Postcards From The Edge

After several days spent kayaking through the jungle and passing peaceful indigenous settlements, I started to wonder: Why all the control posts, permits, and warnings? Sure, there were the usual dangers one would expect in a wild equatorial rainforest, but none of the three local tribes were the least bit hostile. As for the “guerilleros”, nobody I met had seen any. Yet the government continues to isolate this entire region from the rest of the country and so the Darien Gap remains, to this day, the only break in the continuous network of roads connecting Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego.