The Darién Gap: What to know before you go.
Wait… Maybe don't go…too late…
We went!
Inside the Darién Gap,
one of the world’s most dangerous jungles…!
“Ignorance is bliss”. I’ve heard that said all my life. Reality struck this week when reading on line about our location in the jungles of Panama. I am going to share now, what I am sooo glad I did not know…when we headed up the Pucuro river to our Kuna village near the Colombian border in the Darien Gap!
It all started the day we drove the Pan-American Highway, which is an epic 19,000-mile route that starts in Alaska and terminates in Argentina. It’s continuous except for a small section missing along the southern border of Panama, often referred to as one of the most inhospitable places on the planet — this is the Darién Gap.
It’s 66 roadless miles of dense, mountainous jungle and swamp filled with armed guerillas, drug traffickers, and some of the world’s most deadly creatures covering the border of Panama and Colombia.
Just to mention few:
· Fer-de-lance pit vipers (killed regularly)
· Drug traffickers and FARC armed guerillas ( FARC kidnapped and killed our three missionary men out of our Kuna village homes)
· Brazilian wandering spiders (pictured above; one made its way onto my sheet hanging on the clothes-line and then was carried into my house!)
· Black scorpions (it took Ralphs size 14 army boot to kill the one under our bed!)
· Jungle heat and dirty water (95 degrees and 95% humidity!)
It brings me great comfort to know that God withheld this information from me. The Gap is most famous for: Things that will kill you.! Who knew?? The list of deadly things inside the Gap is lengthy, and dehydration and starvation are the least of the obvious concerns. Instead, there were very real threats.
The lawlessness and lack of residents made the Darién Gap a perfect path for drug traffickers of cocaine, fentanyl and etc. They passed through our village, using the trail about 18’ from our house! We had no idea who these strangers were and would offer food, drink and a place to sleep the night. Always with the intent of presenting Christ in the course of the evening.
Active since 1964, FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces) armed guerillas dropped in by helicopter one day to terrorize us into leaving. A backpacker from Sweden was shot in the head in 2013 and found two years later. Multiple others have been kidnapped for weeks or months after venturing into the Gap.
Everything in the jungle is giant sized! Spiders fill the jungles of the Darién Gap, but one of the most threatening is the Brazilian Wandering spider. “You’re going to have a really bad day if this bites you!”. This family of spiders (there are more than one!) has a leg span of five to seven inches. They wander the jungle floor at night and love to hide in people’s hiking boots, logs, sheets(!) and banana plants. Bites from this spider can cause death in 2 to 6 hours.
Jungle scorpions look like they’re from another planet. The black scorpion calls the Darién Gap home. The one I killed under our bed was 9’-11’ long! They live under rocks and logs and hunt for larvae and cockroaches at night.
The Darien Gap boasts of malaria carrying mosquitos, burrowing Botflies, Chiggars galore, an unreal volume of disease-carrying ticks, blood-sucking vampire bats, flesh-decaying trench foot, even undetonated Cold War bombs! And let’s not forget the river crocodiles (I never saw one)…and snakes that hide in the massive tree trunks that grow into the river’s edge.
Even the trees teach a lesson to be learned, as the 8” spikes on the Chunga tree demonstrate. One brush against its spiny exterior introduces all kind of infecting bacteria, plus, a wound full of embedded spines.
So, the Darién Gap sounds downright peachy to visit, doesn’t it?
My husband used to talk to me, his “little much afraid”, before our first trip to Panama, about Jesus sending out the seventy-two with specific instructions to “count the cost” and then, he reassured me that they were “given authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm (them) you.” Luke 10: 19
With that promise we went and it was better than “peachy”…
It was the beginning of a journey with God that changed my life…
~Jackie Johnson - I am a former tribal missionary to the Kuna Indians on the Colombian border in Central America. Fluent in several languages, my husband and I currently pastor a Spanish-speaking church in Southern California. My passion is mentoring and equipping dedicated young women for life, marriage, motherhood, and beyond. I am the mother of two daughters and the grandmother of three Princesses and four young Knights.
