Crossing the Darien Gap - Panama 1995

I was wet most of the time. If not from the river crossings then from the damp, steamy jungle. Wading through the rivers was easier going than picking your way through the dense forest of trees and vines and creepers where a machete was handy. In the rivers it was good to have a stout stick to plunge into the waters and feel for holes and provide stability against the current. You were always wet and everyday you wore the same wet clothes keeping one set always dry for when you made camp for the night. And you always watched for snakes, the poisonous ones. This is how you cross the Darien Gap, a wild area bordering Columbia where the Pan American Highway ends and then picks up later where the jungle is less dense, less formidable.

Thus begins another chronicle in my series of adventure travels. This time, the crossing of the Darien Gap in Panama in 1995, along a route the Spanish Explorer, Balboa, may have taken.