From a reader:
Jonah,
If you’re like me you may think that the Pan-American Highway runs all the way down from Alaska into South America. On a recent trip to Panama I learned that there is indeed an impressive bridge that carries the four lane highway across the Panama Canal, but then the highway ends at the Darien Gap a couple of hundred miles south of Panama City.
The reason, a long time friend told me, is that Panama has long obstructed the completion of the road because it prefers the swamps and rugged country of the Darien Gap as a buffer against immigration (and guerilla incursions) from the south.
That said, we ran into and shared coffee with a multi-lingual Chilean (Spanish, French, English we tested, he also claimed Portuguese, Chinese and some Japanese) selling jewelry in a marketplace who credibly described walking the Gap, dodging Panamanian border guards. My friend told me that it can indeed be done in the dry season but it would take a serious survivor. The fellow said he was saving his money for a bus trip up to Mexico and that he eventually planned to make it to El Norte.