The gap in the world's longest road

The BBC has an article by Carolyn McCarthy about the Darien Gap:

Stretching from Alaska to the pencil tip of Argentina, the forty-eight-thousand-kilometer-long Pan-American Highway holds the record for the world's longest road. But there is a gap, an expanse of wild tropical forest, that has defeated travelers for centuries.
Explorers have always been drawn to the Darien Gap, but the results have mostly been disastrous. The Spanish made their first settlement in the mainland Americas there in 1510, only to have it torched by indigenous tribes fourteen years later and, in many ways, the area remains as wild today as it was during the days of the conquest.
"If history had followed its usual course, the Darien should be today one of the most populated regions in the Americas, but it isn't," says Rick Morales, a Panamanian and owner of Jungle Treks, one of a few adventure tour companies operating in the region.
"That's remarkable if you consider that we live in the twenty-first century, in a country that embraces technology and is notorious for connecting oceans, cultures, and world commerce."
The gap stretches from the north to the south coast of Panama, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It's between sixty and a hundred miles long, and there is no way around, except by sea.
After the conquistadors, the Scots also wagered badly here. Having established a coastal trading colony in 1698, most settlers perished from disease and Spanish attacks. The loss would deplete enough Scottish wealth to compromise their independence less than a decade later, when the country opted to sign the Treaty of Union with Britain.

 

It was only in 1960 that anyone managed to cross the Darien Gap by car, in a Land Rover (photo) dubbed The Affectionate Cockroach, and a Jeep. It took nearly five months, averaging just two hundred meters per hour. The team included noted Panamanian anthropologist Reina Arauz and her cartographer husband, Armando Arauz. Hand-chopping a route through the jungle, they forded hundreds of rivers and streams, and improvised bridges from palm trunks that didn't always hold up. Their research later helped establish the Darien National Park, a Unesco World Heritage Site.
Twelve years later, the renowned explorer, Colonel John Blashford-Snell, led a sixty-person crew in Range Rovers on the first complete road trip from Alaska to Cape Horn via the Darien Gap. This short section of the route he described as the toughest challenge of his career. The seasonal rains came early and locked the vehicles in mud. "Something had to go and it was the back axles," Blashford-Snell recounts. "They exploded like shells, with shrapnel coming through the floor."
Redesigned car parts were parachuted in a month later. Later, custom-built inflatable rafts floated the vehicles across the problem area of the vast Atrato swamp. Eventually, they made it, though half the team had succumbed to trench foot, fevers, and other ailments.

Rico says it's not on his bucket list...