Crossing El Darién
A bicycle journey into the Darién Gap, where the dream of crossing continents turned into a fight to stay alive
Turbo, Colombia.
The place felt like a warning.
In a newly printed guidebook to South America I had read a line that stayed with me: a rough, wild and lawless society. Tourists are advised to avoid Turbo.
The guidebook was not exaggerating.
The streets were flattened dirt. Horse carts rolled past under impossible mountains of bananas. Vendors selling sugar-cane liquor and juice fought for space with everything else that moved. Heavily armed police patrolled in pairs, rifles ready, while women in bright dresses moved through it all with a grace that made the imbalance seem almost normal.
By night, the town changed character.
The main street filled with wandering women walking in pairs. Shops sold smuggled goods beside hotels that were barely disguised brothels. Restaurants seemed to offer the same meal everywhere: a slab of beef, fried bananas, and sugar-cane liquor or beer.
Almost every man carried a machete.
Long metal sheaths hung from their belts, ready to be drawn in an instant. In the darkness, the only visible law was nervous men guarding banks and pharmacies.
Turbo was a port city. That meant sailors. It also meant smugglers and killers.
From every open doorway came loud, rhythmic music pouring into the warm night air. Elegantly dressed women paused in the street, swaying for a moment to the beat before continuing through the chaos.
And then the shouting began.
Hide. Los Bandidos are attacking.
Inside our camouflage-colored hotel, panic spread at once. Doors slammed. Men ran through the corridors. Someone grabbed us and pulled us inside with the rest of the terrified crowd.
A Japanese cyclist named Keizo, who had also arrived in town, stood beside us looking strangely calm.
Am I a mono? he asked dryly.
In this part of the world, all white people were called monos (monkeys in Spanish).
The woman shouting about the bandits ignored him and kept yelling for help while people barricaded doors and windows with heavy iron bars.
Outside, chaos.
Inside, fear.
Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it ended.
It’s guerrillas, the owner of the hotel explained later. They attack looking for weapons and food.
Just another night in Turbo.
Help arrives
Our hope came from an unexpected source.
Dilver Pintor, head of the Colombian National Parks authority, INDERENA.
He sat behind his desk with his feet on the table, studying us while sweat rolled down our bodies in the suffocating humidity.
Did you know the humidity in El Darién is around ninety-five percent? he asked calmly.
It felt less like information than a warning.
Dilver was about my age, sharp-eyed and thoughtful, the kind of man who understood what we were about to attempt.
The first stretch is the worst, he said. You have to reach the Indian village of Paya on the Panamanian side. From Cristales there is a path to a village called Bijao. There you can hire guides. You will never carry all your equipment yourselves.
Then he added something unexpected.
I’ll arrange transport across the Gulf of Urabá to Cristales. Free.
Without him, the expedition might have ended right there.
Selling our winter
The heat in Turbo was brutal.
Thirty-three degrees. Humidity among the highest on earth. And yet our equipment still included winter clothing from earlier parts of the expedition.
So we tried to sell it.
For five dollars you can have the finest hand-knitted sweater you’ve ever seen, I told an old man sitting in the hotel courtyard.
He studied the thick wool sweater with care.
I have no use for something so warm, he said politely.
Of course he didn’t.
No one needed winter clothing in a place where the air itself felt like boiling water.
But we needed money.
We were forced to strip down our equipment, improvising backpacks out of flour sacks and bicycle tubes. They were crude and uncomfortable, but they would have to do.
Ahead of us waited eight hundred kilometres miles of jungle.
And not just any jungle.
El Darién.
A nightmare begins
The crossing started across the Gulf of Urabá.
The small motorboat slammed against the waves until my head felt like it would split apart. I was already weak from illness.
That night I dreamed I was being taken to a sacrificial altar, where I would have to offer my life to appease the gods. When I woke, the dream clung to me.
Ahead lay the unknown.
No reliable maps.
Almost no information.
Very little money.
But after a week in a foul-smelling brothel hotel in Turbo, we could not wait any longer.
The Darién Gap, the great jungle barrier between North and South America, was calling.
Into the jungle
Our guides were Omar and Cariño Santos.
The forest swallowed us at once.
One man walked ahead hacking through vines with a machete. The river beside us narrowed and turned deep green as we moved further in. Massive mangrove roots threatened to destroy the boat’s engine.
Above us, the canopy closed.
Everything felt alive.
Monkeys screamed in the trees. A toucan burst into flight as our motor canoe disturbed its perch. Omar watched it all silently.
Why stay here? I asked him later.
Every morning I wake surrounded by the smells of the jungle, he said quietly. That gives me freedom. Far from corruption, violence, and hateful people
.
The price of survival
But the peace did not last.
Cariño Santos stopped suddenly.
I want fifty dollars.
He was the black chief of Bijao, a village descended from Africans brought here centuries earlier through the slave trade.
His voice hardened.
You pay forty dollars now. Or we stop here.
We did not have the money.
Cariño laughed.
Gringos without money. What a joke.
Then he added, coldly, I am the only one who knows the path to Paya.
We had no choice.
We offered him Ed’s Walkman and a knife as part payment.
He accepted.
Hell in the jungle
Ed exploded.
What the hell have you dragged me into?
He was furious.
The trail became mud. One moment he slipped and sank waist-deep into a swamp.
These damned shoes, he shouted. Can’t they make proper shoes in this country?
The jungle tore at us.
Branches slapped our faces, releasing swarms of black insects that crawled over our skin. Bloodsuckers clung to our legs. Every step sank into mud.
Six streams to cross before nightfall.
The guides moved calmly while Ed and I struggled behind them, hacking at vines with machetes and dragging the bicycles over impossible ground.
There was no cycling here.
Only survival.
The jungle breaks us
Day after day we fought the forest.
Swamps.
Rivers.
Insects.
Mud.
My shoulders burned from carrying the bicycle. Our clothes hung heavy with sweat and swamp water. Cuts opened across our hands from the knife-sharp vegetation.
At night I tried to repair punctured tubes in the dark.
The jungle’s thorns had pierced both tires again.
Then something cold and sticky crawled up my leg inside my trousers.
An enormous worm.
I ripped off my clothes and jumped into the water.
No one laughed.
Everything collapses
The atmosphere between us and the guides worsened by the day.
Insults.
Threats.
Arguments about money.
Cariño and Dilson began calling us cowards.
At one point they disappeared into the jungle.
Where are you, idiots? we shouted.
Dilson returned laughing.
Looking for monkeys.
I was exhausted. Sick. At one point everything went black.
Then I saw it.
My urine.
Bright orange.
Jaundice, I whispered.
Cariño looked worried.
That is contagious, isn’t it?
Then he said something worse.
We refuse to continue.
A terrible silence followed.
Will you leave us here to die? I asked.
The border
Then the jungle opened.
Light poured through the trees. In front of us lay a metal plate in the ground.
Colombia.
We had reached Palo de las Letras, the border between Colombia and Panama.
Only a few hours remained to the Cuna village of Paya.
For the first time in days, we embraced each other with relief.
Perhaps I would survive after all.
The golden people
The Cuna chief examined my swollen leg carefully.
Snake? he asked.
I don’t know, I answered.
He studied the wound and smiled.
No snake bite. Probably a scorpion or a soldier ant.
I would survive.
The village was beautiful. Clean. Orderly. Calm.
Women wore colorful traditional clothing called mola. Gold rings in their noses showed they were married. Necklaces made of animal teeth hung around their necks.
The chief brought leaves and red clay.
This will help your pain.
The calm wisdom of the Cuna fascinated me.
Leaving the jungle
Back at the military camp, the commander solved the crisis with our guides.
He forced them to accept forty dollars, a Walkman, and a knife as payment, and threatened to arrest them if they returned to Colombia.
But by then I was gravely ill.
Jaundice.
Dysentery.
I could not eat. I could not drink. I had lost so much weight that my fingers could almost wrap completely around my upper arm.
For two days I lay half-conscious in a tent.
The dream of crossing El Darién overland was over.
After three weeks we had covered barely a hundred kilometres.
700 still remained.
Impossible.
The river out
Instead, we left by canoe.
A young Cuna paddled us downriver toward Boca de Cupe. As the canoe drifted through the dense jungle, I watched the forest carefully, trying to memorize every detail.
Under other circumstances, I would have loved to learn its secrets.
But now I was simply grateful to be leaving alive.
On the river we met the Chocó, another people still living according to ancient traditions.
They greeted us with warm smiles.
Slowly, the jungle released us.
Back to the world
In Boca de Cupe we finally returned to something that looked like civilization.
Coca-Cola.
Concrete streets.
Radios and music.
A man showed me his arm, where two large ants had been used as natural sutures to close a wound.
Old knowledge in a modern world.
We exchanged our traveler’s checks and arranged transport upriver to Yaviza, where the Pan-American Highway begins again.
Ahead of us, once again, lay the road to Alaska.
Christmas Eve
It was Christmas Eve.
We lay in a hot room under a spinning ceiling fan, staring at the ceiling.
Our Christmas dinner had been a can of tuna in a dry hot-dog bun and a beer.
For the first time since the journey began, I felt a deep longing for home.
Then someone knocked on the door.
Maybe Santa Claus, I joked.
Instead, it was the hotel owner.
Would you like some Christmas food?
Moments later we followed him upstairs.
The table was overflowing with food: turkey, fish, ham, sausages, bananas, whiskey, and Coca-Cola.
There was even a small plastic Christmas tree.
Suddenly the world felt full of people again.
And I wanted to hug every one of them.
El Darién then and now
When Ed and I crossed El Darién in the mid-1980s, it was still one of the last true blank spaces on the map between continents. There were no mass migrant crossings, no permanent global headlines, no daily images shared across the world. The jungle was simply what it had always been: a brutal, lawless barrier between Colombia and Panama.
Today El Darién is in the news for very different reasons. Hundreds of thousands of people have crossed the same region in recent years, trying to reach North America. The jungle itself has not changed. It is still heat, rivers, swamps, disease, exhaustion, and fear. What has changed is who enters it, and why.
We crossed chasing a dream of cycling between continents.
Many who enter it today are chasing survival.