Ever thought of driving from the top of Alaska to the bottom of South America? Technically, through the Pan-American highway (a linking of various major highways throughout North and South America) you can do that. Except you can’t…

See, the road ends in Panama. A thick jungle wildnerness called the Darien Gap keeps would-be motorists from making the crossing entirely by vehicle (it hasn’t stopped some, who I presume have continued the trip by taking their car on some sort of boat, here’s a lowdown on that process for inquiring minds). On the other side of the Gap is Colombia and in between is all sorts of danger with various rebels and pirates lurking, not to mention the millions of other things that can go wrong in the jungle for the uninitiated (which makes up about 99.9% of the people reading this I presume).

So when I heard that a friend of mine was making a trip to Panama and heading south towards Darien, I had to loan him a camera. My instructions – take pictures of the road! Google Maps hasn’t got around to covering Panamanian roads yet, and these particular roads are rarely traversed by tourists (those willing to try to ship and automobile past the Darien have to do so nearer to Panama City – they don’t get this far down the road).

The following pictures offer a unique glimpse of the highway in one of the more remote and mysterious places in the Americas – the Darien Province…