Ever traveled somewhere just to stay in lodging that made you go “Wow!” as soon as you saw it? I have, charmed by the architecture or the amenities or the once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience a night in a treehouse or a castle or a location I recognized from a movie. With that in mind, Airbnb has a category called OMG, featuring what it calls “unique abodes”—and indeed, there are dozens to choose from that will make you marvel. I picked out nine from around the world that are weird, wonderful, and might make your next trip one of the most adventurous yet.

1. Sleep in a Tower Above the Sea, Panama

You’ll have amazing views of the Caribbean from this four-story structure, located in the tropical Panamanian archipelago of Bocas del Toro. Explore area mangroves, surf the nearby Carneros point break, birdwatch—you’ve got the ideal hideout—for the more than five dozen native species, or just gaze downward into waters frequented by fish, stingrays, and dolphins. Head inland to catch a glimpse of anteaters, sloths, monkeys, and bats. A dinghy will transport you the short distance offshore to this unique tower, which sleeps up to five people. Plan to visit during the drier months, typically January through May and September through October, and pack quick-dry clothing for any surprise showers.

2. Snuggle Up in a Snow Igloo, Finland

Immerse yourself in the landscape of Lapland with a stay at this igloo, located adjacent to a lake and PyhĂ€-Luosto National Park, and created winter after winter by the family that rents it out. You and up to three others will have your own bed—but come prepared for the cold, with your own sleeping bag and adequate thermal wear, because below-zero temperatures are the norm here much of the year. (Although a nearby shared, heated house for visitors to use is available with a kitchen, toilets, and a shower.) The flip side of feeling the chill is getting to admire the northern lights, not to mention nearby cross-country trails, a downhill ski resort, and owners who work as adventure outfitters and can arrange activities in the surrounding area, including fat biking, snowshoeing, horseback riding, and ice fishing.

3. Get Grounded in This Earth Conker, Wales

It’s a metal soccer ball, a space orb, a copper conker, as Brits call it (that’s a buckeye to you and me). However you think of it, this innovative outpost offers simple pleasures amid the moors of central Wales. When the weather is wet—something that happens on the regular—you’ll need four-wheel drive to navigate the terrain. But if off-grid is what you’re after, and a routine of daily walks in the woods, past grazing sheep, and down to the small nearby town and its pub, followed by a campfire and a homemade pizza, and maybe a bath in the outdoor tub, then this remote, for up to two people will aid what ails you.

4. Play Out the Apocalypse in This Bunker, New Mexico

Step back in time, and below ground, with an overnight visit at this historic bunker outside Roswell. The site is one of hundreds around the nation built to defend the U.S. from what were perceived as serious foreign threats during the Cold War. Unfamiliar with that period and its weapons? The owners offer a full tour of the grounds, which include a 186-foot-deep missile silo and a launch-control center, the upper level now renovated to serve as lodging for two, with kitchen essentials, a grill, and shared green space above ground. Spend your evening paging through old instruction manuals and emergency operation procedures or perusing related memorabilia—one guest compared it to staying in a museum, with time to explore and gawk at points of interest like an escape hatch and blast doors—and step outdoors come nightfall to enjoy the immense starry skies, or bring your binocs to birdwatch for owls.

5. Live in a Yellow Submarine, New Zealand

Now you can sing the Beatles’ song in a place nearly perfect for the lyrics. You won’t be underwater, but the coast is a quick 30-minute drive away. Instead, this cheery North Island sub is surrounded by a sea of green: forested farmland 100 miles north of Wellington. From its Beatles-themed bathroom and porthole windows to the bunk-bed quarters for four and more dials and levers than you’ll know what to do with, these creative confines have charmed many an overnight guest.

6. Hang Out in the Belly of a Snake, Mexico

Likely one of the most popular picks on Airbnb, this half-serpent, half-bird, designed to resemble its eponymous Aztec god, is typically booked out months in advance. One look at its imaginative and organic design will explain why: its shape, detailed mosaic tilework and ceramic details, colored-glass windows, an open-air shared deck in the snake’s mouth, and thoughtful landscaping (both inside and out) make this a mythical, one-of-a-kind experience, as many visitors have attested. Located within a 40-acre gated community west of Mexico City, Quetzalcoatl’s Nest consists of ten residences—you’ll be staying in one in the belly of the beast, which can sleep up to six people. Getting there requires a car or an Uber, but the property’s expansive natural surrounds, open spaces, and native wildlife will tempt you to just hang out on-site.

7. Float Your Campsite, the Netherlands

Motor your platform raft around a lake and canals until you’ve found just the right spot to moor for the night. You and a partner can fish, swim, birdwatch, and enjoy as much of a hermetic natural getaway as you like, far from any and all annoying campers, with this raft setup. What’s provided: a tent, a small camping kitchen and a makeshift table and chairs, a portable toilet, and a buoyant pallet with an attached outboard engine. The rest is up to you. Just 30 miles north of Amsterdam, this region is an ideal respite for a quiet weekend, with opportunities to explore nearby windmills, tulip fields, and the dunes of Bergen aan Zee, ten miles west on the North Sea coast.

8. Embrace a Box with a View on the Riviera, Italy

Such simplistic quarters are not what you’d expect to find on the Italian Riviera. But we can’t all afford to stay in a pastel-colored palazzo overlooking the sea. Small and bare-bones, this is. But how much time will you stay holed up in your StarsBox, when the beach is just minutes away by foot and you’ve got an adjacent (albeit shared) swimming pool, hot tub, and sauna at your disposal? We’d argue that, if anything, these digs will prompt you to make the most of your outdoor time. After all, you didn’t come to this part of the Mediterranean to stay indoors.

9. Commune with Animals at a Biosphere, Bolivia

Just outside one of Bolivia’s most populated cities, Cochabamba, is a beetle-shaped structure set in an agricultural area and backed by the Andes mountains. The owners provide breakfast and then leave to you go about your day—you can hike the foothills, hop the bus into town, or organize a day trip to explore nearby Tunari National Park. But La Biosfera, with its clean, white, modern design and laid-back vibe, tends to keep guests lingering around the property. Wake up to birdsong, do some yoga by the lake, and wander the grassy grounds to encounter free-roaming llamas, peacocks, geese, and other domesticated animals. Shop the local market and then wind things down by the fire pit. Or bring friends for a trip that combines relaxation with high-altitude trekking. That’s how we’d do it.

Tasha Zemke has traveled extensively around the U.S. and the world and has outgrown her desire to camp on a thin blow-up mattress. Airbnbs have become her accommodation of choice, and she spends hours looking for those with notable architecture.ÌęShe recently stayed at a shotgun-style home in New Orleans, where the city’s famous chicory coffee was stocked in the pantry, the nation’s oldest continually functioning streetcar was steps from the front door, and a favorite local shave-ice stand was two blocks away.

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Every match the Wigudun Galu volleyball team competes in is like a party. Beneath the hot Panamanian sun, players laugh and gossip, some wearing vibrant jewelry or sporting iridescent manicures. Their partners root for them from the sidelines, drinking beer and listening to music. “When people see us play, they are happy,” Joamir Mojic, 29, says from his home in Panama City. “It makes me feel like we’re part of society, because people accept who we are.”

The volleyball team was founded in 2018 by the , a nongovernmental organization comprising people from , an Indigenous territory in northeast Panama where gender diversity is venerated. The Guna Nation’s origin story recounts the arrival of three brothers; one of them, named Wigudun, was said to possess both masculine and feminine spirits. By identifying themselves as Wigudun, the members of Wigudun Galu build upon an ancestral legacy of gender fluidity that predates Spanish colonial binaries.

The Wigudun Galu team quickly gained a reputation for their jovial presence as they played in various leagues around Panama City. “As long as I can remember in Guna Yala, volleyball was a popular sport, as popular as baseball, basketball, and soccer,” says association president Yineth Layevska Muñoz Avila, 40. “There were always men’s and women’s teams, but there were never Wigudun teams when I was growing up.” Despite the discrimination that trans and gender-nonconforming people commonly experience in Panama, Muñoz Avila says the Wigudun team has always been accepted by the teams it competes against.

After the pandemic cut the 2020 season short, the Panamanian government’s policies left many Wigudun players vulnerable. As COVID-19 spread across the globe, Panama implemented lockdown measures that stipulated which days citizens could leave their homes according to the sex listed on their national identification cards. The protocol , who police and civilians accused of being “out on the wrong day” as they tried to buy food and medication.

In February 2021, the lockdown was lifted, freeing up the members of Wigudun Galu to start competing again by spring. , who is from Massachusetts, became acquainted with Wigudun Galu while volunteering with the local , which distributed food kits to trans people during lockdown. “There was this switch, seeing people I had met in really difficult situations suddenly outside and jumping in the air,” the 29-year-old says of attending her first match. “It was a freedom nobody had experienced in the past year, but especially the trans population.”

Photographing the players, Katzman says, was a visual way of showing Wigudun strength in the face of adversity. “But they’re also just there to have fun,” she says.

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The scene opens with a bright red male frog making a sustained chirping sound from his shaded spot of rainforest; he’s calling for mates. But soon another male enters his patch. Extreme close-ups show their huge moony eyes meeting, their glossy little snoutsÌętwitching in anticipation. “Nothing for it but to fight it out,” Attenborough says, and the frogs lunge at each other. Sticky hands are thrown, leaves fly, and one frog tosses the other over his shoulder in an undignified manner. It’s a high-stakes, slow-motion battle for dominance over a precious spot of land that will help the best frog win a mate.Ìę

Or as an expert would put it, it’s like “two gummy bears going at each other,” says , whom filmmakers consulted on how to capture the fight scene and whose poison dart frog research features in the documentary. “They don’t have claws, they don’t have teeth, they can’t really hurt each other.” The feisty personalities that come through in the frogs’ scene, she says, are not just fun little tricks of cinematography. In fact, they were exactly what made it possible to film something that looked so high-stakes in the first place (even if no one got hurt in the end).Ìę

Yang moved from Taiwan to the U.S. to pursue her PhD, studying color evolution through the strawberry poison dart frog, which she completed last year.Ìę(The documentary team got in touch in 2019.) Her work often explores sexual selection and color variation within a species, so naturally Yang was fascinated by Bocas del Toro. The poison dart frogs there have the brightest and most varied hues of any frogs in the world, appearing in a range of colors from pale blue to bright orange. The population on each island is a different shade, since they evolved in isolation from each other. The frogs’ brightness generally indicates how toxic they are, in order to warn predators. Less poisonous frogs tend to be paler with more camouflage-ready colors like green, while more poisonous frogs are familiar “don’t eat me” colors like red or orange—and have bolder personalities to match.Ìę

While getting her PhD, Yang wanted to better understand why the grape-sized frogs come in so many shades and what color means to them. One of her research methods, depicted in the third episode of Life in Color, involved creating 3D-printed model frogs which she hand-painted to resemble different colors of frogs found on each island and moved around with a remote control. She wanted to see if real frogs would react differently to each of them, and they did: it appeared that they would attack other frogs only if they were the same color. They simply ignored frogs of different shades.ÌęÌę

All of this helped filmmakers understand when frogs would be more aggressive toward each other, which was key to successfully setting up the perfect shot for Life in Color. The aim was to demonstrate just how important color was in everything the frogs did, from warning off predators to showing potential mates their fitness. Yang knew that a more toxic frog wouldn’t be shy around camera equipment, and that Solarte Island would be an ideal place to shoot because the red-orange frogs there are among the most aggressive. She also knew that the two frogs would need to be the same color if they wanted to capture a battle. But “two frogs is actually harder to get,” Yang says, “because you will want frogs that are both territorial, and in the case of a natural habitat, usually they already have their territories carved out.” The camera crew would need to locate two male frogs that were close enough to each other’s territories for a potential clash, set up the shots and lighting, and stick around long enough to hopefully see one.Ìę

As anyone who read every single article about the Planet Earth II marine iguana scene (just me?), it’s not exactly a closely held secret that most nature films take cinematic liberties to tell a story. The Life in Color team had to cross their fingers they’d witness a frog fight, but the rest of the visual storytelling was carefully planned out beforehand. The camera crew captured images like close-ups of the frogs’ pugnacious-looking little faces, and establishing shots of the intruder frog entering the scene, at different times using unobtrusive telephoto lenses. The footage could then be knittedÌętogether to create a cohesive story of two confident frogs who meet on a patch of rainforest that’s not big enough for the both of them.

But the Play-Doh-limbed fight itself plays out on screen exactly as it happened, enhanced only by slowing down certain clips for dramatic effect. In real life, you’d see two penny-sized frogsÌęmaking jerky hopping motions at each other for a few seconds. The final scene plays out over several minutes, and it’s hard not to anthropomorphize the two angry little guys by the time we have a clear victor. “They just yielded themselves beautifully to drama, to humor,” says Sharmila Choudhury, a producer on the documentary. “They’re kind of the dream subjects for filming.” For Yang, seeing the subjects of her PhDÌęresearch in a big-timeÌęnature documentary was a treat, andÌęshe loves that the film helps other people understand why her study species is cool. And there was an added bonus for Yang as a longtime Attenborough fan: “I had to pause the video and scream when I heard him say my name.”ÌęÌę

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In case you haven’t heard, minimalism is in. Everyone from Marie Kondo to #vanlifersÌęareÌępreaching the value of cutting back on clutter and replacing stuff with experiences. There’s research to back them up: a from Cornell University showed that experiential and uncommon purchases, like flights, tend to bring young people more happiness and are better remembered than material gifts. SoÌęif you’re stuck on what to get your friend, family member, or partner for the holidays this year, consider buying them a plane ticket for a trip they won’t forgetÌęŸ±ČÔstead of the latest tech that will be obsolete in two years anyway.Ìę

Given the fact that Americans receive Ìętime than workers in other countries, gifting a plane ticket seems like a risky endeavor. ButÌęsites like Gotogate or Spirit’s Flight Flex allow you to book flexible tickets, while ,Ìę, ,Ìę, andÌęÌęalso have the option to buy, gift, or transfer miles, so your loved ones can book their flights when it works best. Other companies also offer Ìęfor airline travel. The only thing left to do is to decide where to send them. These six destinations will work for whatever type of traveler you have in your life.Ìę

For the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Seeker

Sinai Peninsula, EgyptÌę

While Egypt is usually known for its history and culture, the Sinai Peninsula offers abundant . has stunning coral reefs that are home to many of the Red Sea’s 100 fish species. Experienced scuba divers should check out the Blue Hole, off the coast of Dahab, a sinkhole with crystalline water that’s more than 300 feet deep.ÌęThose who want to stay on dry land can tackle the Sinai Trail, Egypt’s first long-distance walk. Opened in 2015, the trail stretches 150 miles from the Gulf of Aqaba, just east of Sinai, thenÌętakesÌęhikers to the top of 8,625-foot Mount Catherine, Egypt’s highest peak. Note: the route takes about 14 days to complete, and all visitors must .Ìę

Best time to go: June through August
Price tag: Round-trip airline tickets to start at around $1,200 from Los Angeles and ChicagoÌęand $900 from New York City.Ìę

Boquete, Panama

One of the most noteworthy aspects of Boquete is the hike to the peak of BarĂșÌęVolcano, ±ÊČčČÔČčłŸČč’s highest point at 11,398 feet. Reaching the top of the active stratovolcano involves a strenuous eight-mile trek from the VolcĂĄn BarĂș National Park ranger station, but it’s worth it as it’s one of the few places in the world where you can see both the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea at the same time. The nearby Lost Waterfalls Trail, about 20 minutes from Boquete, in Los Naranjos, is a more moderate four-mile round-trip hike to three falls through the thick rainforest of a private nature reserve. It offers the chance for both swimming and spotting monkeys, sloths, and tapirs. Along the way to the Lost Waterfalls, stop at Los Ladrillos, a natural basalt climbing wall featuringÌętop-rope climbing on more than 30 easy-to-expert routes.

Best time to go: February through March or September through October
Price tag: Round-trip flights to Ìęstart at around $700 from Los Angeles and $800 from Chicago and New York City.Ìę

For the One Who Needs a VacationÌę

Lake Louise, Alberta

Located in Banff National Park in the Canadian Rockies, Lake Louise is the epitome of Instagram-photo tranquility, with bright blue waters ringed by soaring peaks. Along with plentiful skiing and hiking opportunities, Banff offers tons of opportunities to kick back. Banff Upper Hot Springs has mineral water rising from 1.8 miles below the earth’s crust, naturally heated to 104 degrees. OrÌę for a scenic, relaxing paddle on the lake’s turquoise waters. For a treat, book your loved one a room at the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise (from $260), which has programs in meditation, yoga, and creativity coaching.Ìę

Best time to go:ÌęLate June through mid-SeptemberÌę
Price tag: Round-trip flights to start at around $300 from Los Angeles and $500 from Chicago and New York City.

Provence, France

Best known for , Provence also caters to outdoor enthusiasts. The nine-mile Blanc-Martel Trail winds through the Gorges du Verdon river canyon, often called Europe’s most beautiful,Ìęwith views of turquoise-green water and dramatic cliffs. There’s also the three-hour PĂȘcheurs circuit trail, a moderate walk that climbs down to the water and back up again, withÌęoptions to paddle and boat along the river. Or take a tour of the blooming lavender fields at SĂ©nanque Abbey in Gordes between June and August. AndÌęof course, don’t leave without sampling rosĂ© at the famous ChĂąteauÌęde Berne.Ìę

Best time to go: March to May and September through NovemberÌę
Price tag: Round-trip flights to Ìęstart at around $650 from Los Angeles, $550 from Chicago, and $500 from New York City.Ìę

For the History Buff

Mexico City, Mexico

Museum lovers can spend days traversing the hallways of the National Museum of Anthropology, right across from Chapultepec Park, which houses one of the world’s largest collections of pre-Columbian artifacts. ThenÌęthere’s the living history: the famed , a UnescoÌęWorld Heritage site, has over 2,000 ruins, including the Pyramid of the Moon, the Pyramid of the Sun, the Ciudadela (Citadel), and the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. There’s also Templo Mayor Museum, the most prominent temple of the Mexican people, located near ZĂłcalo, the city’s main public square. More modern history can be found at the National Palace or while walking the streets of CoyoacĂĄn, home to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s colorful Casa Azul, as well as Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s house and place of death. While primarily an urban landscape, outdoor offerings abound within two hours from the city center, including hikeableÌęvolcanoesÌęlikeÌęNevado de Toluca (15,354 feet) and Iztaccihuatl (17,126 feet).

Best time to go: March through May
Price tag: Round-trip flights to start at around $250 from Los Angeles, $260 from Chicago, and $290 from New York City.Ìę

Santo Domingo, Dominican RepublicÌę

Santo Domingo is one of the Caribbean’s oldest cities and a UnescoÌęWorld Heritage site. The Zona Colonial is the town’s historical center, which includes Catedral Primada de AmĂ©ricaÌę(the first cathedral in America),ÌęFortaleza Ozama, a retired military fort, and Calle Las Damas, the oldest street in the city. About a five-mile drive from the cityÌęsits , with three open-air limestone caverns, each holding an iridescent lagoon. Even the area’s natural wonders are steeped in history: once used for ceremonies, the caves feature pottery shards and petroglyphs.Ìę

Best time to go: November through March
Price tag: Round-trip flights to Ìęstart at around $290 from Los Angeles, $250 from Chicago, and $220 from New York City.Ìę

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A scroll through Instagram is a sure-fire way to get travel-inspired. But plug those mountain townsÌęand remote islands into your Google flight search, and the logistics and costs involved can make anywhere far from a major city feel inaccessible.

But arm yourself with some insiderÌęŸ±ČÔtel, like when to book your flight and how to get creative with your connections, and you can make almost any obscure destination a reality. We consulted industry experts for their tips on getting to and from out-there locations on a budget.

Get Creative with Low-Cost Airlines and Regional AirportsÌę

There’s a where low-cost carriers offer better fares out of smaller, regional airports than large hubs. The more popular airlines dominate big airports because they can take over a terminal and service a massive amount of people daily. In this model, regional airlines find it harder to compete due to outsized brand recognition, so they turn to tiny, local airports.Ìę

“In the U.S., for example, you can save money on flying with Norwegian Airlines to Dublin out of [upstate New York’s] Stewart Airport, located an hour and a half by airport shuttle (from $20) from New York City, for a median airfare of about $385, versus flying out of John F. Kennedy Airport [on the same airline], which can cost upwards of $500,” says Steven Sintra, regional director of North America at . Carriers like Frontier and Southwest are also known for servicing smaller airports to lure customers. You don’t have to stick with one airline for your entire booking, either. According to Sintra, “Oftentimes, booking two one-way tickets on different airlines can save you money versus booking a traditional round-trip ticket.”Ìę

For your international arrival, this argument is inverted. Because flying into a smaller airport is usually your only option, direct flights from international hubs are typically sky-high. According to Jesse Neugarten, founder of budget flight-finding site , “Ninety-five percent of the time, it’s going to be more expensive to fly directly into smaller airports than bigger ones,” he says. “It’s simple supply and demand.”

The solution? Fly into a major airport and book a separate connecting flight to a smaller one. He gives the example of the Galapagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador. “Roundtrip flights from U.S. hubs to the islands run roughly $1,500 on average,” he says. “[Instead], you can fly roundtrip into Quito for $300 to $500, then book another roundtrip to the Galapagos for around $200. Just by doing that, you’ve saved [as much as] $1,000.”Ìę

Time Your Booking

Although some of the old-school advice you’ve heard, like booking late at night or on Tuesdays, has largely been discredited, timing your booking correctly is still crucial to ensuring you get the best price.Ìę

First off, start your searchÌętwo to three months in advance for domestic flights and three to five for international flights, suggests Neugarten. When you see a great fare that far out, his advice is to jump on it—it won’t last long, and you’re unlikely to find a cheaper price by waiting. He also notes that if you can be flexible, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday are the cheapest days to fly. Most booking sites, include Google Flights, have a calendar view option that allows you to compare ticket prices across days and months to quickly find the cheapest travel dates.Ìę

Time of year can also make a difference. “We typically see a decrease in median airfare for those searching for travel in January, as opposed to April or May,” Sintra says. “This is likely because they’re traveling in March or April—two of the cheapest travel months of the year.” The two most expensive months are easy to guess: July and August, where most destinations enjoy warmer and drier climes.

Save on Rental Cars

If you can’t fly into a small local airport, your other option is to fly into a large airport and make up that distance by renting a car. Between credit cards and discount memberships, there are plenty of ways to knock some cash off of your rental.Ìę

or offer some of the best discounts around. With a Costco membership ($60 a year), you get a 30-percent discount on major car rental brands such as Budget, Enterprise, and Hertz, as well as the ability to add a second driver free of charge.Ìę

Car sharing companies like , which services cities across the U.S., Canada, Germany, and the U.K., have made car rental more accessible in destinations that typically didn’t have a market for it. You can book a variety of cars and SUVs online and many car owners will even provide delivery to the airport or a convenient location. For more out-of-the-way destinations, oftentimes, your best cost-saving bet is going through local companies, like in Iceland and in New Zealand.

Make the Most of Your Layover

Traveling to distant spots—and taking advantage of those handy connections—usually means a long layover. Sintra encourages travelers to not just endure a layover, but to enjoy it. “Several airlines such as Icelandic Air, Finnair, Air Canada, and TAP offer stopover programs so strategic travelers can get two vacations for the price of one,” he says. Kayak’s recent Travel Awards Guide offers a list of top stopover destinations, including ReykjavĂ­k, Helsinki, and Panama City.ÌęSome of those airlines, like TAP (which makes pit stops in Lisbon and Porto, Portugal), even offer upgrades that let you explore the city for five days with discounts on hotels and restaurants.

If leaving the airport isn’t an option, you can still get a much-needed reprieve without stepping out of the double doors. Frequent travelers should get a credit card, such as , that includes lounge access. Or check out , a lounge-crashing app that often allows you to purchase access for rates that compete with a typical airport meal.ÌęAt other airports, you can partake in luxuries without a pass at all: Munich, Dubai, and London Heathrow are among the airports that have nap pods, beer gardens, yoga rooms, and pet parks. Ìę

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Itz’ana Resort

Belize

Opening in April, Ìęis a perfect base camp for exploring the best of Belize. Night-hike the world’s only jaguar reserve in search of the nocturnal cats? Check. Swim with whale sharks during their annual migration? Check. Sail to empty isles for private snorkeling sessions? Check. Float in the waters of the iconic Great Blue Hole? Check. Cast for wahoo lurking beyond one of the planet’s largest barrier reefs? Check. But good luck prying yourself away from Itz’ana’s lush 20-acre property. The 30-suite resort sits on the Placencia peninsula, a 16-mile-long finger of perfect white sand that separates a mangrove-lined lagoon from the Caribbean. It’s all too easy to spend your days bouncing from the , offering one of the largest rum selections in the country, to the , which serves reef-to-table snapper and conch on a deck over the azure water. From $325 —Graham Averill

Ìę

Guatemalan Highland Tour

Guatemala

In 2014, Vermont native Brendan James was working for a nonprofit in Guatemala when some locals loaned him a hardtail mountain bike and led him along ancient Maya paths weaving around Lake Atitlán. He found fast trails flowing through cool, alpine forests and a homegrown zeal for the sport that’s only flourished since. Today, Guatemala is becoming Central America’s premier fat-tire destination, with newly built singletrack and bike parks opening across the country. James now spends 150 days a year scouting those trails and leading trips for his guiding company, . This year he’s launching the , a seven-day, 96-mile cross-country epic with 29,000 feet of downhill. Along the way, you’ll follow livestock trails and old agricultural paths past 14th-century ruins, crash in small-town posadas, and relax in natural hot springs. From $2,375 —Tim Neville

Mukan Resort

Mexico

Reaching this ÌęŸ±ČÔ the Riviera Maya requires a 45-minute speedboat ride through mangrove canals, so it feels far removed from the region’s hot spot of Tulum. But there are other reasons this luxurious property stands out, namely that its ten suites, bungalows, and villas are among the very few accommodations nestled inside the 1.3-million-acre , a Unesco World Heritage site containing Maya ruins, a section of the 620-mile-long Mesoamerican Reef, and a jungle filled with diverse wildlife including 356 species of birds and 318 species of butterflies. ÌęŸ±ČÔ search of sea turtles, scout the biosphere and add threatened birds like the reddish egret to your life list, or fish for tarpon, permit, and barracuda with local guides who have plied these waters since childhood. The day’s catch is served on a dock over Sian Ka’an Lagoon. From $420 —Stephanie Pearson

Isla Palenque

Panama

Want to play out a castaway fantasy? Newly revamped , located on the pristine Gulf of ChiriquĂ­, along the country’s Pacific coast, ticks all the right boxes—with some rather exquisite enhancements. More than half of the 400-acre private island is a nature preserve that neighbors Coiba National Park, a 38-island, 673-square-mile expanse filled with dolphins, leatherback turtles, and whitetip reef sharks. First envisioned as a safari-style camp in 2012, the resort owners reinvented it last summer by constructing eight thatch-roofed casitas just steps from seven gloriously empty beaches. Spend your days exploring reefs and nearby islands like Las Piñalitas by boat, kayak, or paddleboard, or hike to archeological sites full of pottery shards and stone tools left by the island’s pre-Colombian inhabitants. Come evening dine on local favorites like °ùŽÇČÔ»ćĂłČÔ, an Afro-Caribbean coconut stew, while keeping an eye out for breaching humpbacks. If you book through our travel partner , you’ll get four nights for the price of three. From $770 for two people, all-inclusive —T.N.

The Maya Experience, Ka’ana Resort

Guatemala and Belize

Tikal, the capital of Central America’s ancient Maya civilization, was discovered in Guatemala in the mid-1800s, and its stone temples have been a popular tourist destination for de-cades. But the extensive system of roads and canals that connected Tikal to thousands of previously unknown Maya structures wasn’t uncovered until 2016, when researchers began using planes and lasers to pierce the dense jungle canopy and map what’s been dubbed the Maya Megalopolis. Fernando Paiz, whose Foundation for Maya Cultural and Natural Heritage spearheaded the research, also owns the plush ÌęŸ±ČÔ neighboring Belize. Last spring he blended his two passions to create Ka’ana’s new , a deep immersion into the ancient culture. You’ll follow guides into the jungle on the way to the 77-foot-tall temple of Cahal Pech, learn to cook traditional dishes like the citrus-marinated pork known as poc chuc, or ride in a helicopter with Paiz and marvel as he recounts how the network of structures below is just beginning to be understood by archeologists. From $1,117 for two people —G.A.

Origen Escapes

Costa Rica

This country’s pura vida energy and epic surf spots aren’t a secret. But Costa Rica still has plenty of untapped terrain. , a no-expenses-spared bespoke outfitter, specializes in taking clients to the country’s untouched corners. In December, Origen’s four owners—including Ofer Ketter, a former lieutenant in the Israel Defense Force, and expert waterman and Costa Rican native Felipe Artinano—used their years of expertise to launch the Transformational Travel Series, a group of one-to-two-week itineraries highlighting environmental responsibility and local conservation efforts. Adventurous travelers can Ìęor raft 16 miles of jungle-shaded rapids, while citizen scientists can head off the grid with top naturalists to document new species or track migrating hammerhead sharks. From $1,200 per night —Jen Murphy

Sansara Surf and Yoga Resort

Panama

While parts of Central America sometimes feel overrun with surfboard-toting gringos, Panama has maintained an undiscovered vibe, especially along the southerly Azuero peninsula. The country’s cultural heartland, this region features Spanish colonial churches, biologically diverse national parks, and some seriously great waves from December to May. Located in the sleepy village of Cambutal, Ìę11 cabanas are just steps from the Pacific Ocean, and with nearby beach, point, and reef breaks, you’re sure to find the wave you’re looking for. Choose from all-inclusive weeklong , or create your own Ă  la carte trip filled with offshore tuna fishing, snorkeling, and afternoons spent lounging in the natural pools of a nearby waterfall. No matter which you pick, the use of bikes, SUPs, and kayaks is included in your stay. From $199 —J.M.

Yemaya

Nicaragua

Political unrest in this country over the summer and fall—during which protesters clashed with security forces over government corruption—scared away so many travelers that numerous lodges and tour operators had to shutter their doors. Now, as the turmoil appears to be calming down, traveling here will help these businesses get back on their feet, and resorts that were never near the unrest are enticing visitors with deals. Consider , a 16-bungalow hideaway on the northern tip of Little Corn Island, a carless, 1.2-square-mile dollop of sand 45 miles off the mainland in the Caribbean. The property was revamped in 2017 with five remodeled luxury suites, and it’s slated to reopen in time for the winter holiday season with cut rates of $95 per night, leaving you to splurge on sundowners from the beachside bar, in-room massages, and Ìęon its 40-foot handcrafted sailboat. —T.N.

Acantilados

El Salvador

The surf-focused Salvadorean town of La Libertad has never seen anything like . The sleek 19-room boutique hotel, which opened in November, sits cantilevered over a cliff, exponentially amping the drama of the infinity pool. Surf the classic right-hand point break of El Sunzal in the morning, with or without an expert instructor, then stave off gnawing hunger at El Casco, a renovated century-old colonial house on the property that serves pupusas, tamales, quesadillas, and ČԳܱđČ”Čč»ćŽÇČő—sweet Salvadorean dumplings. In the evening, soak your tired muscles in the saltwater pools, then head to the hotel’s craft-cocktail bar for a Martini Albahaca y Sandia, a mix of watermelon, basil, and vodka. Hikers should make the 90-minute drive northwest to Ìęand summit 7,812-foot Santa Ana, the country’s highest volcano. The view of turquoise Lake Coatepeque is worth it. From $159 —S.P.

Honduran Coffee Route

Honduras

Even though crime has dropped by half over the past five years, Honduras still gets a bad rap. Wandering around the city of Tegucigalpa alone at night was never a great idea, but don’t judge a country by its capital. This fall, Central America’s second-largest nation has made it easier than ever for travelers to check out one of the things Hondurans do best: grow delicious coffee. The new Ìęisn’t a single road but a network of sustainable farms, regional tasting labs and research centers, and more than 60 lively cafĂ©s in six distinct growing regions. The maps and resources on the route’s website will help you craft your itinerary. Keep it simple by focusing on one region—like CopĂĄn, home to a magnificent tenth-century Maya city and seed-to-cup coffee varietals with hints of chocolate, caramel, and orange. Get a room at (from $124), which once catered to archeologists, and spend a morning taking a hike around Finca Santa Isabel, a 200-acre family-run coffee plantation with 85 species of birds, like white-breasted hawks and bushy-crested jays. If you’d prefer to have a guide, CopĂĄn’s Xukpi Tours can take care of housing and transportation. —T.N.

The Whole Shebang

For cyclists who want to see it all—Mexico’s Maya ruins, Guatemala’s volcano-ringed Lake Atitlán, El Salvador’s sublime surf breaks, Nicaragua’s colonial cities, Costa Rica’s jungle, the Panama Canal, and the unsung spaces in between—sign up for the Mexico City to Panama City leg of . For 2019, this 2,467-mile, 40-day van- and chef-supported portion of the 9,013-mile journey has been rerouted so that all but eight miles are paved (though paved is a relative term, so bring a comfortable bike with beefy tires). From $8,000 —S.P.

The post The 11 Best New Reasons to Visit Central America appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Filmmakers , , andÌę spent three weeks exploring the rich ecosystem of Panama. They started their journey through this Caribbean paradise inÌęBocas Del Toro, then began climbing the nearby volcanoes and other lush mountains. They finished their journey in Panama City,Ìęcapturing some amazing cityscape footage for this film. Find more from Vincent Urban on .

The post A Glimpse Into Life in Panama appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

“Huelo chilingos,” the boatman shouts over the drone of an outboard motor. I smell migrants.

I turn around and see nothing but a wall of dark, unruly jungle, then I slump back into the bow of the canoe. Five days we’ve been out here, waiting for a group of foreigners to appear on this godforsaken smuggler’s route in the DariĂ©n Gap, and all we have to show for it is sunburn and trench foot. Our search is starting to feel futile.

For centuries the lure of the unknown has attracted explorers, scientists, criminals, and other dubious characters to the Gap, a 10,000-square-mile rectangle of swamp, mountains, and rainforest that spans both sides of the border between Colombia and Panama. Plenty of things here can kill you, from venomous snakes to murderous outlaws who want your money and equipment. We’ve come to find the most improbable travelers imaginable: migrants who, by choice, are passing through the DariĂ©n region from all over the world, in a round-about bid to reach the United States and secure refugee status.

As traditional pathways to the U.S. become more difficult, Cubans, Somalis, Syrians, Bangladeshis, Nepalis, and many more have been heading to South American countries and traveling north, moving overland up the Central American isthmus. The worst part of this journey is through the Gap. The entire expanse, a roadless maze that travelers usually negotiate on foot and in boats, is dominated by narco traffickers and Cuba-backed guerrillas who’ve been waging war on the government of Colombia since 1964. Hundreds of migrants enter each year; many never emerge, killed or abandoned by coyotes (migrant smugglers) on ghost trails.

Our attempted trip is possible only because we’re traveling with the permission of (FARC), the Marxist rebels who control access to the most direct line through the Gap—an unmarked, 50-mile, south-to-north route that’s also used to move weapons and cocaine. Following months of negotiations, FARC commanders based in Havana have agreed to let us attempt the trek and visit a guerrilla camp, so long as we keep the main focus on migration, not politics. After five decades of fighting, at a cost of more than 220,000 lives on both sides, FARC and the Colombian government are in the final stages of a peace deal that would end Latin America’s longest-running insurgency. No more complications are needed.

Having spent the better part of a week idle in Bijao—a ramshackle hamlet on Colombia’s Cacarica River, which a group of migrants is said to be approaching—we’re restless. So today we traveled three hours by boat to visit FARC rebels on an adjoining waterway. An entire morning was spent hacking through spider-infested mangrove swamps to reach their camp, only to be told that our scheduled interview is off because they don’t have their uniforms with them.

We are on our way back to the village, cursing our bad luck, when the boatman repeats himself.

“Huelo chilingos.”

“Bullshit,” I sigh.

“No, man, he’s right—I think I saw an elbow,” says , a Chilean photojournalist who’s traveling with me. Carlos, 50, has a knack for busting my balls at the worst moments, but he’s already standing up, camera in hand. Roger Arnold, a 48-year-old videographer I met in Afghanistan, who’s along to film our trip for a TV newsmagazine in Australia, is poised right beside him.

We round a bend and there they are: two Bangladeshis, bent over, sloshing forward in waterlogged rubber boots. They give us a nervous grin, thumbs up. Twenty yards ahead of them, a big, shirtless Colombian coyote is towing a canoe that contains another half-dozen migrants. Several Nepalis slog alongside.

I catch up to explain that we’re journalists, but none of the men speak much English. Nor do they believe what I’m telling them.

When I ask Arafat, a 20-year-old construction worker from the Noakhali district in southern Bangladesh, if his goal is to reach the United States, he shakes his head. “No, no. Tourist,” he says, patting his chest. “Problem?”

There’s no problem, I assure him as I approach the canoe, which is nearly scraping the bottom of the low-running river. Arafat’s friend Jafar leans back and laughs behind a pair of knockoff gold Ray-Bans. “Yeah, man!” he says. “Panama!” More thumbs up.

This tourist charade soon falls apart. A pudgy Bangladeshi man named Momir, his face ghoulishly pale from fever, rejects the coyote’s order to get out of the boat when it runs aground. Arafat shows us a large gash on the bottom of his foot and refuses to walk any farther. The men are weak from days of traveling in muggy, 90-degree temperatures, subsisting on crackers andÌęgulping river water. And they are scared. For all they know, we’re Colombian authorities about to arrest them, or bush thugs ready to strip them of their remaining cash, stitched inside the liningÌęof their pants.

Jafar starts to cry, triggering an outburst of desperate pleas from the men. They flash scars on their wrists and stomachs; one is missing part of a finger. “Bangladesh politics,” a man named Nazrul says ruefully as he drags a hand acrossÌęhis neck.

During a three-month stint reporting in Bangladesh in 2013, I became familiar with its cutthroat political gangs and dismal working conditions. Activists, journalists, and opposition members are often hacked to death in public. Rising water levels are drowning farmlands. Rural laborers flock to hyper-crowded cities for work and find themselves locked in the bowels of unlicensed garment factories, toiling for 20 cents an hour.

It’s easy to understand why any sane person would leave such grim prospects behind. Harder to grasp is how these men ended up on the southern edge of the DariĂ©n Gap, half a world away from home, without the faintest idea of the grueling trials ahead. Their willpower is amazing, but the Gap’s shadowy depths have swallowed travelers far more prepared. AsÌęwe continue upriver together, it seems just as well that they are ignorant of the dangers.

is a remarkable feat of engineering that runs about 19,000 miles from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Ushuaia, Argentina, with just one break in the pavement: the DariĂ©n Gap. Also known as El TapĂłn (“the plug”), it can’t be bypassed on land. It’s roughly 100 miles wide, stretching all the way from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean. It has long defied the advance of colonists, road builders, and would-be developers.

The Gap’s legend as a black zone is steeped in bloodshed and tragedy. After Spanish conquistadors discovered the region in 1501, they consolidated their first mainland colony in the Americas by slaughtering tens of thousands of natives, often by turning ravenous dogs loose on villages. The Spanish conquered the Amazon and the Andes but eventually gave up on taming the Gap, which became a bastion for pirates and runaway slaves. In 1699, more than 2,000 Scottish colonists perished from malaria and starvation, and in 1854 nine explorers died from disease and exposure on a U.S. Navy survey expedition, scuttling plans for a grand canal project through the isthmus. In more recent times, efforts to build a road link have foundered because of fears that foot-and-mouth disease could spread and devastate the U.S. beef industry, and because of resistance from the Kuna and Embera-Wounaan Indians who inhabit the rainforest.

The absence of any controlling authority in this wilderness has given free rein to armed groups. A military branch of FARC known as the 57th Front calls the shots around much of Colombia’s Chocó Department—a dirt-poor sliver of land in northwestern Colombia that overlaps the Gap and is one of the wettest places on earth—and often moves freely back and forth across the porous border with Panama, a vital transit area for arms shipments and the cocaine exports that fund its war chests.

In the early years of Colombia’s civil conflict, adventurers could still move through the Gap by foot, motorbike, or four-wheeler. The first vehicular crossing was achieved in 1960 by a Jeep and Land Rover expedition, at an average speed of 220 yards per hour over 136 days. George Meegan of England went even farther, getting shot at in the Gap during an unbroken trek across the Western Hemisphere that he started in 1977. In the eighties, a British adventure travel company offered multiweek treks through the Gap. But by the mid-nineties, the prevalence of armed groups led to a plague of kidnappings, disappearances, and murders that put an end to such trips.

In 2000, two Brits, Tom Hart Dyke and Paul Winder, were taken hostage by FARC guerrillas while searching for rare orchids. They were held for nine months and threatened with execution before being released unharmed. In 2003, Robert Young Pelton, author of , and two backpackers were held for more than a week by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the formally demobilized right-wing militia that was once the largest paramilitary group in the country. In 2013, Jan Philip Braunisch, a Swedish traveler attempting to cross the Gap alone via the Cacarica River—our planned route—vanished in FARC territory. It later emerged that he was killed by a shot to the head.

Since the late aughts, U.S. authorities say, FARC has increasingly relied on the DariĂ©n corridor to smuggle drugs north as traditional air and sea routes have been clipped. Fierce competition for massive drug profits has also fueled the rise of neo-paramilitary groups that terrorize the region with wanton killings and armed assaults. The most powerful is the Clan Úsuga, a.k.a. Los Urabeños, a vicious gang made up of ex-AUC members. Seizing control of lucrative routes along the Caribbean coast, Los Urabeños has used its links with Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel to expand its presence around the country and challenge FARC in parts of ChocĂł.

When migrants began turning up near the border, both groups started using well-worn drug-smuggling routes to move human traffic for money. Over the past ten years, this flow has swelled to a steady stream as the standard maneuvers for reaching or rooting in the U.S., like overstaying a visa, have become tougher to execute. Cubans, lured by the promise of political asylum upon hitting American soil, account for most of the migrant flow, preferring the lesser known path through Central America to the familiar perils of the Florida Straits. But they are rivaled by a rising tide of Haitians, Somalis, West Africans, and South Asians.

Though it’s impossible to know the precise numbers, Panama saw 25,000 illegal arrivals last year, more than three times the number that came through in 2014. (Of these, about 20,300 were Cubans.) By late May of this year, another 8,000 migrants had passed through the Gap.

The fact that so many people would undertake such a long-shot journey caught my eye and Carlos’s well before we knew each other. Back in 2006, he was reading a newspaper in Bogotá when he saw a story buried in the back pages: a boatload of Chinese migrants had been captured in the Gap. During one of the half-dozen trips Carlos has since made in the region, he came upon the decomposing body of a Cuban migrant on a jungle trail. On another, he was stunned to pass a boat full of Somalis and Bangladeshis on the Cacarica. Smugglers ultimately turned him back, but the incongruous scene lingered in his head.

An had the same effect on me. It described how growing numbers of U.S.-bound migrants are flying or taking cargo vessels to Brazil and Ecuador, countries with lax visa and asylum requirements, then heading overland to Colombia on backcountry buses. Those with the means and a passport hire boats to bypass the jungle and reach Panama by sea; the rest take their chances running the Gap. In Panama they’re detained for background checks. So long as their names don’t turn up on international terror watch lists—which I was told has never happened—they are released to keep heading north.

These migrants are a fraction of the more than 65 million people that the United Nations estimates are now in flight because of war, persecution, and terror, the largest such displacement in human history. There are refugees in peril all over the world: Syrians seeking safe haven in Turkey, West Africans traversing the Sahara en route to Europe. But the Darién Gap is the global migration story in extremis. What could possibly possess someone to enter it?

By land or sea, the main jumping-off point for crossings into Panama is Turbo, a dodgy Colombian port town on the Gulf of Urabå that has a bad reputation for violence. Once a FARC stronghold, Turbo became a battleground in the late 1980s when paramilitaries took over. We had been scheduled to travel there in early April, but we had to delay when Los Urabeños, excluded from peace talks with the government, called for a 24-hour strike to show that it still runs this part of the country. All public transport and shops shut down; streets emptied. Three policemen and an army captain were shot dead, presumably after the gang announced a reward for killing authorities. A group of traffic cops were injured by a grenade.

A month later, on May 6, we checked in at our residencia on a balmy morning. From a balcony overlooking a shaded plaza that has hosted many a drunken machete fight, I watched fishermen mend their nets while others played cards. Horse-drawn flatbed trailers bearing grains and bananas—the region’s chief legal cash crop—whipped by in a flurry of hooves. Turbo, the northern terminus of the Pan-American Highway in South America, is home primarily to darker-skinned Afro-Colombians, descendants of slaves brought to work in agriculture and mining in the 1500s. I didn’t see any migrants among them.

Lying in a hammock, with two German shepherds nestled at his feet, the motel’s manager, Juan Montero, explained that Urabeño smugglers usually charge between $500 and $700 to shuttle a migrant from here to Panama, a five-hour trip in a leaky boat. Alternatively, some migrants opt for a harder, cheaper inland route that starts at the coastal town of CapurganĂĄ or Sapzurro and goes through a series of hamlets thatÌędot DariĂ©n National Park, which covers a large part of the central and west side of the Gap. Because there is no Colombian border facility nearby where captured migrants could be sent, Panamanian authorities have typically allowed them to pass.

One week before our arrival, however, the immigration office in Turbo began granting migrants exit papers to bring the traffic aboveground. Now they could openly buy boat tickets to CapurganĂĄ and Sapzurro. From there it’s a short boat connection or hike to La Miel, in Panama. Those without documentation might still hire coyotes to take them up the longer jungle route, which is also a major Urabeño drug-trafficking path. The gang is known to forcibly conscript migrants as mules—and sometimes dispose of them.

At a moss-cloaked graveyard on the edge of Turbo, several tombs were scrawled with “N.N.” (no name), in drab contrast to the colorful encomiums locals left for loved ones. Montero told me that most of the dead were Somalis who had been robbed and tossed overboard by ruthless coyotes. On a 2014 trip to AcandĂ­, an Urabeño-dominated town across the gulf from Turbo, Carlos had photographed the tomb of Roberto Tremble, a 33-year-old Cuban murdered by smugglers.

Cubans still accounted for most of the migrants, Montero said. “Many doctors,” he noted. Until recently, they flew to Ecuador, one of the few countries that have no visa requirement for tourist stays. But Ecuador had changed its policy, and Cubans were now coming in waves from Guyana, which was their last legal beachhead in South America.

In a video shot on Montero’s smartphone, Miguel, a ropy old Habanero, touted Cuba’s free health care and education but grumbled that his salary was not enough to buy shoes. “We are a country bounded by water and we don’t have enough fish for the people,” he fumed. “Populist socialism is terrible.”

Another Montero video showed a group of Nepalis hunched over paper plates in the same room we were now in. Authorities had caught them and brought them to Montero’s for a meal before deportation. “Of course, I never called customs on any of the ones who stayed here, because I don’t agree that those looking for a better life should be sent back,” Montero said. “Their motivation is incredible.”

Montero’s place was currently empty of migrants, so he directed us to the Hotel Goodnight, a flophouse located several blocks away, past bars and pool halls full of guys who threw us bloodshot stares. In the second-floor lobby, I found two Haitian teenagers thumbing WhatsApp on their phones. I introduced myself. One immediately exited down the hallway; the other refused to look up.

A third man was smoking on the balcony. He told me his name was Jackson Wilner and that he was a mason from Cap Haitien looking for work in Turbo. When I pressed him on how he planned to get to Panama, he stuck to his script. On my way out, I noticed that the door to his room was ajar. Looking in, I saw four people lying on a single bed. Three more were asleep on the floor.

Before dawn the next morning, we headed down to the docks. A boat was leaving for CapurganĂĄ, and Montero was sure it would draw migrants into the open. He was right. In the dim light, I could see men milling around. They turned out to be Haitians, Nepalis, and Pakistanis.

Zia ul-Haq, who I talked to on the dock, was the lone Afghan in the group. Twenty-six and slender, with thick brows hanging over forlorn eyes, he told me in halting English that he learned the language by watching bootleg DVDs: the Fast and Furious series was a favorite. He hailed from Nuristan, a remote, beautiful, and violent pocket of mountain ridges plied by fierce tribesmen. Zia’s uncle worked as a translator for U.S. forces, and the family moved to Kabul when Taliban death threats intensified. His uncle was eventually relocated to the United States. Zia applied twice for a visa to follow him, without luck. “Day by day it was getting worse, so I took this journey,” he said. “If someone’s life is in danger, they will do everything for themselves.”

Dubai. São Paulo and the Brazilian Amazon. Peru. Ecuador. Colombia. For the past two weeks, Zia had been dodging police shakedowns, riding back roads in chicken trucks, slipping across borders after dark. From here he would head by boat to Capurganá and then Panama or walk through the jungle; he’d heard the hike was anywhere from two to four days. He confessed to having no idea how to navigate the minefield of gangs, authorities, and six borders that would still lie between him and the U.S.

His provisions: cookies, energy drinks, and $90 in cash. He’d spent more than $1,500, paying for one leg of the trip at a time, to get this far. For protection he carried a booklet of Koranic verse in his front pocket. Zia’s goal was to join his uncle in Las Vegas and one day enroll in medical school. “The U.S. is a safe country,” he said. “They love peace, so we are trying to get there.”

I reminded him that anti-immigrant sentiments were rising in the U.S. Was he worried he might not be welcome?

“It’s a long way still,” he said after thinking it over. “Maybe the Americans have their limits. But there is no way of knowing.” He paused. “I just want a good life. No more feeling scared.”

By 9 A.M., with the equatorial sun arcing overhead, there was a hum of fellow travelers and commerce. I spotted Jackson, the Haitian from the hotel, clutching a black trash bag that contained all his belongings. He was with the two teenagers, and they all avoided making eye contact with me. Hawkers were peddling ponchos and Chinese-made headlamps for $5 a pop beneath a sign from the municipal tourism board that read: Buen Viaje! Have a good trip!

A large motorboat arrived; names were called and life vests distributed. I gave Zia my card and shook his hand. “Get in touch when you make it to Vegas,” I said. Squeezed in among the migrants were backpackers from England, Australia, Japan, and Brazil, who would soon be drinking coconut cocktails on the same beaches that some of these refugees would tramp across.

From the edge of the dock, I watched the boat rumble into the channel. Some of the travelers were snapping selfies. The Nepalis waved. Zia did not look up. He was holding his Islamic traveler’s booklet in his palms, head bowed, asking for protection.

The next day we met “Angela,” an emissary sent by the FARC bosses in Havana. She was in her mid-twenties and had heralded her arrival by texting suggestive pictures of herself. Sucking a lollipop, she told us we had to travel to a town a half-day up the Atrato to meet our primary rebel contact in the Chocó—her father, Elber. We were assured the route was OK, though we would have to pass army checkpoints and Urabeño strongholds along the way.

Choppy seas on the open gulf sent our panga skipping and diving through sheets of salt spray. At the first of two military stops, Colombian soldiers questioned locals headed to inland villages and outbound Cubans with exit papers. We turned southwest and the water narrowed into the Atrato, whose vast wetlands comprise half of Los Katíos National Park, a Unesco World Heritage site. Birds-of-paradise tumbled down its banks and birds of prey soared above us. In the near distance, rain clouds bearded the jungle-clad hills that marked the frontier. While efforts by authorities to combat illegal logging and overfishing have removed the park from the UN’s list of endangered natural places, visitors are scarce. Chocó is Colombia’s poorest department, with a high-stakes drug trade that has FARC and the paras clashing over key routes that run off the river highway.

At the aptly named Riosucio (“dirty river”), we switched to a smaller canoe manned by tough-looking guys with facial tattoos. It was another hour to our destination, Domingodo, a dead-end village where we would spend the next three days making arrangements for our foray into the heart of the DariĂ©n Gap. A mestizo woman was hacking open tortoises for stew; pigs rooted around for scraps in muddy alleyways. From end to end, shack-rattling salsa thumps blasted from bar speakers that never went silent, day or night.

Our host, 50-year-old Elber, wore athletic shorts and carried no weapons, but he was FARC to the core. Burly yet soft-spoken, Elber has served as a political operative for three decades in the dispossessed, largely black communities of the Chocó. Early one morning, he invited us to a “political” meeting at a derelict sawmill in the midst of banana palms and sugarcane fields. Industrial saws were rusting away, half-covered, on a rotted platform. The sawmill was opened in the early 2000s, with government funding, as an alternative to coca trafficking, but support ran dry. No one knew how to operate the machinery, a failure of top-down planning that Elber said was emblematic of government neglect in the Chocó. He presented a case to those assembled for reviving the mill, but swarming mosquitoes made listening too difficult.

Later that afternoon, Elber announced that the commander of the 57th Front, Pablo Atrato, was ready to receive us at his hideout, another half-day up the river. With FARC slated to begin disarming in the coming months, this was a timely opportunity to discuss the tricky business of peace. In the 1990s, a nascent hard-left political party called the Patriotic Union was ravaged by paramilitary death squads allied with government security forces. More than 4,000 members and supporters were killed, including two presidential candidates. FARC’s command has repeatedly delayed the process to avoid the same fate.

Meanwhile, we had a new concern: on May 9, Panama abruptly closed its border with Colombia to stem the flow of migrants. We were hearing that people in transit to the U.S. were being turned back in drovesÌęalong the CaribbeanÌęcoast. The odds were that they would have to push deeper into the Gap and then turn north, making them difficult to find. We climbed into our canoe and set course for Bijao, a traditional junction for migrants on the Cacarica River.

A late start forced us to overnight in Puente America, where a bartender told us that no migrants had come through in weeks. But in a vacant schoolhouse by the water, we found a gallery of graffiti. Rahim from Pakistan had been here, along with Ahmed from Ethiopia and Yahya from Kenya. The walls were scrawled with national pride and nostalgia for home. “Ghana 50 Cent and his group moving to USA.” “God help us, we are on the way to USA.” “God bless Sierra Leone.” “Enjoy the journey.”

Turning up the Cacarica later that morning, the Atrato’s big sky was replaced by dense canopy that spotlighted a fetid marshland of gnarled roots and cativo trees. Rafts of rosewood timber attested to the illegal logging operations common to the rebel-held area. The water was just a foot deep in places, forcing us to get out and push. Farther along, a stash of fresh Aguila beer crates sat on a bank, unguarded. We glided past a sign for Los Katíos fronting an abandoned visitor’s bungalow. Everyone was on edge.

A Perilous Crossing

In September, the Australian newsmagazine “” will air an hour-long segment on Jason Motlagh’s expedition through theÌęDariĂ©nÌęGap, using footage shot by Motlagh and videographer Roger Arnold. Here’s a preview.

“I’m not getting out of the fucking boat until I’m invited,” Carlos intones as we glide into Bijao village, under the gaze of naked children. We all hang back as Elber strides up the bank and greets a handsome, middle-aged black man in a tank top. We’re waved over and introduced to John Jairo, the platoon leader of the FARC guerrillas patrolling this area. With Elber vouching for us, it doesn’t matter that they were unaware of our planned visit. Word from Havana about us had not trickled all the way down the command chain.

The guerrillas are overnighting in Bijao, which is unusual. They wear plain clothes, their assault rifles stashed inside the crooked wooden homes that line the village, but it’s not hard to single them out. Close-cropped haircuts for the men; high, tight hair buns for the women. They all steer clear of us.

After we’re taken to our lodging, a blue and white structure built by the UN’s refugee agency, with a No Armas sign posted at the entrance, Elices Ramirez, the smooth-talking village representative, tells me that the guerrillas are accepted by locals, who harbor a deep mistrust for a central government in Bogotá that exists for them only in name. “They have done nothing for us,” he says. The local school sits shuttered, and with the nearest medical clinic in Turbo, a day’s journey by boat, people die of treatable illnesses like malaria and nonlethal injuries. Contraband smuggling—drugs, goods, chilingos—is rife in the area, he admits, but “we do our best to maintain order.”

Wandering around the warrens of raised shacks and dry-goods stalls that afternoon, I spot Elber standing at the center of a public gathering, calling for “justice without prejudice.” Apparently, two men had gotten into a drunken fight, and one of them nearly took off the other’s arm with a blade. An impromptu tribunal has convened to decide the man’s fate, and most of Bijao is in attendance. The accused is ultimately expelled from town by majority vote, with a warning to never return.

After dinner we’re invited to sit down with Elber and the FARC officers. I pass out cigarettes and Carlos starts to chat them up, name-dropping the commanders he knows and explaining our goal of tracking migrants. Jairo and his light-skinned deputy, Haiber, listen, motionless. I can’t read their expressions in the darkness, but their intensity is palpable.

“I have a question for you,” Haiber finally interjects, pausing for effect. “What is the meaning of chilingos?”

Laughter. No one has a clue where this slang term for migrants came from. I seize the opening to ask how long they have been guerrillas and why. Jairo, 39, says he joined at age 11, after feeling powerless watching his father labor in the fields for years with nothing to show for it but an early death. “We didn’t have a school in the community, and we couldn’t afford a pen and paper anyway,” he tells me. “I felt compelled to rise up against the corrupt state. They don’t respect you unless you fight them.”

Jairo carries a sweat towel around his neck stitched with Comando de Muerte (“death commando”) under a skull and dagger. It belonged to a government soldier, he says, adding, “It was not a gift.”

By the end of our talk, Jairo says we’re free to travel through the Gap with FARC support. No escort or formal letter of approval will be given to us. It is simply understood that we are vouched for by the guerrillas, so we are not to be fucked with. In any case, by morning the fighters would leave Bijao to “go to work.” The Urabeños were starting gun battles on another stretch of river in their latest bid to chisel their way into FARC territory.

In late February 1997, fighters with the Élmer Cárdenas bloc, a hardcore right-wing unit, launched bombs into Bijao as part of a government-led operation that sent thousands running into the bush. Marino López Mena, a local man, was captured and decapitated, his head used as a ball in a soccer game. Another boy who was captured was tied to a tree and made to watch the gruesome spectacle; he still lives in Bijao, left incoherent by mental problems.

It’s a swelteringly hot morning, and Elices walks me to the homemade memorial by the river. He fled along with his neighbors, children in tow, traveling four days across the Gap to Panama, joining the 20,000 people that he estimates were displaced from other villages swept up in the violence. Most, he says, have returned to resettle acreage that is theirs under Law 70, a 1993 ruling that granted black Colombians collective ownership of ancestral lands. But they are still wary of the threat posed by the paras and a state with a record of abetting violence.

Has Bijao’s history of war and displacement made locals more sympathetic to the migrants coming through? “Absolutely—we understand their situation, for we went through the same experience,” Elices says. “We do this as brothers, for we believe everyone has the right to live. We offer our support not because we want to make any money. It is a humanitarian action, our way to help them survive, the same way we were helped.”

When the Bengalis and Nepalis we found on the river finally do pull into Bijao to join us, a band of young hustlers is waiting on the bank, ready for business. Ten bucks for a night in the barracks where we’re staying, mosquito net included. Plus another $5 for a plate of eggs, beans, and rice. The migrants claim that they have no money but soon give in. They are adding their own names to the graffiti-covered walls, buoyed by proof that so many countrymen have been here before them, when word comes in that there’s a mango tree nearby loaded with ripe fruit. The room empties; outside, rocks and sticks start to fly. Jafar picks up two mangos, triumphant. Arafat seems to have lost the limp that was ailing him on the river. “Same like Bangladesh,” he beams, juice dripping down his chin.

Arafat says his journey began when friends back home introduced him to a broker, who he paid more than $10,000. A Brazil visa and a flight to SĂŁo Paulo were arranged, with a stopover in Doha, Qatar. From there he made arrangements to travel through Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, where he and a group he was traveling with got mugged by police.

Unknown to us, a second boat full of nine West Africans also departed from Puente America the previous night and has fallen in behind the Bengalis. When I return to the barracks after dark, five Cameroonians in alpaca-wool hats and two Togolese men are sprawled on the hardwood floor. A pair of Gambians, Ebrima Jobe and Morro Kanteh, are recovering on the porch.

“Fucking hell,” says Ebrima, the taller one, when I ask about the trip. He means the past 24 hours, when he had to cross the river at night and trudge on foot through the swamp. But his entire three-week journey has been a breathless flight from death.

For more than two decades, Gambia, a narrow country on the West African coast, has been ruled by a dictator who silences all dissent with brute force. In mid-April, a police crackdown on protesters demanding electoral reforms saw three men die in custody, including a leader of the main opposition party. This man was Ebrima’s mentor, and Ebrima, 38, heard that his name was on the hit list. With help from friends, he left his pregnant wife and two children for Dakar, then caught a flight to Madrid and from there flew to visa-free Ecuador, where he planned to apply for political asylum. On the go, he kept in touch with his family by e-mail. They were safely holed up with relatives, but he could never rest easy.

Bureaucratic snafus moved him to try for asylum again in BogotĂĄ, to no avail. So he turned his sights to the U.S. and bused to Turbo. “Now I just want to get out of here,” he tells me. “Colombia is no good.” I ask if he’s heard of the DariĂ©n Gap and he shakes his head. I describe it and he becomes somber for a moment, aware that the worst is still to come. “We will cross together,” I say, and Ebrima joins his fellows on the floor.

Our dawn departure is delayed by a dispute. The Africans roundly insist that they paid the coyotes in Turbo a flat fee to take them all the way to the Panama border; the Bijao hustlers counter that they are owed more. The migrants have no leverage out here, and the impasse ends when each migrant ponies up an extra $20. We aren’t spared, either. John and Alberto, the two porters we hired to help with our gear, are now demanding three times the agreed-upon sum—roughly $300 each.

“These people are capitalists, they make money from our misery,” Morro says later that day, as we head upriver in a sagging canoe. “I’m sick of this place.” Like Ebrima, his role as a youth leader in the Gambian opposition compelled him to flee. He scans the jungle for a while, then catches meÌęoff guard.

“Why are you here?” he asks.

I give him a boilerplate answer, but in the moment it feels hollow, even frivolous. For all my good intentions, I’m still a Western journalist getting paid to do this. What I don’t say is that my privilege was secured by the audacity of an Iran-born father who made his own long-shot gamble to reach the United States.

Back when I was a 25-year-old freelancer striking out for Africa, my father, Homayoun, drove me from Washington, D.C., to New York City to see me off at JFK. I’d always assumed he’d emigrated the way normal people do, but in the departure lounge he told me that he had been unable to secure a visa in London, where he was studying in 1973, despite having family members stateside, at a time when trouble was brewing back home in Iran. So he booked a flight to Toronto, with a brief stopover in New York. As the plane neared JFK, he feigned violent illness; flight attendants hauled him off the jet. As he was being transported to a nearby clinic, he jumped out of the vehicle and into a carÌęhis brothers had sent to pick him up. Five hours later, he was eating kabobs in Washington, D.C. He carved out a living selling used cars, and he still works long hours on cold back lots. His gamble bought me a youth free of the Islamic Revolution and mandatory army service. I attended good public schools, played baseball, and graduated from college debt-free. Now I could buy a one-way ticket to the Third World with a sure return. It was the start of a wide-ranging journey that ultimately led me to this remote river, into the void.

We disembark two hours later at the Wounaan village of Juimphuboor. I’ve never found it on any map. Women pound laundry by the water, flanked by clutches of round, thatch-roofed huts that slope up the mountainside to slash-and-burn plots. Carlos tells us to keep our cameras off and our mouths shut: those same heights were likely the last place that the Swedish traveler Braunisch saw during his fatal 2013 attempt to cross the Gap.

In 2015, nearly two years after the 26-year-old went missing, the International Committee of the Red Cross delivered his skeletal remains to state investigators. FARC later took responsibility for his death, accusing him of having been a foreign spy, partly because he was carrying a GPS and had no prior approval to travel. His bad luck was compounded by bad timing: rebels and government forces were battling it out aroundÌęthe lower Atrato River, and a cease-fire with Los Urabeños had collapsed.

Three years on, peace talks between FARC and the government present us with an opening, but drug profits have a way of breeding spoilers in the Gap, and we are unusually fat targets. In addition to our expensive camera gear, battery packs, laptops, medical kit, and communications equipment, including a sat phone and GPS, we also have lots of cash. This is a pay-as-you-go venture, and the only way out is through.

One by one, our party—20 migrants, four porter-guides—shimmy under a barbed-wire fence and into the hissing maw of jungle toward our first objective: Palo de Letras, an unmanned crossing at the crest of a mountain, which will take at least ten hours of trekking to reach. The beaten path is lined with Red Bull cans, salt packets, and the first pieces of clothing discarded in the heat. I notice a long skein of leaf-cutter ants running fragments, parallel to our foot traffic. Their solidarity casts a sharp contrast to ours, which is starting to unravel.

It’s not yet noon when we stop to rest. Momir, the overweight Bangladeshi, is on the ground pleading with our guides to carry his bag for $10. “Please take,” he groans, doubling his offer to $20. But there are no volunteers, only indifferent looks. “Throw your things away,” one of the Nepalis says with a barbed edge. Reluctantly, Momir pulls out some tissues, then a T-shirt, then some socks and mittens. Morro grabs them and puts them on.

I have an urge to strip. My clothes are soaked through, my fancy knee-high, French-made boots freighted with water. The air is almost thick enough to chew. For a boost, I stuff a plug of dried coca leaves into my cheek with a chunk of quicklime. The concoction tastes vaguely of yerba mate and provides a jolt of energy and focus that will help me navigate the endless hills and switchbacks, mud-slick ravines, and root systems that obstruct our path. I can’t help but think of Steve McQueen in , a favorite of mine. When he is chased after escaping from a penal colony in French Guiana and starts falling behind, a timely wad of coca proffered by his native escort gives him the second wind he needs.

Cevedao, our Wounaan lead guide and porter, sets the pace of a mountain goat. We hired him and another man in Juimphuboor to help with our gear and see us through to the Paya River in Panama, since indigenous people can pass freely on both sides of the border. (Our porters from Bijao, John and Alberto, are taking a well-paid gamble crossing the border anywhere near migrants, because this carries a minimum five-year prison sentence.) Morro is close on his heels, followed by the Nepalis, who stick together and move at a steady clip. The Bengalis and Africans bring up the rear.

It’s not long before Evelyn Chantal, the only woman in our party, is flat on her back gasping for air. “This is too much. But what can I do with a war going on in Cameroon and Boko Haram killing all of our brothers?” she tells me once her breath calms. A hairdresser from a restive corner of northwest Cameroon, Evelyn left home as radical militants, expelled from Nigeria, threatened to overrun her village. With gold hoop earrings, lime spandex, and a backward courier cap, her flair has endured. But she is top-heavy, saddled with huge breasts, and wearing flimsy shoes, which she tosses aside.

“I’ve never moved in this type of forest, even in Africa,” she says. “I’m very, very scared, but I have no choice. I have to struggle because I want to save my life.”

Near dusk we learn that our native porter has vanished with Ebrima’s backpack, which contains his only change of clothes, money, and ID. After some tense discussion, Cevedao, with my encouragement, agrees to go back and find the bag. OnlyÌęafter he leaves does it dawn on me that in addition to our 30-pound backpacks, one of us would have to carry the 50-pound duffel stuffed with video gear and supplies. Because I’m the only man in my group without camera duties, this falls on me.

The trail by now is littered with more precious items: jeans, blazers, backpacks. I see a random discarded letter with runny scribbles and stuff it in my pocket. With each step, the muck is pulling harder on my boots. A gathering night riot of mosquitoes get their fill of blood, and the infernal heat sucks us dry. The jungle trail, I realize, is one big alimentary canal that breaks down everything that passes through. Thickets of thorns slice my arms; a series of fallen trees forces me to crawl on all fours. This is what you get for sticking your neck out, I think to myself. Head down, chin dug into the pack on my stomach, I stumble on.

“Did you see the skull?”

I’m lying in a shallow creek trying to cool my body temperature when Roger, our videographer, drops the news: in my stupor, I’d somehow walked right past a human head on a stake. Carlos missed it, too. We walk a quarter-mile back up the trail and it’s facing us—and Panama—presumably as a warning to anyone who would dare enter FARC territory. The surface is rain-polished to a shine, the jawbone missing.

“I swear I’ve seen this in a dream, man,” Carlos says, creeping closer, wide-eyed. “This is crazy.” We snap pictures and catch up with the group, driven by energy that no coca or caffeine had previously mustered.

Three hours later, we stop to make camp. The Bangladeshis swarm around me for insect repellent. The Nepalis bathe in their underwear and complain that the Bangladeshis complain too much and don’t share. The West Africans collect banana leaves for makeshift mattresses by the fire, which they feed with moss to create as much of a smoke screen against the mosquitoes as possible. Fruit bats bank and dive around them. By morning one man is hiding up in a tree.

The hangover of a rough night is tempered by the border crossing. At 10 A.M. we reach the stone obelisk that marks Palo de Letras, on the boundary with Panama. Those with working cell phones take pictures to remember the moment. Ebrima and Morro sit down to collect themselves, grateful to be out of Colombia at last.

“My faith keeps me moving, that’s it,” says Ebrima. “There is no turning back for me. I can’t go back to where I’m from.”

Meanwhile our shifty guides John and Alberto are anxious to head back home to Bijao. Although we had a deal to travel together to the Paya River, another half-day’s walk, they would face jail time if caught in the company of migrants by Senafront, the Panamanian forces that stalk the borderlands. They’re demanding to be paid in full, and more, to go all the way.

My temper flares. I never really trusted these men; paying them out would give up the last shred of leverage we have. But Carlos explains that we still need them to find our way, and we can’t afford to piss them off since they are skilled with machetes. FARC’s protection extends only so far.

I settle down, and a compromise is reached: the migrants will go ahead of us, on their own, to maintain a safe distance in the event that we’re intercepted. In English, then in French, I explain our predicament to the group and assure them that the route is easy to follow. Panama has a reputation for its humane treatment of illegals emerging from the jungle, complete with room and board. Everyone seems relieved at the prospect of imminent salvation.

But forward momentum is running down. During the next stretch, I spot a poured-concrete marker for the Carretera del Darien, a through-highway that was never built. Carlos sees a wheel from a Chevrolet Corvair, casualty of a 1961 expedition. Despite an hour’s head start, we catch up to the group. We sit and wait again. Same result. Somewhere in the skies above the canopy, rotor thumps from a Senafront helicopterÌęare audible. Our panicked guides insist on moving ahead at double speed to drop the gear at the river, and I volunteer to go with them. We shoot up the trail, Cevedao in front, John right on my heels “for motivation,” until a merciful stop for water. I bend down to fill my canteen. They vanish.

I race to catch up but don’t see a trace. I call out their names. Nothing. At a fork in the path, I bear right and find an energy-drink can, but I’m starting to have doubts that I’m going the correct way. The Gap is veined with dozens of trails and detours to nowhere, and my GPS device lost its signal the day before. For all I know, I could be heading back to Colombia, a dreadful thought. I wonder, have the guides stolen our bags? Perhaps they are preparing an ambush. Did I go too far?

I arrive at a tepee-shaped structure that looks to be a marker and shout into the abyss for a while, with no reply. It’s then that I notice that the structure is a tripod-shaped root, not man-made. I can feel the veins pulsing in my forehead, the fury of being left behind cut by sudden alarm. I am retracing my steps to the junction I passed earlier, unsure of my judgment, when the rustle of leaves stops me in my tracks. One of the Togolese men appears down the trail in his brown winter coat. He mumbles something in French, and I can scarcely contain my relief.

When we finally catch up to the guides, I want to explode. But Cevedao is holding a finger to his mouth. Soldiers are on a hilltopÌęnot far down the trail, he says, and the Paya River is no more than 40 minutes away, tops. The guides dump our bags, collect the last of our pesos, and rush away as the rest of the group stagger in. One by one, they crumple to the ground; some are asleep within seconds. Evelyn is the worst off, her swollen toes protruding from socks torn to shreds, lips quivering in sweat. I try to get everyone’s full names and e-mail addresses in case they’re detained, but few can manage the pen. Roused for a final push, we wait as the migrants pick up what’s left of their things and vanish over the ridge.

Four hours later, Carlos, Roger, and I are still walking. The trail is relatively easy to follow, but the terrain is steeper. The heat and humidity are dehydrating our bodies, and our water supply is dwindling, with no fresh sources since the guides departed. Carlos struggles to keep up. The added burden of carrying all our gear is taking its toll, forcing us to stop at shorter intervals, until we finally run out of water. We have no idea where we are.

I go forward alone, clumsy and parched. Another hour or two passes, and the foliage around me becomes more lushly tropical. I’m barreling downhill through a tight chute of banana leaves that spit me out into a clearing where Senafront soldiers with M4 rifles are barking orders. Drop your bags and put your hands up! For the first time in my life, I’m relieved to face the barrel of a gun.

Our migrant friends are seated in rows on the ground, under armed guard, waiting. As I’m escorted into the soldiers’ camp with orders to not talk to them, a plaintive voice calls out. “Don’t forget about us, brother.” It’s Ebrima. I turn back to catch his eye, and a soldier motions me away.

That was the last we ever saw of them. When Carlos and Roger eventually hobble into camp, a burly Panamanian officer informs us that President Juan Carlos Varela’s executive order is in force: no more migrants are being accepted. When I ask if this means the group will be sent back, he nods hesitantly. Retracing the route we just completed seems impossible at that moment. I cannot think straight, but emotions are welling up. We are fed pasta and coffee and escorted across the Paya to its namesake hamlet.

Sleepy and serene, Paya is a small Kuna Indian village with manicured grass and stilt homes, the last outpost inside ±ÊČčČÔČčłŸČč’s DariĂ©n National Park. In January 2003, it was the scene of a massacre: paramilitaries disguised as guerrillas executed four local men as punishment for cooperating with FARC. The paras went on to steal livestock, slaughter dogs, and land-mine the hamlet’s periphery to prevent people from leaving. At the time, no Panamanian security forces were in the vicinity.

Today, Paya counts on the protection of Senafront. Though technically a police force—±ÊČčČÔČčłŸČč’s army was dissolved after the 1989 U.S. invasion—the unit has a broad mandate to safeguard the country’s southern border and carries out special-forces-style operations against drug smugglers and Colombian armed groups. In 2013, ±ÊČčČÔČčłŸČč’s government announced that FARC was no longer a threat in the country, removing restrictions against travelers with passports to the Gap, though coming this far inside was not recommended. A billboard at the Senafront base entrance features pictures of wanted FARC commanders and paras.

Major Hector de Sedas, the local Senafront authority, greets us under a tree that’s dropping mangos. A yellow placard is posted behind de Sedas that tallies the number of migrant arrivals between February 24 and March 24: 114, spread across 21 nationalities. When he deployed here six months ago, as many were recorded crossing daily, but on the day of our passage only six people were detained along the entire frontier. De Sedas says his men had been expecting us for a week—we’d informed them what we were doing ahead of time—and feared that we may have lost our way, like the four Somalis who strayed from their group on reaching Panama and wandered the jungle for 15 days, only to end up back in Colombia.

We’re crushed when he confirms that the migrants we traveled with were being sent back. “They will be given some food and water and escorted 30 minutes back up the trail,” he says. “There is nothing we can do—it’s an order.” I tell him this could be a death sentence for some. He winces in sympathy.

“We have an extraordinary humanitarian character. But Costa Rica and Nicaragua both sealed their borders, and this became a serious problem for us,” he explains. With more than 4,000 Cubans and other migrants blocked from advancing north, he says, social pressures were mounting that forced the government to airlift scores of them to Mexico. Intelligence sources estimate that 5,000 more migrants are backed up between Ecuador and Colombia, he adds. “Some people say President Varela should have made this decision [to close the border] six months ago.”

Local tolerance was ebbing. When I ask Paya’s aging village chief, Enrique Martinez, how the community has fared since the paramilitary violence, he says that aside from some land-rights disputes with the state, the situation is peaceful. “Now there is a problem with migrants coming from Africa, Bangladesh—we don’t have the capacity to feed all of them anymore,” he huffs, a necklace of jaguar teeth jangling on his chest. “They arrive sick, and who knows what diseases they’re carrying, like Ebola. When the migrants get here and leave the next day, that’s one thing. But when they stay for 15 days or more it becomes a problem. I want the border closed once and for all, you hear me?”

A hard rain comes down and we retire to our bungalow, where I notice that some of the boards are etched with migrant messages in Bengali and Arabic. As the downpour intensifies, I’m kept awake by a gnawing, familiar pang from my years of reporting: the guilt of leaving people in duress behind, made more acute in this case by my naive assurances that their lot would improve in Panama. The 20 of them were out in the bush somewhere, beyond tired, hungry, exposed. The Nepalis might find a way, I thought. I was less sure about the Bengalis and some of the Africans.

When I open the letter I found on the trail, there’s a draft note addressed to Ecuador immigration from one Mohammad Shariful of Bangladesh, with a world map sketched at the bottom. On theÌęother side there’s a bank-account number and transfer amount, and, in English, the makings of a poem.

love is a river. love is an ocean. loveÌęis the earth. love is radha (hindu god). love is giridhar (hindu god). not being able to sleep, that is what love is. if there was no love there would be nothing. i would not be here.

It’s dated April 6, 2016, a month before the border closure. If all went well, Mohammad could be in the U.S. by now.

The Darién Gap in Panama is such dense jungle that the only sensible way through is by boat, and in the morning we climb into a piragua for a ten-hour glide upriver. I lie back and watch the teeming forests drift by. Pucuro, Boca de Cupe, El Real, and then Yaviza, a rowdy town of bars and brothels on the Chucunaque River, where the Pan-American Highway resumes and the grid comes alive.

It’s now May 19. Since departing from Turbo on May 8, we covered more than 200 miles by boat and on foot, crisscrossing rivers and swamps and humping through unmarked trails up a mountain to a forgotten border plateau. Along ankle-busting ridges, we dipped and climbed higher into the wilderness, only to descend once more to water,Ìęthe lifeblood of the Gap and anyone unfortunate enough to be mired there. I send e-mails to Zia, the Afghan from the Turbo docks, and Ebrima—the two legible contacts in my notebook. At least they don’t bounce back.

While we were in the jungle, Colombian authorities confiscated 8.8 tons of Urabeño cocaine in a raid on a banana-plantation stash house in Turbo, the “biggest seizure of drugs in history,” the president boasted. As we wait for breakfast at a cantina in the morning, another news report from Turbo flickers on the screen.

Since the Panamanian closure came into force, a bottleneck of several thousand migrants had overwhelmed the way station. Streets are thronged with stranded Cubans, Haitians, Africans, and South Asians. The tableau could easily be mistaken for New York City or Miami, the telltale difference found in the crunched facial expressions of thwarted desire.

Some ugly myths have taken root in the United States that these same people are predisposed to be criminals, a dormant threat to national security and gathering drag on our economy. In a country built by migrants, currents of nativism and xenophobia are on the rise, with bluster of walls going up and mass deportations. And somehow people of all stripes keep angling for our faraway borders with their dreams intact, risks and distances be damned.

Inevitably, through sheer force of will and a lot of good luck, some of the ones stranded in Turbo will make it to Panama and on to the United States. Maybe they’ll be spared the onerous jungle crossing; maybe they will get a berth on an airlift; or maybe they are bushwhacking a new route through the DariĂ©n Gap at this very moment, their feet and gazes in lockstep forward against the inertia of fear and cynicism, driven by visions of something better.

They are our past, present, and future. And they are worthy.

is a fellow with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.Ìę

The post A Terrifying Journey Through the World’s Most Dangerous Jungle appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

The Darien Gap is a lawlessÌęwilderness on theÌęborder of Panama and Columbia that serves as an alternative to traditional pathways for migrants seeking entryÌęŸ±ČÔto to the U.S..ÌęIt's full of drugÌętraffickers,Ìęantigovernment Guerillas, and deadly snakes, and many of the hundreds of migrants who enter each year never emerge. In the August Issue of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, Jason Motlagh plunged in, risking robbery, kidnapping, and death to document one of the most harrowing treks on earth. This clip is a preview of an hour-long film that Australian newsmagazine Ìęwill air on September 6Ìęon Motlagh's expedition through the Gap, using footage shot by Motlagh and videographer Roger Arnold.

The post Crossing the Darien Gap appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

“No man’s land” is a term that, to the modern ear, can sound like stepping onto a battlefield. In fact, the phrase refers back to the idea of unclaimed land (recorded as “ÌęŸ±ČÔ the Domesday survey of England of 1086) and still carries an echo of perennial hopes for free land, for places beyond the control of others. Ordinary places become extraordinary in no man’s land.

Such in-between places remind us how dependent we are on borders—that our sense of order and certainty draws deeply from the knowledge that we are in governed territory. No man’s lands may be vast stretches of unclaimed land or tiny scraps left over from the planning of cities, though the uncertainty of the no man’s land is especially keenly felt in places that the outside world refuses to recognize or that appear to be between borders.

The notion that places might slip down between borders led me on a geographical quest. I went looking for the farthest possible distance between the border posts of two contiguous nations, to see how far they could be stretched apart.

Most border posts face each other. A change of signage, a different flag, a line on the road, all combine to signal that no sooner have you stepped out of one country than you have arrived in another. But what happens if you keep on opening up that space?A few years ago, with the help of hours spent blinking at the tiny fonts favored on travelers’ Internet chat forums, I found what I was looking for. Along a road between in West Africa the distance between border posts is 27 kilometers.

It is not the world’s only attenuated border area. The Sani Pass, which runs up to the mountainous kingdom of Lesotho from South Africa, is the most famous. It’s a rough road, although much visited by tourists in 4x4s seeking out the highest pub in Africa, which sits near the top of the pass. The drama of the trip is heightened by the thrill that comes from learning that this is no man’s land. The South Africa border control, complete with “Welcome to South Africa” signs, is 5.6 kilometers away from the Lesotho border office.

Another specimen is to be found in the mountainous zone between border posts on the Torugart Pass that connects China and Kyrgyzstan. Central America also has a nice example in Paso Canoas, a town that can appear to be between Panama and Costa Rica. It is habitually described as no man’s land because, having left through one border post, you can go into the town without passing through immigration to enter the other country. Some visitors relish the impression that the town around them is beyond borders. Partly as a result, Paso Canoas has developed a darkly carnival atmosphere, as if it were some kind of escaped or twilight place.

What these gaps reflect back at us is our own desires, especially the wish to step outside, if only for a short time, the claustrophobic grid of nations. We probably already suspect that it’s an illusion. Shuffling forward in a queue and making it past the passport officer does not mean you are, at that exact moment, leaving or entering a country. Such points of control exist to verify that you are allowed to enter or leave. Their proximity to the borderline is a legal irrelevance.

Yet this legal interpretation fails to grasp either the symbolic importance of the border point or the pent-up urge to enter ungoverned territory.The fact that Paso Canoas is split by the Panama– Costa Rica border rather than actually being between borders doesn’t stop people from describing it as an “escaped zone.”Similarly, the steep valley up the Sani Pass is nearly all in South Africa, and the road down from Senegal into Guinea is always in one nation or another, but that isn’t how travelers experience it or even what they want.

The attraction of these in-between spaces has a lot to do with the fact that they are on land. Going through passport control at an airport provides no comparable thrill, even though international airspace is far more like a genuine no man’s land than any number of dusty miles on the ground. It seems that escaping the nation-state isn’t all that is going on here. There is a primal attraction to entering somewhere real, a place that can be walked on, gotten lost in, even built on, and that appears to be utterly unclaimed.

Some of the overland tourist trips that occasionally rumble along the Senegal–Guinea highway offer camping in the no man’s land as part of the package. Like other examples, it’s a zone that provokes people to muse on allegiance and belonging. In his essay , the American travel writer Matt Brown describes encounters with villagers along the Senegal–Guinea road that provoke speculation on the nature of national identity:

I stopped my bike to chat with the woman pounding leaves. I asked in French (my Pular only goes so far), “Is this Guinea?” “Yes,” she answered. Surprised that she even understood French, I posed a follow-up question. “Is this Senegal?” I asked. “Yes,” came the reply.

A little later Brown sits on “a nationless rock”Ìęand imagines these villagers as freed from the “archaic, nonsensical national borders drawn up by greedy European leaders at the Conference of Berlin over 100 years ago.” Stretching out border posts does seem to break the seal on the national unit. The resultant gap may not be of much legal import, but for travelers on the ground it creates a sense of openness and possibility.

Yet while travelers may relish this expansiveness, the consequences for those who have to live and work in such places can be less positive, such as heightened insecurity and a sense of abandonment. This is one of the reasons why African states have been trying to close the gap in such anomalous spaces. The , which supports economic infrastructure projects across the continent, has made “establishing juxtaposed checkpoints at the borders” of its member states a priority, including at the Guinea–Senegal border.

What most concerns the fund’s members is the impact that these distant border posts have on the flow of trade. Along the Guinea–Senegal route there are nightmare tales of vehicles being sent back and forth by officials who keep asking for new documentation or demanding new bribes. In-between land can easily turn into a place of bureaucratic limbo where both travelers and locals are uniquely vulnerable to tiresome and corrupt officialdom. Patches of ground “between” nations are places that can be thought of as free, but they are also places where we are reminded why people willingly give up freedoms for the order and security of being behind a border.Ìę

Excerpt from Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies. Copyright © 2014 by Alastair Bonnett. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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