Crossing the Darien Gap

Author: Andrew Niall Egan
Publisher: Adventura Publishing
ISBN: 9780964794061
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
If you ever plan to travel between North America and South America, you must consider that there is no road. Ten hours southeast of the Panama Canal, the Pan-American Highway penetrates the jungle, shrivels into a footpath and dies. The highway resurrects in Colombia, another continent. But the land between the two countries is a vast and primitive realm. On a map the two ends of the highway appear as two slivers of life, separated by the unknown. Filling this void is a rugged wilderness known as the Darien Rainforest. Because the Darien hinders all contact by land between North America and South America, it has earned the name "the Darien Gap." Yet most travelers never encounter the Darien Gap. When they go to South America they fly or perhaps take a boat. I decided to cross the Darien overland, traversing from Panama to Colombia by foot and riverboat.

Road Fever

Author: Tim Cahill
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307809374
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 407

Book Description
Tim Cahill reports on the road trip to end all road trips: a journey that took him from Tierra del Fuego to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in a record-breaking twenty three and a half days.

31 Days in the Darien

Author: Kevin Arnold
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781725990975
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
The Darien Gap is the ultimate off-road challenge; a two-hundred-mile section of jungle separating Colombia, South America from Panama, Central America.Ride along with Mike Arnold as he shares his five-month experience via a daily journal and pictures as he travels with the group known as the Expedicion de las Americas. His off-road adventure team not only conquered the Darien Gap, they took it further and traveled from the tip of South America to the tip of North America following the Pan-American Highway.

The Cloud Garden

Author: Tom Hart Dyke
Publisher: Corgi
ISBN: 9780552165716
Category : Darien (Panama and Colombia)
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
"The Darien Gap is a place of legend. The only break in the Pan-American highway, which runs from Alaska to the tip of South America, it is an almost impregnable strip of swamp, jungle and cloud forest between the vast landmasses of North and South America. Stories of abduction and murder there are rife and in recent years more people have successfully climbed Everest or trekked to the South Pole than have crossed the Darien Gap. In 2000, Tom Hart Dyke, a young botanist, set off to Central America with one thing on his mind- orchids. He knew that in order to find the rare and beautiful species he so fervently admired, he would have to visit some of the most inhospitable places on earth. Unbeknown to Tom, another young explorer, Paul Winder, was backpacking through the area at the same time. Though he sometimes worked freelance in the City of London, Paul was a fearless and intrepid traveller, happier scaling volcanoes than lounging on beaches. In every bar and cafe along his route, rumours abounded of the Darien Gap - and the more he heard, the greater became his desire to make the journey. Pure chance brought Paul and Tom together in northern Mexico; they formed an instant bond

The Longest Line on the Map

Author: Eric Rutkow
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 150110392X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Book Description
From the award-winning author of American Canopy, a dazzling account of the world’s longest road, the Pan-American Highway, and the epic quest to link North and South America, a dramatic story of commerce, technology, politics, and the divergent fates of the Americas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Pan-American Highway, monument to a century’s worth of diplomacy and investment, education and engineering, scandal and sweat, is the longest road in the world, passable everywhere save the mythic Darien Gap that straddles Panama and Colombia. The highway’s history, however, has long remained a mystery, a story scattered among government archives, private papers, and fading memories. In contrast to the Panama Canal and its vast literature, the Pan-American Highway—the United States’ other great twentieth-century hemispheric infrastructure project—has become an orphan of the past, effectively erased from the story of the “American Century.” The Longest Line on the Map uncovers this incredible tale for the first time and weaves it into a tapestry that fascinates, informs, and delights. Rutkow’s narrative forces the reader to take seriously the question: Why couldn’t the Americas have become a single region that “is” and not two near irreconcilable halves that “are”? Whether you’re fascinated by the history of the Americas, or you’ve dreamed of driving around the globe, or you simply love world records and the stories behind them, The Longest Line on the Map is a riveting narrative, a lost epic of hemispheric scale.

The Darien Gap

Author: Martin Mitchinson
Publisher: Harbour Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
If you want to drive from North America to South America, youll have a hard time when you reach Panamas southernmost province, Darien. The Pan-American Highway ends just sixty miles short of Colombia. This book presents the history of the region.

10 Years on 2 Wheels

Author: Helge Pedersen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780944958384
Category : Motorcycling
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description

Walking the Americas

Author: Levison Wood
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1473654084
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
LONGLISTED IN THE ADVENTURE TRAVEL CATEGORY OF THE 2017 BANFF MOUNTAIN BOOK AWARDS SUNDAY TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER BY THE AUTHOR OF WALKING THE HIMALAYAS, WINNER OF THE 2016 EDWARD STANFORD ADVENTURE TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 'Levison Wood has breathed new life into adventure travel.' Michael Palin Walking the Americas chronicles Levison Wood's 1,800 mile trek along the spine of the Americas, through eight countries, from Mexico to Colombia, experiencing some of the world's most diverse, beautiful and unpredictable places. His journey took him from violent and dangerous cities to ancient Mayan ruins lying still unexplored in the jungles of Mexico and Guatemala. He encountered members of indigenous tribes, migrants heading towards the US border and proud Nicaraguan revolutionaries on his travels, where at the end of it all, he attempted to cross one of the most impenetrable borders on earth: the Darien Gap route from Panama into South America. This trek required every ounce of Levison Wood's guile, tact, strength and resilience in one of the most raw, real and exciting journeys of his life.

Obsessions Die Hard

Author: Ed Culberson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781884313066
Category : Latin America
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Culberson set his sights on riding Amigo, his BMW R80 G/S, the entire length of the Pan American Highway-including the Darien Gap, a feat never before accomplished by a motorcyclist. He suffers failure before meeting success, encountering killer bees, arrest by a corrupt law officer, cycling injuries, and back-breaking labour to get himself ......

20,000 Miles South

Author: Helen Schreider
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1787207994
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Book Description
Helen and Frank Schreider were true adventurers. Their dream was to drive the length of the Americas, from the town of Circle, Alaska (just outside the Arctic Circle), to the world’s southernmost town, Ushuaia, in Tierra del Fuego. Dinah, their German shepherd, went with them. They are the first people in history to have made this trip. They came back with a whale of a story. The seagoing and mountain-climbing abilities of their amphibious jeep, La Tortuga, were put to a rugged test during the eighteen thrill-packed months the Schreiders were under way. They didn’t just drive from Circle to Ushuaia—much of the way there are no roads. Many of the rivers that slice through the jungle are unbridged; the jungle itself often rears up in an impenetrable wall, and the natives just shake their heads and say, “Turn back.” Undaunted, the Schreiders hacked their way with machetes through the steaming jungles of southern Mexico, were forced to put out through the monstrous surf into the far from pacific Pacific, island-hopped across the reef-ribbed Caribbean, rode out a hurricane at sea, and crawled to almost sixteen thousand feet in the Peruvian Andes. They are the first to have reached South America in a wheeled vehicle under its own power. La Tortuga served them well and came away with her share of honors: she’s the first “ship” ever to have been weighed in on dry land for passage through the Panama Canal and to have driven up to the port captain’s door to pick up her pilot. 20,000 MILES SOUTH is a book filled with the happy glow of discovery, the ease, charm, and determination of its young authors, and the fascinations and romance of faraway places.