The Darien Gap is the ultimate off-road challenge; a two-hundred-mile section of jungle separating Colombia, South America from Panama, Central America.Ride along with Mike Arnold as he shares his five-month experience via a daily journal and pictures as he travels with the group known as the Expedicion de las Americas. His off-road adventure team not only conquered the Darien Gap, they took it further and traveled from the tip of South America to the tip of North America following the Pan-American Highway.

If you ever plan to travel between North America and South America, you must consider that there is no road. Ten hours southeast of the Panama Canal, the Pan-American Highway penetrates the jungle, shrivels into a footpath and dies. The highway resurrects in Colombia, another continent. But the land between the two countries is a vast and primitive realm. On a map the two ends of the highway appear as two slivers of life, separated by the unknown. Filling this void is a rugged wilderness known as the Darien Rainforest. Because the Darien hinders all contact by land between North America and South America, it has earned the name "the Darien Gap." Yet most travelers never encounter the Darien Gap. When they go to South America they fly or perhaps take a boat. I decided to cross the Darien overland, traversing from Panama to Colombia by foot and riverboat.

"With an appendix containing a full analysis of the debts of the United States, the several states, municipalities etc. Also statements of street railway and traction companies, industrial corporations, etc." (statement omitted on later vols.).

The Darién Gap is a place of legend. The only break in the Pan-American highway, which runs from Alaska to the tip of South America, it is an almost impregnable strip of swamp, jungle and cloud forest between the vast landmasses of North and South America. Stories of abduction and murder there are rife and in recent years more people have successfully climbed Everest or trekked to the South Pole than have crossed the Darién Gap. In 2000, Tom Hart Dyke, a young botanist, set off to Central America with one thing on his mind: orchids. He knew that in order to find the rare and beautiful species he so fervently admired, he would have to visit some of the most inhospitable places on earth. Unbeknown to Tom, another young explorer, Paul Winder, was backpacking through the area at the same time. Though he sometimes worked freelance in the City of London, Paul was a fearless and intrepid traveller, happier scaling volcanoes than lounging on beaches. In every bar and café along his route, rumours abounded of the Darién Gap - and the more he heard, the greater became his desire to make the journey. Pure chance brought Paul and Tom together in northern Mexico; they formed an instant bond and their fate was sealed. Ignoring a final, succinct warning from the Lonely Planet guide - 'Don't even think about it!' - Tom and Paul set off into the Darién: Tom in search of orchids, Paul in search of adventure. They would find plenty of each. For six days they made good progress. Then, just hours away from Colombia, the dream ended and the horror began. Paul and Tom were ambushed by FARC guerrillas who were to hold them hostage for the next nine months. From that day on, their survival was a matter of extraordinary endurance, incredible ingenuity and not a little good luck ...

A valuable document from the Reconstruction era, The Journal of Archibald C. McKinley offers the modern reader a rare glimpse of daily life on Sapelo Island, Georgia, as seen through the eyes of an upper-class farmer. A descendant of Scottish settlers, Archibald McKinley was born in Lexington, Georgia, in 1842 and served as a Confederate officer during the Civil War. Just after the war, he began farming near Milledgeville, Georgia, and within a year had met and married Sarah Spalding, a granddaughter of Thomas Spalding, who had built his plantation empire on Sapelo Island. In 1869, the McKinleys moved to Sapelo to raise cotton, sugar cane, and other crops. The bulk of this journal is a sustained account of their sojourn on the island through 1876, before their return to Milledgeville. The brief, matter-of-fact entries that make up McKinley's journal focus mainly on the small occurrences that filled his days: farm work, hunting and fishing expeditions, sailing excursions, church services, changes in the weather, the disposition of his crops, the development of the Darien timber shipping trade. Scattered throughout, however, are intriguing references to dramatic events--shootings, trials, tensions between whites and the recently freed blacks--and to the processes of Reconstruction, as when McKinley notes that "a company of Yankee soldiers" had arrived at the penitentiary to ensure equal treatment of black and white convicts. The longest entry in the journal is a eulogy for a freedman named Scott, who, as McKinley's slave, had remained "true as steel" during McKinley's service in the Civil War. Editor Robert L. Humphries has included with the journal several of the McKinley family letters, written after Archibald and Sarah left Sapelo Island. In the introduction, historian Russell Duncan places the story in context, focusing on the larger events of Reconstruction as they pertained to Sapelo Island and to the relations between blacks and whites there.