What this section covers
Overlanding in Panama is shaped by a single geographic fact: the Pan-American Highway ends at Yaviza and does not resume until Colombia, so any traveler moving through Panama with a vehicle has to solve that break. This section is written for the reader facing that decision (driving in from Costa Rica, staging in Panama City, and getting a vehicle across the Darién Gap to continue south, or reversing the route north).
Panama is therefore a mandatory stop on the Pan-American route, not a detour. The planning problems it creates are narrow and recurring: how to enter from Costa Rica, how to drive the Inter-American Highway east, what to do about the end of the road at the Darién, how to ship a vehicle by sea to or from Colombia, and where to base in Panama City while the logistics are sorted. The child pages below take each of those problems in turn.
What is genuinely unique to Panama
A few things about the Panama leg are worth naming up front because they are not obvious from a map. Panama uses the US dollar as legal tender, which removes currency friction but also means costs run higher than elsewhere in Central America. The driving season matters: the dry season (roughly December to April) is the reliable window, and the rainy season degrades the secondary roads that overlanders use for the scenic spurs. And Panama City is where the staging demand converges (the ports, the shipping agents, the parts shops, and the overlander community all concentrate there), which is why the staging phase almost always settles in the capital rather than anywhere else.
Beyond that, the detail belongs to the topic pages. Border formalities, route distances and road conditions, the Darién safety reality, the shipping options and costs, and the staging logistics are each covered in depth on their own pages, and the reader is best served by going to them directly rather than reading a compressed version here.