What happened to the dream of the Pan-American highway?
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It probably doesn't really count, but via OpenStreetMap I found that they have a joint military base that crosses their border.
Everything's airlifted in, but on the photo in this article it looks like they've got at least a couple of ground vehicles there, and presumably tracks crossing the border: https://www.critica.com.pa/sucesos/no-existe-ninguna-base-mi...
More surprising to me is that on the Atlantic coast there's small towns on either side of the border seemingly without a road connection to other adjacent towns in their respective countries, as well as no cross-border connection (but there's a short hiking route): https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/8.6626/-77.3683
So it's not only an issue of crossing the swampland of the greater gap itself, but also the general underdevelopment of these countries.
Northern South America has some incredible challenges when in comes to terrain in general. The former columnist on Latin America at the Economist left it as his final thesis that this fact explains why the region is not more rich, despite a wealth of natural resources:
https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2022/12/08/latin-amer...
If one has ever been on the road between Villavicencio and Bogotá or passed through Tungurahua to Pastaza in Ecuador they can appreciate the difficulties that were overcome to build those roads. The rough terrain is one reason why less than 50 miles from modern cities in Ecuador there are still uncontacted native people. Given this northern South American baseline, if someone who knows the area says the terrain is unforgiving it is unforgiving.
Colombia has parts that remind you of Miami. I guess the drug money had to go somewhere :-) But Colombia IS an amazing place. Its culture, people, history, food and extremely diverse climate, it just overwhelms you. From the Caribbean, to the mountains to the Amazon, there are few places in the world with such a diverse climate. Medellin is the city of eternal spring. And Bogota, the district of Candelaria, I always found it a magical place. But I think nobody likes Bogota except of me.
T-Shirts worn by the tourist information: "Colombia, the only risk is that you want to stay"
Oddly when I speak to Colombians, they refute both of these warnings every time. I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing to downplay danger or discomfort, but those are #1 on my travel priority list.
It's just a practical bias. You see this everywhere on Earth.
Natives aren't the victims of the crimes alleged, so since they don't see it, they assume it's not actually happening as often as reported.
For example, #2-- I've heard the same about Brazil, then heard the denials by Brazilians, and shortly after that there was that tourist couple who got murdered when their GPS routed them through a slum.
Tourists anywhere are conspicuous, vulnerable and lucrative prey. The #1 travel safety advice anywhere is never letting yourself appear lost or confused. Hence, the advice to only travel off-course with a local you trust.
Like most of Latin America the very poor areas are beyond anything you’re likely to see in the US but unless you’re the kind of person who’s also afraid of Miami or New York City you’d have nothing to worry about.
Regarding prostitution in Colombia, it's legalized since 2016, which may explain its greater visibility.
Colombia's major exports are commodities; while tourism has grown, it's not the primary export.
Recommended, rafting in the jungle. Loved it: https://expeditioncolombia.com/tours/rafting/rafting-day-tri...
They had this long time ago, they now have this again. This is mainly caused by poor Venezuelan immigrants.
#1 on my travel priority list.
Possibly. But I think we traveled in very different places. Forget Somalia, try to travel in Venezuela (hint: Dont!)
The Gotthard tunnel was completed in 1882, after 11 years of construction. And that was with the incentive of linking northern and southeastern Europe!
Columbia declared independence in 1810.
So it's not surprising that a project of complexity that economically required European levels of industrialization hasn't been successful.
Hell, Venezuela's been struggling with the Puerto Cabello - Encrucijada link for how long now? And the Bárbula Tunnel is half the length of Gotthard and in a single country. https://tunnelbuilder.com/News/Puerto-Cabello-La-Encrucijada...
Note the contour lines: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/8.66221/-77.36813&laye...
The walking track is marked as steps on the Colombian side. It ascends about 50m in very roughly 100m distance, then descends equally steeply.
- there was a part of the city that was kind of fenced off for security purposes. that’s where all the hotels were. once outside of that area guns were everywhere. and you could tell there was a gun culture as every gun was modified.
- the locals were telling me to never go to the north of the country. apparently the people there were in the habit of kidnapping for ransom. there were also rumours of drug/gun trafficking.
I've been to Medellín several times, and stayed in some of the nicest and most popular hotels, as well as in various local neighborhoods. I never saw a fenced off part of the city.
> guns were everywhere
;)
regarding the "fenced off" hotel area, not sure what was happening, but it was known to the locals that that was the "safe tourist area". maybe it was a temporary thing? maybe some foreign/local politicians was staying/visiting? no idea. but there were checkpoints all around the hotel area.
Yeah, must have been.
What area were you staying in?
"People there" is likely an exageration. Illegal armed groups.
https://colombiareports.com/colombia-illegal-armed-groups-ma...
The FARC group goes back 50+ years and was inspired by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. There are still radicals who have not laid down their weapons or profit from drug trade or gold mining operations.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/25/farc-che-gueva...
This is also true of Newfoundland. There are many small fishng villages on "the Rock" with no road connections; the only link to the rest of the world is by sea.
(This is also true of many small villages in Alaska, whether on the coast or not, but there this is less surprising.)
>"Under" implies some ideal state of development
No, not necessarily "ideal". It simply implies there is an average or median level, with instances that are lower and instances that are higher.
>anything under that threshold is deficient
I think if you wanted a loaded term, you'd use something more like "development-deficient" and "development-abundant".
"Underdeveloped" doesn't mean "less than average development", it means "not and/or insufficiently industrialized", implying a problem to be solved.
[1] I saw it in person in Laos and also in this popular video https://fb.watch/nQ-Xvh9iLO/It seems appropriate to me to describe a slum with poor roads and power as underdeveloped, but weird to describe wilderness as underdeveloped. The former brings to mind philanthropic NGOs, the latter, villains from popular pro-environmentalism fiction.
It seems weird to me to refer to wilderness as "underdeveloped", but more because if it really is a wilderness then it should be undeveloped. If someone starts building things in it but few enough that the zone can be called "underdeveloped" then it's no longer the wilderness. In any case, what the original person said was that the country was underdeveloped. If there's not even a single road or rail between it and its neighbor, I'd say that's a fair assessment.
Reminds me of the parable of the fisherman and banker: https://joneytalks.medium.com/the-parable-of-the-mexican-fis...
The “under” connotes that it is less than it ought to be.
This is the same thing as an island in practice. Pretty common for people to live on islands.
Fun fact, the first successful motorcycle crossing took months of planning and multiple failed attempts, back in 1975.
[0] https://www.advpulse.com/adv-news/crossing-darien-gap-motorc...
This record stood until 1984 when Mercedes blew it away using a luxury car having 10X the purchase price of the lowly Comet.
For the 1965 Comet they went from the tip of South America to Fairbanks, Alaska. These were not ideal conditions.
The 1966 model was slightly upsized compared to other compact cars, and it outperformed all off-road vehicles in African safari testing.
It is a very common thing to do, takes about a week of paperwork and a friend that did it recently paid $1000 USD all in. It's important to note it will be a lot more expensive if your vehicle does not fit inside a 20 foot shipping container (or a 40 foot high cube if you share with someone else).
Note: It's the door height you need to check, which is lower than the actual container height.
I heard a rumour that before the 2014 soccer world cup in Brazil, the Brazilian government said they would pay for the road to be built if someone would step up and build it. Obviously it never happened (For context Brazil built a TON of roads through the jungle and what-not in the lead up to the world cup)
[1] http://theroadchoseme.com/shipping-across-the-darien-gap-pt-...
http://theroadchoseme.com/shipping-across-the-darien-gap-pt-...
I actually finished up the lap of Africa in 2019, then spend 18 months around Australia, and now I'm saving up for the next one :)
Pre-pandemic it was a dangerous place with a high risk of running into drug smugglers or just people who might kidnap you. Some would try and cross it on foot and a fair few of those were simply never seen again. The terrain is horrendous. Mud, mountains, many streams and rivers, thick jungle and often torrential rain [1].
Nowadays there are a lot of migrants that cross the Darien Gap. This should tell you something about how truly epsperate they are [2].
[1]: https://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/09/darien-gap-most-dan...
[2]: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/darien-gap-migration...
That alone might be sufficient explanation for the continued halting of development.
https://www.cfr.org/article/crossing-darien-gap-migrants-ris...
There, migrants decide to get off and spend some time in these towns. Primarily to recuperate after crossing the Darien Gap, but also to panhandle, and sometimes commit various petty crimes.
These small towns do not have the resources nor infrastructure to handle ~5k people per day passing through. There aren’t enough public toilets, police officers, ambulances, nor shelters to handle this volume of people.
I happen to live in one of these small towns, size ~2k people. It’s been very difficult to deal with. The government does nothing, so the townspeople are left trying to add some order to this chaos.
The level of human suffering is high. These people went through some serious shit in the Darien. This isn’t a humane process for anyone involved.
This situation has certainly added a con to the list, though it hasn’t changed the balance of the equation so far.
For me, the whole thing is more emotionally taxing than anything. Though it’s not that different from living in Manhattan in terms of the sadness you see every day.
Maybe 2-3 times the distance of the Chunnel, but doable for connecting two continents.
The article sites a lack of bedrock to use for bridges, that could be a blocker for a tunnel. Though I'm sure there's rock down there somewhere if you dig deep enough.
I'd like to see zip lines. The longest and highest capacity ever built. Carry cars and freight. It'd be an engineering stepping stone towards the tether for a space elevator.
tl;dw: the Darien Gap and U.S. interest in the potential for the Panama Canal were critical to Panama's goal of independence from Colombia. Today, neither wants to make it easier for Colombia to gain access to its former territory. The gap serves as a critical barrier to: 1. The drug trade; 2. People migrating to the north in hope of a better life; 3. Any adventurism on Colombia's part.
This phrasing seems off, and it seems like it's trying to invalidate the concept of a nation maintaining its borders. One could also justify murder as done "in hope of a better life", as if pursuing a better life justifies the means.
If the US could secure its southern border people would likely be much more open to a road right to it.
Do you...think there aren't roads next to the US-Mexican border?
We followed the Pan-Am most of the way. When we got to Panama, first we rode down south into the territory of the semi-autonomous Indians, the Guna Yala in the San Blas Islands. They charge a small toll to get in their territory.
Then we put our motorcycles onto dugout canoes and ferried onto a tiny island. You could walk clear across in about 5 minutes. They live on an archipelago of islands, and the women dressed traditionally, with piles of bracelets on their limbs. They had a sort of museum there with their own Flood myth, interestingly.
After a couple days our hope of a boat stopping by seemed unlikely, so we ferried back to land, rode back to Panama, and found a hostel run by a couple of Germans.
They contacted a British couple sailing around the world, who were happy to hoist our motorcycles on either side of their mast and take us to Colombia along with a few other couples also traveling, with a few stops at gorgeous Caribbean islands for snorkeling.
And that's how we crossed the Darien Gap!
Take a train from Tokyo to San Francisco... I think this project is inevitable. Not in my lifetime, but maybe someone's born before I die. It's a potentially 0kg C02 journey if built right and business class accommodations would probably be 1/10th the price of a plane trip and a heck of a lot faster than a boat.
The freight potential alone...
Let's do lowest possible speed and highest possible cost of an automobile road and we get something like 0.25 mph traffic with mangled bodies in crashed vehicles everywhere and tollbooths every 5 miles where everyone is forced to drive million dollar Bugattis.
Really, this is like someone in the 1970s claiming smart phones are impossible because you can't fit a rotary dial, satellite link, tape storage reel and a CRT in your pocket.
In it, customs officers went through the train like a ticket checker to check your passport as the train travels near jet speeds through the Russian forests.
That wasn't the plot of course, but it's part of the setting. The characters desperately cling to 19th century ideas of nationalism like small European countries still have a king even in a time where vast oceans no longer matter. There's a cadence problem with the emotional salience of our institutions and their relevance. This includes the personal.
All things start and end as ceremony and theater but somewhere in the middle, they become real.
So you wouldn't expect a road connection to be developed if it's super expensive given that this more efficient alternative already exists, and, well, the road connection is super expensive.
Remaining pristine areas will serve as nuclei for a new period of rewilding and healing the planet while we make smarter use of the spaces we have already colonized.
Perhaps they should develop some infrastructure, like roads or tunnels.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/21/world/americas/darien-gap...
This comment really belongs at the unfortunate juncture of privileged assumptions and geographical/geopolitical naivety.
The volume of people making the crossing doesn’t signal that it has somehow become less treacherous. All this shows is that the reward for crossing outweighs the risk of dying along the way - both of which are preferable to not attempting the cross (which is pretty bleak when you think about it).
> Perhaps they should develop some infrastructure, like roads or tunnels.
This is a very “thanks I’m cured” sort of statement that appears to be informed by nothing except your own lived experience in a place where terrain is mild and the political landscape is such that this is even possible.
If you have not seen this sort of terrain for yourself, it’s hard to imagine it. Miles and miles of stinking swampland, ankle to waste deep in mud, bounded only by limestone cliffs with a shear drop to salty oceans below and plenty of rain to keep it muddy. Malaria is a literal plague and the mosquitos that carry it are not in short supply.
Getting construction equipment there is difficult at best absolutely impossible otherwise. Tunnels would require multi-decade, multi-trillion dollar investments, boring through bedrock. Making coast-adjacent roads is difficult due to the isolation of the place and two closest cities you could link are on facing opposite oceans.
>The volume of people making the crossing doesn’t signal that it has somehow become less treacherous. All this shows is that the reward for crossing outweighs the risk of dying along the way - both of which are preferable to not attempting the cross (which is pretty bleak when you think about it).
If people become more desperate they may attempt to do things that they believe are risky. It's perfectly possibly that they are more desperate and also that the trip is not as dangerous as they believed. It's true, the mere fact that, say, 1000 people successfully made the crossing doesn't tell you much by itself. How many attempted it? How many were in any way injured along the way?
It does. Most migrants use guides / "coyotes" to guide them through. Kinda like the sherpas of Everest. This wasn't so easy back in the day. Now it's pretty cheap - one guide for a group of 30-50.
https://www.cfr.org/article/crossing-darien-gap-migrants-ris...
One additional major factor not mentioned in the article is that Colombian side of the Gap is still largely controlled by various insurgents/guerrillas/traffickers, meaning the Colombian government would struggle to build a highway even if they wanted to.
250k have done it already this year, with 64k children.
More dangerous than typing this on my couch? Sure. As dangerous as it was in 2015? No.
So it's not comparable to driving the whole way, which would be a much larger distance.
Without knowing how many attempted it and turned back, or started and never showed up on the other side, that statistic is meaningless. How many completed the crossing without encountering significant trauma or abuse?
> The border between Panama and Columbia is where the dream faltered.
Spelling Colombia as Columbia is a very infuriating error to many (not all, but many) people who speak Spanish, particularly Colombians, obviously. It's as jarring to read as "Englend" or "Onited States". I urge the author, if around, to fix it, and any readers who are around to be very mindful of not making it as it can be disrespectful.
I agree that this didn't happen in the case of the English name of Colombia, and that the English name of Colombia is "Colombia", not "Columbia", but again I wonder why this didn't end up being regarded as a "translation" of the country's name.
The insistence of the leadership of the “Ivory Coast” that the country be called “Côte d’Ivoire” even in English, does seem to have been broadly successful. I rarely see “Ivory Coast” in English-language scholarship or in travel resources these days. I’m a bit surprised that Wikipedia still uses the English version throughout its article on the country.
Same goes for Türkiye/Turkey - those umlauts and the "toor-kee-ye" pronunciation will scare off most users of English, who will fall back to the more familiar "Turkey".
"Czechia" doesn't even have the problem of diacritics and it's still not that widespread. I find it a bit awkward and don't use it even though I live here.
Old habits die hard and, whether they like it or not, Ivory Coast, Turkey, Czechia etc are gonna be around for a while.
Not too long ago a British politician was unironically suggesting a post-Brexit trade deal with "Czechoslovakia".
I don't know how much of that was mere incompetence in his case, but in general at least some of it will be old habits dying hard.
I do a bit of work in music engraving software and you run into needing to type things like dètaché.
goturkiye.com
www.mfa.gov.tr/turkiye-and-eu-info.en.mfa
As such, progress should mean even historical names are reverted to what current inhabitants call them, i.e. we should all visit Firenze, not Florence.
It's still called Peking in many other languages.
It took years of living in Berlin to realise that "Warschau" was the German for Warsaw.
Hence, in English-speaking usage, "Columbia" (with a u) is more common, as in the Columbia River or District of Columbia. But the (Spanish-speaking) South American country uses the 'o' spelling.