Its a new week, and we are off on a road trip, with a difference, as we are actually celebrating both Pan-American Day, on Tuesday the 14th of April and Pan-American Week, which started on Sunday.
The idea of this celebration is a remembrance of the 1890 conference that established the International Union of American Republics, in order to bring peace, harmony friendship, and co-operation throughout the ontinent of America, which extends from Murchison Promontory, Nunavut, in Canada. through North America , squeezing through the narrowness of Central America, and then going all the way down to Aguila Islet, part of the Diego Ramirez Islands, in Chile.
We have taken a bit of a liberty with this, and decided to travel the Pan-America Highway, which, technically, is a road that runs all the way down that continent, but only goes to prove that manufacturing any form of unity, whilst an applaudable dream, is very unlikely to ever happen....
And so to this week`s clue cards.
Saturday the 11th of April saw us start our journey in Mexico, and with good reason, as though our long and winding road starts at Prudhoe Bay, in Alaska, it does not get very far before it hits Canada, and though the road continues, it is not, officially, called the Pan-American Highway once the Canadian border is reached, nor after it crosses another border, into North America. In fact it only assumes that name, officially, after it leaves North America and enters Mexico, at a place called Nuevo Laredo.
So on Sunday the 12th of April we started driving off along that newly named Pan-American Highway, and motored on down through Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Then we carried on into Panama, and hit a big problem, something known as the Darien Gap. Now this card is not named as the Darien Gap, but it has many of its characteristics, for the area is remote, impassable, except by canoe, as it is a system of deep waterways and dense rainforests. It is also very dangerous, for it not only marks the border between Panama and Colombia, but the border between North and South America, and because of that it is one of the most likely places that migrants attempt to get through, or are convinced by a trafficker that it is possible to do such a thing. We do not know, and will probably never know, how many people attempt this journey, or how many people make it, but we are fairly sure that those who make it are very much less that those who start out, and are never seen again.
Now those two cards saw us off on our journey but they did not provide the road, so our third card on Monday the 13th of April, showed just that, a road, being carved through what was formerly open land, for if you look closely there is but a farm, whose lands are now lost forever, and whose peace and quiet will never be the same. And in this you can see, and sympathise with, the indigenous peoples of the Darien Gap, whose world would be forever altered if a road came crashing through.
On which note, if anyone else would like to send us any information or scans from their collection which relates in any way to our theme of the week, please do - simply email us at webmaster@card-world.co.uk - and this is the same for any corrections, or for general cartophilic correspondence and chat.