Rucksackpacked

  A man, a plan, a canal, Panama The Pan-American Highway stretches an almost unbroken 30,000 kilometres from Prudhoe Bay in north-western Alaska to Ushuaia in Patagonian Argentina. Over the next three weeks, our journey will cover only a 2,000km section of this, through six different countries, albeit travelling further on the ground as we zigzag from coast to coast. The "almost"  is the notorious 105 k m Darien Gap on the border between eastern Panama and Colombia, where completely impenetrable jungle is home to indigenous tribes and narco-traffickers. Our journey begins with 480 kilometres by highway bus from Panama City to David.  But before that,the City itself. A couple of hundred kilometers west of Darien but a world away culturally. Facing out onto a broad bay in the Pacific with the queue of ships waiting for the entrance to the canal to the western end, Panama bakes in tropical heat beneath a sky full of Frigate birds and a million migrating black-headed vulture...

The long road to the deep south From storms and strife at home to the first signs of spring in the southern hemisphere. The jacarandas are coming in to bloom and people are stripping off in the parks to catch the sun: it could be Portugal or Spain in early May. In more ways than one. Having flown 7,000 miles, Buenos Aires could be any of a dozen cities in southern Europe: architecture, shops, language, food. But there are undercurrents. Inflation is over 40% and the currency is tanking. And then the F word (or M word to Argentinians). For younger readers, on 19th March 1982, 19 Argentine scrap metal workers raised their flag over the almost abandoned British dependency of South Georgia, in the wild and stormy South Atlantic. Two weeks later, Argentina invaded the disputed, but at the time British,  Falkland Islands. A ten week undeclared war ensued, which cost the lives of 255 British servicemen, 649 Argentines and a number of ships and aircraft. The British victory sealed the rule...