some Pringles lime-flavored potato chips, which may sound disgusting, but to which we were all now addicted, probably because of their high salt content. PRI called and did a lengthy interview, speaking to each of us, and at the end we all had to gather around the cell phone and say together “the answer to today’s geo-quiz is Camino de Cruces”. I remember it very clearly because they made us say it five or six times until we got it perfect.

Photo of the team with our designated ranger/guide: Roland, Brad, ranger dude, Steve, Perry, Vince

We came quickly to the end of the dirt road at the park headquarters and refilled our water packs from a faucet instead of pumping from a nasty jungle stream. We made Vince do a trick demonstration for the park rangers and we caught sight of a coati climbing a nearby tree. Marcos drove Perry, still fixing his tire, to a pizza place in town where we were to meet for lunch. Vince, Brad, Roland, and I rode down some back roads, then some busy roads, past where we had seen the sloth days earlier, and into Panama City. I was feeling terrible heartburn from overheated exertion and was close to vomiting as we wove through a military base and made our way into the city. The afternoon sun was scorching our right sides, and my right ear felt like it was literally on fire. I’m sure I had a fever at that point, and I was completely toasted, planning on riding in the van with Marcos the rest of the way.

Roland, however, still fresh as a daisy, got me some Alka Seltzer from the grocery store, and that and about a gallon of cold water had me fixed up enough to eat and feel a thousand percent better. We spent two hours in the blessedly cool air conditioning of the restaurant waiting for the mid-day heat to relent. We polished off two large pizzas, one plain and one “Don Alberto”, which had more toppings than I’ve ever seen, and we chugged giant Coca-Colas and many pitchers of ice water. Then all of us, Perry with a new inner tube, and even me, Mr. Heartburn, felt good enough to begin the final leg of our expedition. On to the Pacific!

Again, Roland switched unis with me, letting me ride the more roadworthy KH29 and taking the slower KH24 trail machine for himself. Our route took highway shoulders and busy roads as we made our way towards downtown Panama. Soon, we were in the thick of city traffic and the contrast between this and the jungle riding was stark. The cries of howler monkeys were replaced by the engine breaking of large trucks, the soothing calls of birds were replaced by the honking of horns, and the sweet smells of jungle flowers became a fleeting memory as we rode into the heart of the busy downtown.

The first hour of riding through the city was quite fun. People whooped, hollered, gawked, and waved as we rode past, and I repeated the word “Hola” several hundred times. We’re certain this scene has never before played out in Panama City. The remaining ride through the city was a chore. Traffic was intense, the exhaust was thick, and our legs were fatigued, but the Pacific was in sight and Panama Viejo was getting closer.

The last leg of the ride was stretching longer and longer, and we rode most of the length of the entire city, our obstacles now frequent curbs and crowds of people waiting at bus stops. Perry took a fall where his foot got caught between the spokes and his crank, leaving deep gashes on both sides of his ankle, but he bravely continued his pedaling. Finally the crumbling ruins of Panama Viejo came into view and the realization sunk in that we’d completed something never done before. It was an emotional finish.

Somewhere around 7:30pm on Thursday evening, January 15, 2009, we dipped our wheels into the Pacific Ocean and popped a bottle of champagne to celebrate the completion of our epic trek as the planet Jupiter smiled down upon us from the darkening skies. Perry essentially collapsed from exhaustion but rallied to celebrate with the rest of the team as Marcos captured the moment on video. We five riders of Team Personal Rollercoaster had completed our proposed ocean-to-ocean unicycle expedition through the jungles of Panama. It was time for a beer and quiet reflection. We all sat on the wall of some ruins and let the memories of the past four days sink in.

All done! At Panama Viejo w/Champagne; Roland, Brad, Vince, Steve, Perry

We had a big feast at another open-air restaurant, where the other clientele seemed to discreetly request tables far from our smelly, noisy party, and then we returned to our house in Gamboa. We took it easy the next couple days, sightseeing, sending emails, updating our blog and playing around on Vince’s slackline in the backyard. The flights back home experienced some delays, and my dinner time arrival in Albany pushed all the way back to 2AM.

Again, our team’s endless gratitude goes out to Kris Holm, the Hoover family, Unicycle.com, and Horny Toad Clothing for the generous grants and wholesale equipment, and to STRI for logistical assistance of boat rides and accommodations on BCI. Also, our team thanks Christian Zeigler, a world class photographer and a world class dude. His pictures of us far exceed the quality of anything we could have managed ourselves. Of course, we could never have done our ride if not for the help of Marcos Garcia, our hired hand, driver, hero, and major goto guy. Perry, Brad, Vince, and I also owe huge thanks to Roland for all the Panama legwork before our trip, the incredibly rich learning experience about the amazing biodiversity of the tropical rainforest, and saving our skins repeatedly with his cool-headed route-finding in the untracked jungle. We could never have done it without him.