Darien Gap: The Most Dangerous (Absence of a) Road

As a historical anecdote, this was also the site of the Darien Disaster in the late 1690s: the plan was to build a Scottish colony, but it didn't go well. It went so poorly, in fact, that Scotland went broke and had to get a bailout from England, leading to the Acts of Union in 1707.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme

Just back from Colombia. A swedish tourist tried to cross the Darien Gap in May. His last blog post is here: http://centramerica.wordpress.com/

"I’m in riosucio now, on the atrato river. From here it’s not far from panama. There are supposedly quite many paths from here to panama. We’ll see how it goes."

He hasn't been heard from since. Read the comments on his blog if you want to feel like crying.

One of my best college friends and I decided we were going to adventure the entire stretch of South America, through Central America and then up the PCT over the course of about 6-7 months via bus and motorcycle (ended up not doing the PCT because we ran out of money).

We get into Ecuador thinking just a few short bus rides (http://i.imgur.com/kVVqZuX.jpg) will have us through Columbia and at the border of Panama.

We got our asses laughed at so hard when we were asking about how to get through this "weird jungle area" -- asking the dumbest questions like "where are the roads?" "how about hiking trails"

Lesson learned and ended up just flying over it. But highly recommend traveling that area of the world if you ever get a chance. Some absolutely gorgeous areas, and I think it's still relatively under-appreciated

One of my best friends and old roommate tried to walk this from Panama to Columbia in his "party shirt" (dress shirt covered in puke and blood). Gave up after 3 days because he couldn't cross certain streams/rivers, where the map he had said there would be bridges and the water was too high. Paid a guy going past in a boat to take him to Columbia. They had to stop 6 hours in a long the way in some town in the middle of the jungle were he got picked up by Panama military.

They questioned him for hours (they don't want dumb white kids in there) and then brought him back out the Panama side, revoked his visa, and told him to get out of the country. It is also a cool place for FARC and major cocaine traffickers to do business.

My favourite part of the story was they went through his backpack and were really concerned he was traveling with a girl or someone else because it had luchador masks from Mexico and tight pink underwear my girlfriend who worked at American Apparel gave him, but not much else.

He said being in the jungle there was pretty frustrating and terrible. Like everything moved, and it was sweaty and hot, and you couldn't get a break from it and just cool down. Also Howler Monkeys!

A popular way is via yacht to Cartagena as someone mentioned. It will skip a bunch of beautiful countryside though.

Less well known are the small villages along both sides of the coast.

On the Caribbean side there is a small town called Capurgana on the Colombian side with a few nice hotels that offer hikes to the village La Miel on the Panamanian side. So it is possible to cross the border there quite safely by foot.

http://www.brendansadventures.com/paradise-found-la-miel-pan...

The area looks beautiful. Since I first of heard of this it's been on my bucket list.

That still leaves you with the question on how to get there without flying. The hotels in Capurgana offer boat rides to Turbo in Antioquia where there are good roads south.

While I know Panama well I was actually surprised to learn from Colombian TV of the villages on the Panamanian side. I nor most of my Panamanian friends had never heard of these.

So your best bet would probably be to go by boat along the coast from either one of the San Blas islands or more likely Isla Verde a bit further west.

I did the "Yacht Route" that a bunch of people here are talking about. Well worth it!

We had backpacked North from Peru and ran out of North in Cartagena, so we headed down to the local yacht club to see what we could find out. As luck would have it, there was a woman standing on the dock chatting to some friends. She was single-handed, heading to Panama in about a month, and didn't like the idea of doing the overnight journey without a crew.

The only downside? "Well, I'm not going straight in to Colon. I was planning to spend a few weeks sailing around the San Blas islands first. Would you be OK with that?"

Uh... I guess.

The San Blas are amazing. There's absolutely no way to visit the place if you don't have your own boat. There are no hotels. The locals won't let you sleep on the islands or let non-Kuna run tours there. But for something like $5/month (depending on the local village) you can moor your yacht anywhere you want. Just don't take any coconuts off the islands.

Most of the islands are completely unpopulated, of the white-sand & palm tree variety that you think of when you think South Pacific tropical paradise. The locals clump together on just a few islands, with ridiculously dense concentrations of thatch huts piled on top of one another and overhanging the sea. 200 yards away might be yet another tropical paradise, but they'd prefer to be next to one another, so you can have that one to yourself if you'd like.

They have little shops (and solar powered cell towers supplied by the government), and they'll row their dugouts out to your yacht in the morning to sell you Kuna bread and fresh fruit.

All in, we spent 5 weeks on the boat. It was rather pleasant. Enough so that I often find myself pricing yachts online when I look back on the experience.

Tangentially, Road Fever is a pretty epic read about two roadtrippers who get from the Tierra del Fuego, Argentina to Prudhoe, Alaska, in 24 days. Border crossings, mechanical issues, weather, the Darien Gap, all covered. (They took a ferry I think). Looking at the pictures and the intensity, 90km has to feel like an eternity on actual land

Interesting. I was under the (wrong) impression that you could drive or motorcycle from South America to North America. Seems all but impossible.

Think of making a road trip to South America in 1961, as the subjects of my documentary did. They knew better than to try to penetrate the Darien Jungle -- that's why they went in a surplus Army Duck. Unfortunately, the DUKW (which was designed for a ship-to-shore dip like at Normandy) wasn't up to the seafaring in store, and they ended up marooned in that very jungle. Check out here for more: www.facebook.com/TheDuckDiaries

Darien Gap: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darién_Gap

redirecting to a broken mobile page is idiotic.

I motorcycled North and South America from 2001-2003. It was fairly simple, and cheap, to fly from Panama City to Quito, via Bogata. The yacht technique was the source of quite a few bad stories, while Colon, the step off point from Panama, was awful. I had to build my own motorbike box, but some others had theirs done for them. These days the number of riders is huge, and the process for flying should be very well covered in the adventure motorcycle sites like horizonsunlimited.com.

I did get to ride on a yacht through the canal - and that was amazing.

Guerrilla is not a type of person, it's a type of war. A "little war" to be exact. The person fighting in a guerrilla is a guerrilla soldier or a guerrilla fighter. Also, it's pronounced geriya (with a hard g and a rolling r), not gorilla.

I wonder if they have thought of making the road go around north-east to Acandi and then connect with Hw 62 around Chigorodo. It won't be as direct but it would avoid the environmental issues of cutting through the Darien National Park.

see http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/04/22/130422fa_fact_sm... too