Obsessions Die Hard: Motorcycling the Pan American Highway's Jungle Gap
"Rated *****" --Motorcycle Consumer News"When he wrote Obsessions Die Hard, Ed Culberson was a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines and served as a chief instructor for the Motorcycle Safety Foundation. He was very active in leading motorcycle tour groups into Mexico, Central America, and Panama. He died in 1995 of Lou Gehrig's disease (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis)."As a teenager Ed Culberson was fascinated by the Pan American Highway System, which runs the length of North and South America. In his early forties, he acquired another passion--motorcycling. It was only natural that he would merge the two. Culberson, then a retired U.S. Army officer, decided to ride the Pan American Highway's entire route between Alaska and Argentina, but in eastern Panama and western Colombia's Darien region the road is broken by an 80-mile gap filled with jungles, rain forests, rivers, and swamps, which forces travelers to detour around by boat or plane. The area is so inhospitable and unexplored that a myth about its impenetrability has evolved over the centuries, and a curse aimed at Darien trespassers shrouds the region. But the Darien Gap, known as el tapon del Darien the Stopper, didn't stop Culberson's dream. It turned it into an obsession."On Amigo, his BMW R80 G/S, Culberson suffers failure before meeting success, encountering killer bees, arrest by a corrupt law officer, cycling injuries and back-breaking labor to get himself and his motorcycle through the torturous jungles and swamps--including the Darien Gap, a feat never before accomplished by a motorcyclist. --i