
Darien Gap: The Most Dangerous (Absence of a) Road - geekfactor
http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/09/darien-gap-most-dangerous-absence-of.html
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hdevalence
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme)

~~~
makomk
Yeah, and now Scotland is seeking independence again - but they still expect
England (or at least the Bank of England) to be on the hook to bail them out.

~~~
JetSetWilly
Neither of those assertions are true.

Only if there is a yes vote returned in the referendum will it be possible to
say that "Scotland is seeking independence" \- at the moment the most that can
be said is some Scots are seeking independence.

Secondly, the white paper released yesterday does not suggest that England (by
which you rather arrogantly mean the rest of the UK presumably) be liable to
pay any Scottish debts incurred after independence.

So get that chip off your shoulder.

~~~
gadders
The White Paper released yesterday was a list of hopes and wishes. A lot of it
wasn't confirmed.

~~~
JetSetWilly
Of course not, seeing as here in the real world, many questions can't be
settled until there's a negotiation between the two parties undergoing a
divorce. The sole reason for the white paper is unionists demanding "answers"
for things they know fine well it is impossible to answer definitively, then
moaning about how said answers are "hopes and wishes".

However I'm impressed you read a 674 page document in less than a day, you win
a speed reading award.

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martingoodson
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/](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.

~~~
EStudley
Wow, those comments really do hit home. I would think he would have a
satellite phone or something. Really chilling.

~~~
webjames
chilling indeed.

More here: [http://colombiareports.co/swedish-tourist-missing-in-
northwe...](http://colombiareports.co/swedish-tourist-missing-in-northwest-
colombia/)

[http://www.panama-guide.com/article.php/20130708131957815](http://www.panama-
guide.com/article.php/20130708131957815)

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sharkweek
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](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

~~~
Nursie
I had a plan to do something similar - motorcycle up the pan-american highway.
Unfortunately every time I think I have a friend or two sold on the idea they
drop out...

Last time it got as far as the planning phase and the Darien Gap came up, and
there was a real moment of "WTF? There actually is no road between Central and
South America? How can there not be a road?"

It was only a few months after I'd completed a driving circuit of the
Australian coastline and I'd assumed if there were roads there then there
would be roads everywhere...

I'd still like to go to South America, but the tales of kidnappings in remote
areas do still stay my hand.

~~~
coldtea
> _I had a plan to do something similar - motorcycle up the pan-american
> highway. Unfortunately every time I think I have a friend or two sold on the
> idea they drop out..._

Just go do it. You'll make some friends on the way...

~~~
Nursie
I'm very good at not doing that! In Australia I managed three weeks without
speaking to another human being beyond ordering food and checking in to
hotels. I'm not really the talks-to-strangers-easily type.

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nacho2sweet
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!

~~~
tincholio
>Panama to Columbia

ColOmbia

~~~
sparktree
get out of my head!

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pelle
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...](http://www.brendansadventures.com/paradise-found-la-miel-panama/)

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.

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jasonkester
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.

~~~
GFischer
You can rent a yatch, no need to own :) (though it's nice - but yatchs are
costly to maintain!).

One of my uncles rented a yatch to sail on northern Australia (the Whitsunday
islands), from his description, it sounds amazing (much like you described,
white sandy beaches, awesome weather, nice sailing). He does own a yatch and a
sailing license back home though, I think at least the designated captain must
have a license.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitsunday_Islands](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitsunday_Islands)

Edit: remember the quote "A boat is a hole in the water into which you throw
money"

~~~
josephlord
The other aphorism about boat ownership is something like "the two happiest
days are the day you buy it and the day you sell it".

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exue
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

~~~
idProQuo
I believe you mean 90 megameters.

~~~
na85
I don't believe he does mean 90 million kilometers (a tenth of the
circumference of earth's orbit around the sun)

~~~
phaemon
"mega" means million. 90 megameters is 90,000 kilometers, or 90 million
_meters_.

~~~
na85
Whoopsies.

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

~~~
001sky
People do it all the time, just with the help of a boat across this obstacle.
Given the scale of the journey, its often not "footnoted" in many casual
references. For scale, the Pan-American-Highway, which basically navigates
from Alaska to Patagonia is _about 48,000 kilometres (30,000 mi) in total
length_.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-
American_Highway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-American_Highway)

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mptwomey
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

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twocommas
Darien Gap:
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darién_Gap](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darién_Gap)

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exit
redirecting to a broken mobile page is idiotic.

~~~
freehunter
Especially when I have my browser set to request the desktop site. There's
literally no way for me to find this article using my phone.

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lancewiggs
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.

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anon4
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.

~~~
InclinedPlane
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy)

~~~
coldtea
It's not even metonymy proper.

It's the adoption of a spanish word in another language, in which it IS used
as a noun in the first place.

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vpeters25
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.

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allard
see
[http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/04/22/130422fa_fact_sm...](http://m.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/04/22/130422fa_fact_smith)
too

