The Wonder Trail by Steve Hely

Author:Steve Hely
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-05-25T10:50:25+00:00

The Darién Gap

You could drive all the way from California to Chile, and on paved road, too—well, mostly paved road. I read reports that it gives out a bit in Honduras. But there’s road, all the way from North America to the very bottom of South America.

Except for one big gap.

The Darién Gap, it’s called. About 150 kilometers of mountainous, lawless jungle between Panama and Colombia where the road disappears. The landscape is too rugged, and no country wants the responsibility. All authority dissolves away into the wild. Drug cartels, tribal people, guerrilla fighters, ants and snakes and jaguars—who controls the Darién Gap? Nobody knows.

People have crossed it before. Noted Canadian travel writer, historian, ethnobotanist, and overall brilliant badass Wade Davis walked across it in 1973. He was twenty. He went along with Sebastian Snow, the “Rucksack Man,” an English adventurer, an Eton alum and bearded maniac who ended up walking from Patagonia to Costa Rica.

In 2000, two Englishmen, Tom Hart Dyke and Paul Winder, went into the Darién Gap. They ended up getting kidnapped for nine months by Colombian FARC guerrillas, a story told in their bestselling book, The Cloud Garden.

“Yeah, we used to run a trip into the Darién,” Captain Rich told me, back on the Canal. I wanted to hear all about it. “Lately some new guys came in there,” he said. “They wouldn’t be too excited about us taking people in there, Americans especially,” he said ominously. “You get lost in there, and nobody’s coming after you. Not Panamanians, not Colombians—I mean nobody.”

Gaps are interesting. For a while now I’d been fascinated with this one. I bought the best map I could find of it, the National Geographic Panama Adventure Travel Map. Even on there, the trails drift off and disappear.

The best firsthand account I found from anyone who crossed it is a book called Crossing the Darién Gap: A Daring Journey Through a Forbidding and Enchanting and Roadless Jungle That Is the Only Link by Land Between North America and South America, by Andrew Niall Egan, self-published by the author.

Let me highly, highly recommend this book to you. Andrew Niall Egan now works as a real estate agent in Florida, but when he was an eighteen-year-old kid in Canada, he went off on a three-month adventure from Mexico to the Darién Gap, determined to walk across it. So he does, and his adventures are amazing. He slept among tribes who had no idea what country they lived in, or how many people might be in the world. Many thousands? He encounters an incredible man, “The Prophet.” Let him tell you. He tells his story in a brisk and clear and compelling way.

When I finished his book, I wrote to Andrew Niall Egan to congratulate him on it and thank him for writing it. I said I was maybe thinking of trying the Gap myself. He wrote back and said he thought it “too risky to cross the Darién Gap overland right now, due to the risk of kidnapping.

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