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.
How much of it is about preserving jungles and how much is about keeping Colombians out?
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.
Before the recent waves of Venezuelan immigrants, most discussions I've seen about the topic was related to preserving the jungle, but some people for sure made snarky comments about keeping colombian gangsters out.
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.
Interestingly, reading this thread has made me realise that roads more-often-than-not are a path for exploitation (equally as you might describe them as a path for opportunity).
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.
On that topic here's an interesting article about the Ambler Mining District in Alaska - massive mineral deposits that would require a road through pristine wilderness to access:
I was in panama when i was young, about 17 years ago. I always wanted to come back and had the idea of building startups there that help local economy. How is the landscape there now? Is there a startup scene?
I love panama and hope to return some day. Always excited to hear from panmeños!
For sure, a garmin gps would help. They're not 100% though. I have a property in the mountains with jungle and there were steep drops that did not show up on my topographic map. I imagine someone could easily die if they didn't pay attention.
Also, slipping and falling is a serious risk during the wet season, even on well known paths.
GPS often fails in dense cities with tall buildings. Also in mountainous areas with sharp terrain like the Julian Alps.
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.
GPS can tell you exactly where you are, and nothing more. It can’t tell anyone else where you are, it can’t teach you to read a map if you don’t have the skills. It can’t tell you the best route through dense jungle terrain if you don’t have the skillset.
In the 1690's the Scottish invested an enormous sum of money and human capital to settle this region. The goal was to build and profit from an overland route to ferry cargo from the Pacific to the Atlantic, similar to the Panama Canal today.
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.
There was more to the Scottish colony in Darien failing than just that, the English state had a hand in it, and an incentive to ensure it failed.
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.
> "As to the post failure financial effect, that was mainly on a bunch of rich folks."
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].
I’m not sure it was mainly rich folks who suffered. Many small scale investors also lost money. So severe were the losses that something like 25% of private wealth in Scotland was destroyed.
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).
>I’m not sure it was mainly rich folks who suffered.
I've read it was 1/3rd of their annual GDP.
>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.
A little diversion into the tiers of people you’d hear about constantly in primary school. S+ from P3 onwards, S from P6 onwards, A tier are more those that you’d be told invented the modern world
S+ tier: Alexander Graham Bell, John Logie Baird, Rabbie Burns.
S tier: James Watt, Alexander Fleming, Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Thousands of people died during the construction of the Panama Canal as well. The Path Between the Seas is a good book covering it.
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
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.
Man, they really picked the worst possible place to settle. There aren't many places that are still neat-inhospitable to modern humans, but this is one of them.
I've always thought that "too expensive and detrimental to the environment" was a bit 'too simple, sometimes naive' for an explanation.
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.
In the other thread posted on this Gap, I commented that over a quarter of a million people have crossed it already this year, over 60,000 of them being children.
It may be dangerous in an absolutist sense, but it is no longer apparently as dangerous as it was 10 years ago.
The US–Mexico border is so long and varied, danger is going to vary significantly. I cycled the Baja Divide cycling route, which starts from San Diego and goes through the nearby Otay Mountain wilderness reserve before reaching the Mexican border. The trails around Otay are littered with backpacks dropped by migrants, and when I asked a CBP officer parked in his car monitoring the area, he said that patrols were only partly successful and aliens were constantly getting through. It’s just a few km of walking before a migrant will hit a paved road where a prearranged contact can pick him up. Compared to descriptions of crossing the desert farther east, this seemed pretty safe, with the main risk the waste of days and months if one is caught by Mexican or US authorities.
There’s a good video in which a YouTube creator gets a tour around the US-Mexico border with an Arizona sheriff and discusses these kinds of issues: https://youtu.be/GdYAYgbf5Uc?si=RD8b8NTfxsyv0urz
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.
Random related anecdote. I met a guy in Colombia who was cycling from Canada to Patagonia.
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.
I drove the length of the Pan-American, and shipped my Jeep around in a shipping container.
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.
Entering a crapy boat or canoe in a place known to be run by drug smugglers and gangs sound like an easy way to disappear without trace after being robbed and murdered.
> 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.
Quite a few cyclists and thru-hikers have crossed in recent years. The hassle with the authorities is mainly on the Colombian side, regularizing one’s status there, since the Colombian authorities consider one to have entered the country illegally. Those who get sent back on the Panamanian side generally do so because they look embarrassingly badly prepared.
I know several people who have made the foot journey across the Darién, and have heard many horror stories about it.
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.
> When I was in Bogotá last year, I met a Venezuelan man selling art ... Many of his pieces were portraits of people who crossed the Darién fleeing Venezuela.
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 don't think he met any of the people in the portraits personally. He said he learned of these people and their stories through social media, at least the ones we talked about.
I crossed the Darien gap escaping from Cuba to the US. I still have nightmares about it 8 years later, the nature was impressing now that i think back and we found some nice/helpful communities there but got some kind of parasite on my feet from crossing a river and had to stay 10 days in a village taking herbs to continue the path.
Sounds awful. I hope the rest of your journey went more smoothly.
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.
May I recommend “long way up” as well (although they also took a boat). They travel from Ushuaia to Canada, and talked about the Darién Gap, I don’t recall how in depth.
Seconded. Long Way Up is entertaining, interesting and has some incredible cinematography. It's also great that Ewan and Charlie rode all-electric Harleys and the crew had pre-production Rivian's (the with the very first 2 Rivian "production" VINs).
I drove the entire Pan-American Highway (shipped around the Darien). Getting to see the Panama Canal and the whole region was just one of hundreds of highlights.
It's commonly done now, and you can totally do it yourself in any vehicle.
Sounds like a very cool experience. Is it safe? My naive impression is that northern Mexico and perhaps parts of Central America could be dicey, but I also suppose in Mexico at least the cartels are rational enough to generally avoid targeting foreigners.
Many thousands of people do it every year, and just a few experience pick pocketing or a vehicle smash and grab.
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.
It's cheaper to ship something from Shanghai to Los Angeles than from Bogotá to Cartagena, or so my classes taught me when I took a class on Colombia's economy.
I find it pretty funny that someone posted about the Pan American highway yesterday, and then the Darien gap today. It’s interesting how ignorant most HN’ers are just south of the USA.
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.
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.
No, the word ignorant is insulting. That's just a fact about everyday English usage which it might be helpful for you to be aware of. It's the word's fundamental connotation.
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.
I AM a New Yorker and I do know Florida and Texas. You picked a very poor example. There are also a huge influx of New Yorkers that have migrated to Florida and Texas. In fact the joke is many New Yorkers end up to Florida and Retire/Die. The majority of the Villages/Spring Hill in Florida are from recently relocated New Yorkers.
Nice try, etc etc, I don't wish to argue. People are very ignorant of The Darian Gap and die everyday being cute.
> I AM a New Yorker and I do know Florida and Texas. You picked a very poor example.
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.
Alaska–Ushuaia cyclists commonly take a boat around the gap. It is a bit more expensive than flying, but it allows one to claim that one did the journey entirely overland. (Recently a few cyclists have bought packrafts and paddled along the coast themselves instead of paying for someone else’s boat.) You shouldn’t think the story was “problematic”, the cyclist was validly describing the journey as typically done.
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.
No need to doubt his story. Very likely he took a boat, like many touring cyclist doing the Pan-American route do. It is a relatively established route.
If you really want to be self-reliant, the amazing Iohan Gueorguiev bike-raft it, but that's quite on the extreme side.
Many secrets about that place:
Legends abound of a lost city of gold, sometimes called "El Dorado," in South America. While many associate this legend with places further south, some tales and searches for this city have placed it within the Darien Gap. Over the centuries, various explorers and adventurers have ventured into the Darien Gap, drawn by the allure of this hidden treasure. Yet, the dense jungle and the formidable challenges of the environment have kept many secrets concealed, and no concrete evidence of such a city in the Darien Gap has ever been found. Still, the legend persists and adds a layer of mystique to this already enigmatic region.
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.