Talk:Eastern Panama

Darien gap

The Darien gap between Panama and Colombia would surely make for an interesting trip: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28756378 Andrewssi2 (talk) 11:36, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

I very recently merged an article on Darien province to this article here, since Panama has not been otherwise broken into provinces, so this article contains the content we had there (minus the redlinked village names. We describe the area as "an extremely dangerous area plagued by Colombian narcotraffickers and guerrillas", and this is corroborated by the article you posted, which talks of disappearances, shootouts, and kidnappings in the area. That might be "interesting", but do we really have enough information to have a guide on how to do it safely? Texugo (talk) 12:09, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

A topic is valid even if it's somewhere extremely difficult to reach (like Mount Everest, Antarctica or even the Moon) or too dangerous to be advisable (Iraq, Detroit, Afghanistan)... just so long as someone has actually successfully made the journey. We disqualify Mars if the only travellers to visit have been robotic explorers, but there's a whole category filled with destinations with big red {{warningbox}}es which we keep to inform travellers. K7L (talk) 01:58, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

I was unaware of the merge, although I don't actually disagree with it.

I agree with K7L that just because it is dangerous does not invalidate it as a travel topic. It may be interesting to visit the outer regions without actually trying to cross, for example. Also I would be interested to take the ferry link described in the article even if does circumnavigate rather than go through the area. Andrewssi2 (talk) 02:20, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

I don't disagree with either of you, just saying that until someone is confident they can cover it without endangering people, with enough info to warrant a separate article, it's probably fine to keep what we have here for the time being rather than starting a skeleton elsewhere. Anyway, even if and when we do create such an article, it should probably be a specific Darien Gap article rather than the standalone province article it was. Texugo (talk) 02:37, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Definitely. We will probably need someone who has traveled through it, and I guess there are very few people with actual experience of this. (I was somewhat near in Panama City and on the north Colombian coast, but I didn't get close enough to see it) Andrewssi2 (talk) 03:05, 15 August 2014 (UTC)