For thirty years I have sold people the two most romantic ways to reach Europe, the ship and the train, and for thirty of those years the same tired sentence has arrived to spoil the dream: but first you need a US visa, to change planes in Miami. It was never true. There is a cleaner way to the whole of Europe, and it runs through Panama.
The road to Europe does not pass through the United States
Somewhere along the way we were taught that everything leaves the Caribbean through an American airport. It does not. Panama City is one of the great crossroads of this hemisphere, and its national airline has spent decades turning it into what it calls the Hub of the Americas: a single stop that ties our islands to almost everywhere to the south, and, the part people forget, to Europe.
From Panama, Europe is a nonstop flight
This is the piece that redraws the map. From Panama City you can fly nonstop to Europe on European flag carriers: KLM to Amsterdam, around ten and a half hours, Air France to Paris, and Iberia and Air Europa to Madrid, with onward connections from any of them into the whole continent. These run year-round, roughly two dozen flights a week. So the honest routing is almost embarrassingly simple: your island to Panama, Panama to Madrid, and not one inch of it flown over the United States. (Sources: the Panama tourism authority and the airlines' own schedules.)
A word about the visa, because I am honest about these things
Here I have to be precise, because your passport matters. Many CARICOM passports enter the Schengen area of Europe with no visa at all for stays of up to ninety days: Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, the Bahamas, and the OECS states such as St Lucia, Antigua, Grenada and St Vincent among them. Check where your own passport already reaches. A few of ours, including Guyana and Jamaica, still need a Schengen visa, and if yours is one of them you apply for that at a European consulate. But notice what has quietly vanished from the whole conversation: the US visa. You never needed it. You only needed to stop being routed through a country that was never on your way.
Then the best part: the train
Once you land, you are standing in the continent that invented the grand railway journey, and this is where my own heart lives. A single rail pass can carry you from Madrid to Paris to Amsterdam on fast, civilised trains, watching the country change through the window instead of over a wingtip. It is the kind of trip I have been arranging for people since before some of my readers were born, and it is finally, cleanly, free of the American detour.
Come the long way, which is really the short way
The travellers I send this way go, and they come home a little changed by how ordinary it turned out to be. Panama, then Madrid, then a slow blue train north through Spain and France to a canal-side hotel in Amsterdam, with no US visa, no US airport, and no interview to dread. One of them wrote me a single line from somewhere near the French border: "Why did nobody tell me it was this easy?"
That question is the whole reason this column came back. If Africa was one corridor and our own Caribbean was another, then Europe by way of Panama is the third. Search the route to Europe now, priced and filtered so it never touches the United States, or write to me with the European city you had given up on, and let us find you the way there that does not run through anyone else's border.