OUR VERY EXOTIC MID-LIFE CRISIS
Sienna Miller’s sister sold up her family’s idyllic cottage for a wild new life (and tent) in the Panama wilderness. The result? She’ll never moan about the glories of England again!
AN AEROPLANE has just flown overhead and the sound of the whirring engines makes me shudder. I am instantly transported back to the moment, a month ago, when I finally touched down on British soil after nearly a year of living supposedly wild and free in the jungles of Panama.
It is surely the middle-class dreamer’s ultimate fantasy. To escape the ‘hamster wheel’ and live a simple life.
Your children frolic naked on white sands while you, their carefree and liberated parents, smile on, with your deep, sun-baked tans and beaded slippers glinting in the late-afternoon sun, white muslin billowing in the breeze.
But life in the wilderness wasn’t exactly a walk in the park.
For a start, the sand was black, there were no beaded slippers and the kids couldn’t be naked because locals frown upon naturist behaviour. They swim fully clothed, so you feel a bit stupid strolling in the surf in your tiny two-piece.
I should have known, when my nature-loving husband Nik suggested we sell our beautiful fivebedroom Cotswold farmhouse and decamp to a tent in Panama with our three children and a dog, that it wasn’t the world’s brightest idea.
But if you set the allure of tropical beaches, freedom and South American sunsets against gloomy Britain, a serious bout of postnatal depression and major business woes, what would you do? We chose escape.
My husband’s father had long harboured a dream to start a deepsea fishing company in his retirement, and so now my wild husband’s feet began to itch. Could this be the moment when he could finally realise his dreams of living ‘off grid’ and have the simple life he so craved but could never get anywhere near with his consumerist, London-loving wife constantly pull- ing on the reins? I was at rock bottom so was prepared to do anything at that point as long as it didn’t involve thinking too much.
So last August, Nik and I sold our house, packed our lives in to a storage unit and I waved him and our eight-year-old son Moses off, to ‘set things up’ in Panama, where his father was living.
Meanwhile, I travelled around visiting friends and family with our two girls Lyra, five, and Bali, 18 months – all the time trying very hard not to cry. Lyra kept saying: ‘I just want to go home,’ which broke my heart.
But we soldiered on, and, at 4am on September 12, my mother drove us to the airport to see us off. I had an awful lot of luggage. The finality of leaving hit me quite hard and I ended up bringing ridiculous things like the kitchen scissors.
When we arrived at Nik’s father’s house it turned out that they weren’t ready for us. We spent our first nine weeks living in a Coleman family tent just like you’d find on a Norfolk campsite. In the rainy season. With three children. In the middle of nowhere.
I cried solidly for the first week. We ate a lot of pasta with packet sauce from the local shop and fish barbecued to splinters from the local cantina (which served said fish during the day and blasted twangy Panamanian pop all night, right in front of our tent).
The children cried, I cried. Home was now a stretch of canvas, the shower was a hosepipe rigged up to an old tarpaulin and the kitchen was a borrowed corner in Nik’s dad’s house.
And then I realised it was time to sink or swim. To stop wallowing in memories of Sunday roasts around our farmhouse kitchen table, art galleries and manicures: I had to get a grip.
With the help of a new cabin to live in (complete with wi-fi), I got creative. The Panamanian bread was inedible – it would sit on the shop shelf for four months and not decompose one iota, so I learned to make my own from YouTube. I started butchering chickens and would make medieval stews. I also had to learn how to teach.
We had decided to home school our oldest two, so every day started at 5.30am before the 37C heat kicked in.
I had arrived with literally hundreds of books and dreams of teaching my babies maths using shells on the beach. In reality, we never did a full school day because the heat was so intense, but we wrote endless stories, practised multiplication tables every day, and taught Lyra to sew. By February, we decided that Moses needed to see children his own age, so we enrolled him in a village school.
It was a very basic building with a tin roof. Lessons started at 7.30am with a salute to the Panamanian flag and a rendition of the national anthem. It was crazy but worth it, because he is now fluent in Spanish.
But however hard I tried to embrace the palm-fringed paradise that I had hoped Panama would be, it was tough.
Nik, meanwhile, has always been way more adventurous and in February decided to introduce me to the ways of the high seas. He was taking us on an adventure to Coiba Island, the site of an ex-prison, surrounded by sharks.
We stepped one morning into a perfect Robinson Crusoe moment; bleached-white sand, conch shells, a view untouched and tropically perfect. The next day we sailed off to see the old prison. Manta rays were swimming past, it was like being in a David Attenborough movie. And then my son’s cap blew off into the sea.
Moses is his father’s son, and he was determined to retrieve it himself, standing at the stern and reaching into the water as Nik reversed the boat. But Moses couldn’t reach, and instead of just shouting: ‘I missed, Dad!’ he jumped in, as we continued reversing.
I screamed as Moses disappeared
under the boat and Nik dived in after him. It was the longest 20 seconds of my life. This was sharkinfested water for Christ’s sake. Then Moses appeared 8ft in front of the boat, blood billowing into the water.
I dived in and swam towards him as he screamed: ‘Mum, my leg!’ He had caught the propeller, gashing calf and ankle to the bone. Thank God there were police on the island. They got us onto a speedboat and raced us to the local hospital where a Frankenstein-esque doctor casually said: ‘Don’t worry I can sew him up,’ as my son turned whiter and whiter. The next day we took him up to Panama City where, after four hours under general anaesthetic, he was properly repaired.
Then there was the time I crashed the car, skidding off a steep track through hedges, trees and i nto a ditch. As I screamed, Lyra said: ‘That was fun, Mummy. Can we do it again?’ And the time the doctor tried to give Bali an anaesthetic, just to put her pulled elbow back in its socket. And the time I stepped on a scorpion.
Was all this enough to put me off? I certainly found every excuse to escape. For my mum’s 70th birthday Sienna flew us both to Le Sirenuse, an exquisite boutique hotel on the Amalfi Coast of Italy.
The contrast between the Egyptian cotton sheets, room service and the insect-infested tent where I now lived was stark to say the least.
But there were also moments of magic, such as on Moses’s ninth birthday when we took his friends to a remote waterfall and they paddled around on kayaks with howler monkeys jumping over the gorges above their heads. I don’t think Lyra’s sixth at a local leisure centre will come anywhere close.
Life in Panama was slowly improving. We had found out about a surf town, Venao, an hour away from our wilderness home that had hotels and a yoga centre. I’ve always been a fan of a shoulder stand so off we went on the hunt for like-minded locals.
Later I was enjoying the almost forgotten luxury of a cafe coffee when a child whizzed past on a skateboard and I heard him say to the waiter: ‘Hey, could I get a Coke?’ in a New York twang. I grabbed my son and said: ‘Moses! That child is speaking English. Talk to him!’ Moses did not oblige so I grabbed the boy and said: ‘You speak English!’ He looked at me as if I was mad. And then in walked his mother – and I was saved. From that moment Lowry Reinauer became my soul sister. She and her family had moved to Panama the same week as us but she had sensibly gone on a reconnaissance mission the year before and found a house to rent and some decent restaurants.
Together we drank pina coladas and took our children exploring, discovering everything from the exquisite local waterfalls to the drive-thru McDonald’s two hours away which housed a soft-play centre. We do not frequent McDonald’s in our dayto-day English life but, believe me, there it was like gourmet food.
Meanwhile Nik joined forces with Fred Lacoste, a glorious French man who has lived in Panama with his family for ten years, and they started an adventure tours company ( islacanasmarina.com).
They take people to remote waterfalls, trekking in the Cerro Hoya national park, sailing to Coiba, horse-riding along unspoilt rivers and ferry surfers to remote spots. Nik was in his element. I, however, I was ready for my home comforts.
A year away from the civilised world is fine, but I could see my children turning into little Tarzans. The agony of missing my family and friends also really gnawed at my soul. Sienna and I have spent periods of time apart in life because of her work, but we have never had such long bouts with no communication and I felt like a limb was missing. And so last month we came back.
Now, sitting in my little rented house in Stroud, Gloucestershire, I realise I have learned a very simple lesson. I appreciate everything.
Never again will I be cynical about England, our politics and the nanny state. Yes, I miss my big farmhouse, but we were living beyond our means. This is a better way to be.
In Panama, it was a constant struggle for survival. Every day, you were battling the elements. Extreme heat and rain with constant power failure really pushed us to the edge.
Yet I don’t regret a single minute of it. My anxiety has eased, I am closer to my children than ever and I have come back to work with a fighting spirit.
There is nothing more empowering than pulling yourself out of the muck to emerge shiny and new with eyes open wide in to the glorious British sunshine, strawberry firmly between teeth and big fat grin on face. It’s good to be home.
Savannah’s husband Nik now runs Azuero Adventures Panama.