Motorbiking from Oregon to Ushuaia, Argentina Part 2 South America Edition

So tell me, How do you go from Central to South America?

Yeah, so this is like, you know, I think one of the most defining moments of the trip.

If you talk with a lot of people who are doing this overland journey, or even just traveling by bus, that's always a question.

How did you get from Panama to Colombia? Or how did you get to South America? Yeah.

Because there is no roads.

There's no contiguous road that you can drive through that connects between North America and South America.

It's about 60 miles of dense jungle called the Darien Gap or the the tap on, it has a Spanish name as well.

Um, but for Westerners, it's in English, it still is a Darien gap and it's very nefarious for being this kind of impassable jungle for a long period of time.

And there's been many reasons why they haven't, um, connected this road partially to separate, I think like different, um, biosphere so not having like any kind of infected animal diseases coming from one continent to the other also it's a very important biosphere and it's also just incredibly difficult to build on top of a swamp land it's just endless swamps so the the the cost of building an infrastructure connected to continents would be very difficult.

So it's mainly inhabited by indigenous people who've lived there for hundreds of years, and then a lot of human traffickers and narcos.

So kind of like criminals in the depths of the jungle that run operations for the drug trade and also trafficking people.

Kind of a little spooky place, and most people would just

get on... a flight to skip it or if you have a vehicle like a car you put it in a container and it might take like one to three months and these things cost about like one thousand five hundred to maybe four thousand dollars depending on if you can share a container or not so if you talk with the motorcycle travelers or bicyclists the most common option was to go to Panama City, and then book, I think there's a company that's famous called Overland Embassy, and they will actually organize a cargo plane to put your motorcycle on and then fly it over.

So that was like the kind of option that most people consider.

And I was considering that.

But I was also intrigued by a Facebook post of some people mentioning that they were able to find their own, hire a captain from the indigenous Kuna Yala tribe.

they're like these kind of sea nomads that live out along the jungle on the ocean side.

So they actually, I saw some people successfully crossed this way and going from south to north.

So I was like, all right, well, maybe I will try the same.

And I found another French guy who was another motorcycle traveler who was interested in doing it with me.

So because I had someone else to do it with, I was like, all right, I'm going to, try to go this way, I'll also end up paying less money.

So maybe that's $800 in total versus the $1,500.

Which, you know, that $1,500 is paid for the convenience of not having to deal with all the headaches that I was about to get into for this whole two-week crossing.

It took me two weeks to cross this.

Which a lot of it started with just finding a captain.