Taking adventure riding to extremes
It’s the most dangerous route through the Americas, so it’s no surprise the Darien Gap hasn’t been conquered. Until now…
The story of how the Darien Gap was conquered on two wheels
Imagine a fun off-road day with your mates the day after a heavy rain storm… Except, it’s in one of the most dangerous places on Earth and nobody’s idea of fun. Throw in eight days of 42° C heat, constant tropical downpours, the world’s most venomous snakes, poisonous spiders and swarms of diseased mosquitos. Then mix in drug smugglers, human traffickers and anti-government bandits, swamps and trench foot and you’ve got the Darien Gap. Not the best place to ride a motorcycle.
“But we had to,” said Where the Road Ends Team Leader Wayne Mitchell. “Our aim was to be the first to ride the length of the Americas in one go, from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Ushuaia, Argentina and that meant getting our bikes through the Gap.”
Off to a chilly start
Sane Pan-American riders avoid the Darien at all costs by shipping their bikes from Panama City to where the road picks up again in Turbo, Colombia. There are, however, a small handful of nutters who have taken vehicles through the Gap before. But to ride from top to bottom, including the Darien, in one fell swoop means starting the trip from the northernmost point of Alaska in the depths of winter and riding 3000 miles through ridiculously cold temperatures, just to make it to the world’s most dangerous jungle in time for the dry season. Remembering the start of the ride in Alaska, Wayne recalled: “It was brutal. The wind propelled ice and snow onto little gaps of exposed skin. The initial stinging sensations disappeared as cells started to die. We were left aching, stiff and numb on week one.”
Getting in and out again
But the frozen ride was long behind them as they sat in the Senafront Battalion Commander’s office in Yaviza – the end of the road in Panama. “Fourteen years of planning and we didn’t know if we were going to be allowed through. It took a year and a half to get permission from the governments, Guna villagers and the National Park. But Senafront (Panama’s elite border patrol rangers) recently had a shootout with drug smugglers and didn’t want to let us go,” said Wayne. After tense negotiations the commander finally agreed they could enter on condition that a patrol of 20 armed rangers would go ahead of them to the Colombian border. From there they were on their own. The team were now five days behind schedule. With no time to waste, they loaded their bikes into dug-out canoes and set off for a twoday boat ride to Paya, the last village before starting on the jungle path. As the boats docked, the guards disappeared into the trees to start their patrol and the team finally started their ride into the Gap. “One-mile into the jungle on the first day and one of the Kawasaki KLR’s clutches burnt out. The sidecars we used for the Alaska stretch put a lot of wear on them and we didn’t pack spares. We didn’t
‘One mile in and the clutch on one of the KLRs had burned out’
anticipate that they’d take such a beating,” explained Wayne. It took the team 12 hours to cover two miles that day and team member Rich Doering decided he didn’t want to push a lifeless bike the rest of the way and would slow the team down. The KLR was abandoned and Rich turned around and walked back to Paya. It was about to get a lot worse for the remaining three.
From bad to worse
“We planned on riding over dry ground but being five days late into the jungle made a world of difference. It was unseasonably wet and constantly raining hard. The ground was a swamp of muck, mud and thick tree roots,” said Wayne. The area is inhabited by traditional
natives called Guna Indians. They travel back and forth using canoes for transporting plantains and use a maze of tight footpaths. The team hired a group of 15 tribesmen as well as a local guide to help navigate, carry supplies, heave the bikes and cut through the thick jungle. “It’s so lucky we had them with us. They’re physically fit and used to working hard in those conditions. But we were still exhausted. We constantly cleared trails with machetes and chainsaws just wide enough to squeeze our handlebars through. We crashed almost instantly when we tried riding. Vines caught and snatched our bars, huge tree roots sent us flying and front tyres washed out in knee deep mud. And it wasn’t normal mud either. It was seriously sticky, creating a gluey paste of leaves, twigs and vines around the rear wheel. Even if we could ride more than 100m in one go we’d have to stop and use knives to cut it all out of the chain, sprockets and rear wheel,” said Wayne.
The crew worked 12 hours a day in 100% humidity in-between storms. And then had to set up camp by cutting more trees and clearing out three-inch long Black Palm spikes that pepper the forest. Then it’s a quick dash into netted hammocks before mosquitos feast on their skin before a few hours’ sleep with burning muscles and soggy clothes as deadly Fer-de-lance snakes slither beneath them and poisonous spiders crawl over the nets.
The final push
Two days in and the remaining three bikes have all burnt their clutches out, too. “We had no choice but to throw ropes over the motorbikes and drag them through the jungle for the next six days. Streams were always a sharp 3m drop in and a steep 4m bank going back up the other side. Heaving three 200kg machines up and down all day left our bodies exhausted. In the end we pushed the bikes into the rivers and then dragged them through the waist-high water instead. When the ravines were too big we set up pulleys and cables and ziplined our bikes across. When the banks were too steep we used a block and tackle to heave them up. It was slow, agonising work leaving us with raw trench foot,” said Wayne.
‘Be gone by morning’
“We found the Senafront patrol waiting for us in a clearing by a small cement pillar marking the Colombian border. They shook our hands, wished us luck and disappeared back into the jungle. We crossed and made our way to the village of Cristales where the locals were a little uneasy. Turned out there were 80 armed paramilitary soldiers camped close by. The villagers went to ask their permission for us to stay the night. Luckily, they accepted but warned us not to fly our drone and to be gone first thing in the morning. “A European backpacker was executed near Cristales a few years back, he was found with a bullet hole in his head. There’s been foreign kidnappings from here and decapitations too. So we were in our canoes and out nice and early.”
It’s not over yet
The team still had to negotiate the Atrato Swamp before they were safely out. In places the water was only 10cm deep, forcing the crew to get out of their canoes and drag their bikes and boats through even more muck. To add insult to injury, when they finally reached the Colombian military checkpoint they weren’t met with a hearty welcome… “Baffled soldiers had a hard time believing we had brought our bikes through the Gap. So, we ended up with a letter of reprimand from the officials for ‘illegally’ crossing into Colombia,” Wayne recalled. “We’d dreamed of riding off into the sunset, but instead had three broken bikes, another somewhere in the jungle, trench foot, exhaustion and a few angry officials. We probably only rode five miles in total and spent 22 miles pulling by hand and leaving the remaining 75 miles to canoes and swamp land. The biggest challenge was pushing all day without knowing how much further we had to go, with each mile taking an eternity. Physically, we were done. But it was a tremendous sense of relief having made it through the Gap. Now all we had to do was get from Colombia to Argentina… we only had five months off work, after all.”
‘Vines caught our bars and roots sent us flying’