Impossible Roads

The Darien is a swamp, an impenetrable jungle of 12,000 km2. And yet men and goods have been crossing this area for millennia. Today, often illegally by rivers or trails. The directors followed Gina, a colorful shopkeeper, who supplies her business, 3 days from Panama City in the jungle with the means at hand. She takes up tons of goods first by truck and then by canoe. It is called the “Queen of the Tuira River”. Indians, peasants, gold diggers, adventurers; a whole world crosses paths in the Darien. In the Choco region of Colombia, having a truck, or even a mule, is useless. The only means of transport… are men.

It is called the road of the Kalingas, the road of the head cutters. Every day, Christopher the foreman tries with his diggers to open the road and every night the mountain covers part of it. Thousands of cubic meters of earth and rocks that carry away everything in their path. The next day, if the machines have not been buried by the flows, you have to start all over again.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, to go from Kinshasa, the capital, to Kisangani, the big city in the North, there are no longer any roads. The lack of maintenance and the invasive forest made it disappear little by little. To transport their goods or to travel between these two cities, the Congolese have only two solutions: the plane for the richest, the ticket costs the equivalent of 6 months' salary, or the boat for the poorest, a grueling journey of 2000 kilometers on the Congo, one of the largest rivers in Africa.

The Kawah Ljen volcano in Java has the largest acid lake in the world in its crater. From 5 a.m., in suffocating fumes, Matrusen and other miners harvest blocks of hot sulfur, without gloves, masks or overalls, while the air is full of toxic fumes that attack the throat and lungs. Once the sulfur has been harvested, the miners are not at the end of their troubles. It is now necessary to descend the volcano by a narrow and steep path to reach the factory. Every moment, loaded with their heavy baskets filled with sulfur blocks, the miners risk their lives.