The joy of backpacking is that you can make it up as you go.
The night before I meant to leave Bocas del Toro to go back to Costa Rica, I got a crazy idea that I actually wanted to go to Panamá City and see the canal. I asked around, found out the easiest way to get there and woke up painfully early to get on another boat-taxi-bus ride to the capital city. Known just as “Panamá” by the locals, Panamá City is supposed to be the most glamorous capital city of Latin America. And so far, I don’t disagree. When I arrived, I kept getting confused because the signs looked misspelled- like they should have been in English instead of Spanish. Everything is so streamlined and commercialized. It reminds me of a cross between Buenos Aires and any major city in the US. The locals joke that it’s like Miami, except that they speak more English in Panamá City.
After a full day of travel, I arrived, rather disoriented in the glitzy city. I wandered around the giant bus terminal-mall-movie theater-airport for a while before giving up and taking a taxi to my hostel. I found a local supermarket and unsuccessfully tried to cook a disgusting combination of macaroni, canned peas, Miracle Whip, and sardines (which I thought were tuna). No more trying to be creative with my cooking.
First thing Tuesday morning, I set out for the Canal. After a moderately confusing time trying to find the right bus, I got to the visitors center shortly after it opened. Visiting the Canal made me wonder why I didn’t go into an Engineering field. Everything about it is awesome. “Big” can’t be captured in photos, unfortunately, but everything was huge. And awesome. The ships were ginormous. And awesome. The mechanics with brilliant and intricate. And awesome. You get the idea.
In the three and a half hours that I stood and watched, only three ships (and a little boat) passed through. And that was one after another. At first, I wanted to say that everything in the Canal moves at glacial speeds. But I’ve seen glaciers. I think glaciers actually move at Panamá Canal speed. When I got there, there was a battleship passing through. The sailors were on the deck and waving to us as they waited. After that came a couple of massive cargo container ships. The scale of everything at the Canal is tremendous. The entirety is about 50 miles long and takes 8 hours to pass through. The ships are raised and lowered, via a series of three locks, about 79 feet to cross the Isthmus. With each ship, 52 million gallons of freshwater are dumped into the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean. Lots of statistics that you can look up online if you’re as interested as I am, but I’ll avoid boring you with more of them right now. Point being: Panama Canal = terrific.
After watching ships for three hours, wandering through the museum and doing everything else I could come up with to do in the visitor’s center, I struck off to find a bus to a nearby national park. The bus got me most of the way and a sweet English woman in an old green Beetle drove me the rest of the way and gave me the afternoon’s bus schedule before dropping me off. Yay nice people! The part of the park I was visiting was a combination zoo/botanical gardens and, true to my Argentine zoo experience, safety standards in other countries seem to be much lower than those of the US. There were at least half a dozen cages where I easily could have gotten my fingers bitten off, but it actually made the experience much more enjoyable knowing the animals were so close by. I even got to practice my howler monkey call, not understanding why the monkeys weren’t howling back…until I read the sign and found out they were black spider monkeys. Sigh. I guess my monkey identification skills have a ways to go.
In my continued effort to do Panamá City in a day, my next step was the ruins of old Panamá. I’m no ruins buff, but these were pretty cool. There were fantastic explanations of what each pile of rocks used to be and why it was important. Some of the structures were impressively large and well preserved. Even though they were “only” about 500 years old (which isn’t that old for ruins) it was still really cool to get to experience some of the history of one of the most important cities of early Latin America.
Next stop: Nicaragua!
Also, with regard to pictures, they’re all going to go up when I get home to the States, so be ready for a massive flood of pictures once I get them all editted and posted. It’s on my To-Do list immediately after “Hug family” and “Pet dog.” They’ll be up ASAP.