The Authors
The Cloud Garden was written by two men who set off into the Darien Gap for very different reasons — one chasing rare orchids, the other chasing adventure — and came home nine months later having survived the same ordeal together.
Supporting Figures
Brian Winder
Brian was Paul's father. When Paul went missing in the Darien Gap, Brian led the family's nine-month search for him, later writing about it himself in A Search for a Son — the story from the other end of the phone line, back home in England, waiting for news. Brian passed away on 19 July 2023.
James Spring
Before Paul set off into the Darien, an American writer named James Spring had already made the same crossing and posted an account of his route online — the very trail that Paul and Tom would later follow. Spring, a former foreign correspondent for Cox Newspapers, had crossed the 75-mile jungle between Panama and Colombia in his early thirties, at the height of the FARC conflict, and written it up in a manuscript called Crossing the Gap, which as far as we know has never been published.
When Paul went missing, Brian Winder tracked Spring down and the two stayed in close contact throughout the search; Spring even prepared to mount a rescue mission before it was called off. He remained a firm support to the family for many months, and later visited Lullingstone Castle to see Tom and Paul again after their release — pictured above, between the two of them, in the snow. Spring has continued a life of his own kind of redemption since: in 2008 he tracked down two fugitives wanted for murder in Baja California and helped reunite their two young daughters, one of them with Down syndrome, with their grandparents.
Read James Spring's own story, including the rescue →
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