You don't need to get to the National Transport Terminal early on a Sunday to get the last bus to the Darien. I strolled in at lunchtime, learned that the next (but not last) bus would leave at 2:30, paid my seven bucks for a ticket and set off to explore the country's premiere selection of franchise fast food. After partaking of one of several chicken options, I hunkered down with the history book I brought along for just such an event. The time came, the old school bus loaded up maybe halfway, and we were off at a little before three o'clock.

There were fewer stops on the run than usual — fewer local passengers to load and unload, and no stop for dinner. We did stop, however, to show identification to police at checkpoints just before the Bayano Bridge and upon entering the Darien. At the second checkpoint the police pulled aside a Colombian and a foreign tourist, warning the latter about travel beyond Yaviza and detaining the former for more questions.

I was only going as far as Embera Puru, in Chepigana district's corregimiento of Aguas Frias. This really isn't a war zone, but a Colombian kidnap gang did strike a few miles down the road in Meteti a while back, and while I was in Embera Puru I saw four busloads of police headed toward Yaviza and points beyond.

There is money appropriated to pave the Pan-American Highway from the bridge to Yaviza. It's a project that has been talked about for a long time and which has broad public support. (This is a separate issue from whether or not it's a good idea to extend the highway through the Darien Gap into Colombia.) So far there's no sign of the work getting underway.

From the bridge through the rest of eastern Panama province, the gravel road is in good shape. Not so once you hit the Darien, at the police checkpoint in Cañazas.

The road is dry, but once you hit the Darien line it has hardened ruts and bumps, to be taken slowly and by the most-beaten set of tracks. The need isn't so much for double traction as for high clearance. Don't try this in your Mitsubishi Lancer.

Last year I saw some surveying and some culverts being put in on the eastern Panama province stretch of this drive. I can't be sure whether these would have been related to the paving project, but certainly drainage is a key ingredient in the installation of a black-top road, and this work has certainly not been done in the western Darien.

By the way, if you leave from Panama in the mid-afternoon, it will be nightfall as you cross into the Darien. The highway is not lit up like, say, Tumba Muerto, and the place where I was headed has little in the way of electricity. But of course, folks are pretty neighborly on these buses, and a santeño who lives down the road helped to find the right stop in the dark.