Well, it isn’t quite as bad as all that these days. I’ve made 17 trips to the Darien, including one trip almost of the way up the Tuira River to the Colombian border. (The Tuira is the main route through the Darien Gap on the Panamanian side.) I wouldn’t say the tribes are hostile. I’ve mostly traveled with Embera guides, and often stayed in Embera villages, and they’ve always been exceptionally friendly. (The Kuna of the area can be a pretty standoffish and rather mercenary, but I wouldn’t call them hostile either.) The main peril in the area is not Indians, but the Colombian FARC guerillas, their rightist paramilitary opponents, and occasional armed robbers. But on my last trip to the Darien a month ago, my guide told me things haven’t been too bad recently, now that Panama has put a stronger border patrol presence in the area.
The Darien Gap has been crossed by car at least 3 times that I am aware of, the first in 1959-1960, by a Jeep and a Land-Rover. I’ve met one of the guys who has done it, Col. John Blashford-Snell, who led the British Trans-America Expedition in 1972. (He was in Panama last year organizing an expedition that I had hoped to join, but it didn’t pan out.) The 1972 Expedition drove from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. It took them over three months to cross the Darien Gap, chopping a track through the jungle, winching the vehicles over gullies, and rafting them over the Atrato Swamp in Colombia.
It is true that there are parts of the Darien that are virtually unexplored. In 1997 I led an expedition to the remote Serrania de Jungurudo, which had never previously been scientifically surveyed before. When we reached are final camp near the peak, my Indian guides said even they had never been there before. They spent several hours discussing what they should call the place, because the peak had no name in their language.
While I really enjoyed Balf’s book, he rather exaggerates the difficulties of his own trip to make a better story. (I talked to one of his guides, who is an acquaintance of mine, about the trip last month.) I think Balf just wasn’t much accustomed to jungle travel. To be fair, though, the Kuna of that region have the reputation of being unusually difficult even for Kuna, and the Chucunaque presents some problems, especially logjams, not typical of the other Darien rivers.