21 May 04
It is the most dramatic of the world's great roads. One minute, a tarmac scar cutting through mile-high mountains hiding Central America's coffee plantations. The next, it plunges down lush jungle valleys camouflaged in every shade of green imaginable. The Pan American Highway is never just a road. Its uses are boundless: supermarket, car park, crop-drier, garage, morgue, race track and meeting place.
The Pan American runs from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of South America, but the interesting bit is the section that runs from the Mexican border with Texas to the impenetrable rainforests of Panama's Darien Gap. The Darien Gap means it has never been possible to drive the entire length of the highway. It is a bit like expecting to circumnavigate the M25 without getting stuck in a traffic jam.
Until quite recently it has even been too risky to drive the Central American section through Mexico and Guatemala into El Salvador and Nicaragua. This is still the land of el bandito but the end of the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua have taken some of the heat out of the journey to the centre of the earth.
