Darién, 2008: Hunting and Village Life With the Emberá

The Sambú River

Long before there was a farm in Boquete, there was the Darién — Panama’s wildest, least-touched province, where the road simply stops and the rivers take over. In 2008, I travelled up the Sambú River by piragua, the dugout canoes poled by hand through currents and shallow rapids, into the territory of the Emberá.

The Emberá have lived along the Sambú, the Chucunaque, and the Tuira rivers for generations, in villages of stilted, open-sided huts that catch every breath of river air. I wasn’t there as a tourist passing through for an afternoon. I was there because I could keep up — and in the jungle, that changes everything.

Embedded in an Emberá Hunt

At the time, I was in serious physical training — the kind that has you covering 40 kilometres a day, on mountain trails, through jungle, always outdoors, always wild. It’s not a boast so much as a fact that mattered: it’s what let me follow the Emberá hunters at their own pace, and their pace is fast. They don’t walk the forest so much as read it, moving at a near-run over roots and rock, tracking animals most outsiders would never even notice had passed.

Wild peccary — jungle pigs — was the prize we were after, and when a hunt succeeds, it isn’t kept by the hunter alone. Among the Emberá, a peccary or any large animal is shared across the whole village: every family gets a portion, cooked the same evening over open fire. Coming back into the village with the men who’d made that happen, and being handed a share of it myself, is still one of the most honest welcomes I’ve ever received anywhere.

Life in the Village

What stayed with me wasn’t just the hunt — it was everything around it. Days spent in the open-air kitchens, up on stilts above the ground, where the older women ran the household with total authority. Evenings around the fire. Children, dogs, and hammocks everywhere. Nobody explained the rhythm of the place to me; you simply had to fall into step with it, the same way you’d fallen into step on the trail.

That’s the part I still carry into the farm today: nature doesn’t perform for visitors, and neither do the people who actually live inside it. You have to arrive on its terms. Boquete is a gentler forest than the Darién, but the philosophy is the same one I first understood on the Sambú River — earn the trail, and the rest opens up on its own.

Hiking from Wild on the Farm → Reserve your stay →

The Hunt

Every photo from the river and the hunt.

Village Life & Hiking

Every photo from the village and the trail.