The Darién Gap
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
The Darien Gap still has foreigners (including wealthy tourists) going there with the crazy idea they can hike through it. The trash being left behind in just the past couple years is just heartbreaking.
Mountainous jungles in Panama are extremely easy to get lost in the overgrown vegetation. Tourists have died in hiking trails in Boquete, Veraguas or Cerro Azul by only going a few hundred meters off path.
Also, most Panamanians are against the idea of building a road between Darien and Colombia since most of us want to preserve as much jungle as we still can.
There is currently massive protests against the mining operation in Donoso by the Canadian company First Quantum Minerals (FQM). I imagine there would be similar blockades against foreign companies trying to build a road in the darien gap.
Also, slipping and falling is a serious risk during the wet season, even on well known paths.
I imagine a dense jungle could pose similar challenges. If nothing else, a gps won’t help if you can’t find a route to where it’s telling you to go because the jungle/river/valley is impassable.
Just because it can't do everything doesn't mean it can't do anything.
From the article yesterday about the failed pan American highway due to the Darien gap, it pointed out that Colombia and Panama are the only two neighboring countries in the world without a road between them. It also explicitly stated that many citizens support that to reduce undocumented immigrants from Colombia.
Nowadays, most of the attention are definitely on the Venezuelan immigrants that come to Panama without much money or much of a plan.
But if the government signed a deal to construct a highway, I predict it would be mostly environmentalists protesting in the street than xenophobes.
Also, man-eating parasites known as screwworms.
Without roads, you cannot build mines or forestries within the area to extract the resources from the land. Just interesting because I've never thought about roads in this way.
Feels like not building roads is a good thing if preserving the land is the intention.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-27/ambler-ac...
and
Same context: a thick jungle.
I love panama and hope to return some day. Always excited to hear from panmeños!
Notably and tragically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_of_Kris_Kremers_and_Lis...
(though this was at the other end of Panama)
Due to disease, less-than-accommodating natives, and geopolitical climate, the scheme failed miserably. Many argue the crippling financial effect on Scotland was a key factor in the 1707 Acts of Union which merged Scotland and England.
As to the post failure financial effect, that was mainly on a bunch of rich folks. Scotland per-se was not in any financial distress after the failure of the scheme, as it was private individuals, not the state which had invested.
Have a read of this piece, which covers a lot of the history around the failure of the Darien Scheme.
https://wingsoverscotland.com/weekend-essay-skintland-britna...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18271029-the-darien-disa....
It was written in the late 60s, but it looks like it's been republished more than a few times since then:
https://www.alibris.com/booksearch?mtype=B&keyword=%93Darien...
Some argue we are still feeling the effects of this today. It certainly didn’t help with social attitudes towards being miserly with money (which we very much are).
>Some argue we are still feeling the effects of this today. Of course you are. Think of it this way. The reason they poured everything into it and kept pouring more into it wasn't just to increase personal wealth of investors. It was a unique opportunity to poll vault towards becoming a major European empire. While they knew it was a massive endeavor, the rewards would be incalculable. For them to control the most important manmade waterway to global trade 3 times as long as the US has would be a success story that we'd be reminded about in every grade school class but Golf and Gaelic.
S+ tier: Alexander Graham Bell, John Logie Baird, Rabbie Burns.
S tier: James Watt, Alexander Fleming, Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
A tier: David Hume, Adam Smith, James Dunlop
Although trickle-down economics is largely discredited when it comes to wealth, I suspect the same isn't the case when it comes to debt. For example, one of the causes of the Highland Clearances (which began around a generation after the Darien Scheme) was landlord debt[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances#Landlord_d...
The Guna (a.k.a. Kuna) natives were actually helpful, providing food to the colonists, who formed an alliance with them against the Spanish, who were hostile to both Kuna and Scots.
As I recall, food was “refrigerated” by the workers in nested, open pots submerged in water. …which happened to be an excellent breeding place for mosquitoes. Malaria and yellow fever would kill or cripple every worker present, and the country du jour had to keep shipping more in. Bleak stuff.
France saw like 20,000 workers die alone. Rainforests really are not a great place to live, lol
There’s a lot of YouTube spam of people talking about the gap but precious little content from people who have done it.
Panama was split from Colombia thanks to the US right before the Panama Canal was built. So an obvious line of thought is that the Gap has a defensive purpose to keep both sides well apart. It also helps reduce the flow of people.
Strange to be downvoted for pointing out the stats on the linked wiki article.
There’s also a Texas sheriff video, but the Arizona video is more interesting IMO because the sheriff knows more about how immigration law impacts border enforcement.
It may be dangerous in an absolutist sense, but it is no longer apparently as dangerous as it was 10 years ago.
He'd made it all the way to the border according to his maps but was stopped by armed military/paramilitary troops and sent back to Panama by river in a dinghy full of (or made to appear to be full of) bananas.
In the end he had to fly that leg. It's also common to sail it, Panama city to Cartagena, but the other direction makes for a smoother trip.
Even back in 2008 when I did it, I met a few backpackers that had crossed the Darien on foot. You take a bus and then hitchhike as far south as you possibly can. Talk to locals, figure something out. Someone will know of a crappy boat or canoe or something to take you a few hours through the swap and then you're on land again. Hitchhike, bus, whatever until you pop out somewhere in Colombia.
That's a very optimistic approach for such a deadly trip.
Yes, optimism is a requirement for any major undertaking.
That is exactly how I spent two years driving 40,000 miles from Alaska to Argentina, and also how I spent three years driving 54,000 miles right around the coastline of Africa.
When I was in Bogotá last year, I met a Venezuelan man selling art painted on Bolivares. Inflation is so bad in Venezuela that Bolivares are practically worthless as currency. (There's also a beautiful irony that painting a picture of Che Guevara on a Bolivar makes it more valuable.) Many of his pieces were portraits of people who crossed the Darién fleeing Venezuela. He seemed to have a story for all of them. Most of them were working-class folks, engineers, teachers, lawyers. He himself was a former oil engineer who left Venezuela because of the economic collapse. These stories made me really appreciate everything I take for granted.
Maybe I'm missing something.
Folks are fleeing Venezuela. They pass thru Columbia and crossed the Darién into Panama.
How did the guy in Bogotá meet people who crossed the Darién?
Edit: Never mind. I think you meant: portraits of people who were going to cross the Darién, now having fled Venezuela.
I just heard a story of a Venezuelan family who made it through the Darién gap relatively fine, but once they got to Mexico, they were detained by a man claiming to be a Federale. He extorted their cousin, who was living in the US, for thousands of dollars, saying that if she didn't pay, he would kill them.
There’s a TV show here in the Uk called “race across the world” and in last season they had to cross the gap. Was really hoping for racing jeeps and armed militia but sadly (and sensibly) they took a boat.
BTW: It was actually Ushuaia to LA, not Canada.
Should have called the series “half way up”
It's commonly done now, and you can totally do it yourself in any vehicle.
If you're smart, don't drive at night and don't go looking for trouble, there's no reason to think you'll have problems.
After driving the Pan-Am I drove right around Africa through 35 countries. Never had a single "bad" moment, never heard a single gunshot. I was in LA a couple of months ago, heard gunshots.
I've driven the entire Baja peninsula many times and done a road trip across much of central Mexico.
The user PanamaNewb covered most of it correctly. It’s still a dangerous area. There are famous bloggers that have gone missing and literally only their bones have come back. The famous one thus far is: http://travelswithmitzi.blogspot.com/2018/10/killed-in-darie... Jan Philip
Most people mistake the issue there as a technical or engineering one. It isn’t. It’s political and human centric. The indigenous people don’t have a true connection or believe in the government of Panama or Colombia. Go back over a century and the whole land was just Colombia, but Roosevelt (yes, that US president!) wanted the a Canal thru Panama and thus Panama became a country.
Decades later it came up again for road construction but it was already heavily used for smuggling and other curious business. During the 60s through 90s it came up a lot for the cocaine trade. When that was gone, the power vacuum created a few gorilla militants that aligned themselves with the indigenous- most notably the FARC.
That doesn’t really exist anymore, but the people that belonged to several faction still do and many still have revenue from passage or related business.
Most people that need to legitimately get through just take a ferry to Turbo and vice Versa. The migrants walking through is a new phenomena in the volume that try to go through. If you can read Spanish and can find the telegram/signal groups you can even get day by day news of what happens and which days the migrants are told to wait and not try. It correlates to some curious activity or so I understand.
Most people outside of South America lack the understand the above history and the dynamics in general of this graft. But before you point fingers - everyone most likely is somewhat related from Panama to Panama military, Colombia and Colombian military. The anti government groups and the idginious people.
Tl;dr no one wants change except government of Colombia and people on the internet that have no idea of what happens there. Colombia government wants to build roads and tunnels for trade and then eventually enforce laws. But the later always has bad outcomes in Colombia.
You're also being downvoted, surely, because you're needlessly insulting HN'ers in your first paragraph.
If you refrained from calling people ignorant, then I'm sure informative comments like this would be upvoted instead. :)
Ignorant isn't bad, people want and should learn. It isn't an insult but I find it hilarious how the continunation of conversation from yesterday to today is this. HN is unfortunately USA centric and a majority of people in the USA do not know what happens outside the 48' borders.
Also, a majority of people in pretty much every country don't know much about what happens outside of their borders.
The idea that Americans are particularly ignorant is a tired myth that deserves to die -- and if you've traveled the world and met people, you'd realize that geographical "ignorance" is widespread pretty much everywhere. Shocking, even. Sure, people in smaller countries know a bit more about nearby countries, but the American equivalent is a New Yorker knowing about Florida and Texas and California, since America's pretty huge.
So no, it's not true.
Nice try, etc etc, I don't wish to argue. People are very ignorant of The Darian Gap and die everyday being cute.
And the first result on Google is this: https://conversational-leadership.net/blog/ignorance-is-not-... it's a common debate.
No, you clearly missed my point entirely.
I'm saying that's the same level of geographic knowledge of usual examples of e.g. Germans being more knowledgeable about European countries, so why aren't Americans more knowledgeable about South America? The answer is that there's a lot more to be aware of in America in the first place. America is the size of Europe just on its own. We know plenty of geography in absolute terms, but for us a lot more of it happens to be within our own borders.
Most people in the world don't know about the Darian Gap. You think Brazilians or Argentines all learn about it or something? It's a relatively local thing, and that's fine.
You're claiming that Americans are especially ignorant of world geography compared to other countries. That's just not the case.
In any case, hopefully by now you've learned that calling other people ignorant never goes down well.
I thought the story was problematic the moment I heard it. I met someone who crossed the gap while migrating to the United States from Africa. When I asked what they thought about someone riding a bicycle through it, they shook their head. They said even carrying a bike would be problematic because there are parts which require you to climb.
If you really want to be self-reliant, the amazing Iohan Gueorguiev bike-raft it, but that's quite on the extreme side.
That said, there are multiple recent accounts of cyclists crossing the gap. Indeed, it is a tiresome hike-a-bike because you can’t actually cycle much, but from the account by a German cyclist I read a few months ago, I don’t recall any climbing. It’s worth mentioning that even a traversal of the gap will involve leaving land and going over water along the rivers at some points.