I walked green miles of jungle I walked through yellow miles of pain I crossed starvation’s desert Watched dead rivers swell with rain The song of insects filled the air Nights and days of despair where a killer’s son says “son beware”
Rollins Band, ‘Illumination’, 2000.
THE DARIEN GAP, it’s safe to say, is not up there on many people’s holiday-destination bucket list. This vast, godforsaken tract of jungle, swamp and mountains located between Panama and Colombia is most noteworthy for being the only real interruption to the circa-30,000km pan-American highway network linking Alaska to the southernmost tip of South America. It’s a stronghold of wilderness where the cloying air is thick with insects and vampire bats; the swampy ground riddled with deadly snakes; dense foliage concealing aggressive wild pigs. You’ll search in vain for a Contiki resort in the Darien.
It was the perfect place, then, back in 1972, to show the world the capabilities of the then-new Range Rover, launched just two years earlier. The Darien Gap was by far the most arduous part of an epic pan-American journey taken by two lightly modified examples, beginning in Anchorage, Alaska, and finally concluding, just over six months later, in Ushuaia, on the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in Argentina.
This story is from the October 2020 edition of Wheels Australia Magazine.
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This story is from the October 2020 edition of Wheels Australia Magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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