Going through the Panama Canal

This was really fun, but I'm too tired to blog in detail.

Started at Gamboa dredging station. Odd pitch from pastor of church there; bought his book anyway because of his work in prison ministry.

Got on Isla Morada - an old wooden boat built in Maine, owned by Al Capone, then Steve McQueen.

Saw lots of big ships in Gatun lake.

Saw the Culebra Cut. Have a picture of a massive passenger liner going through the cut. The cut is twice as high as the ship was. They moved an amazing amount of rock.

Went under the Centennial Bridge. 220 Million Dollar bridge. Looks beautiful. How come the crappy replacement for the Crown Point bridge is going to cost 175 million? It's a lot less bridge.

Went through the locks. Not dramatic, but pretty neat.

Dad had a good time - actually, we all did.

Jimmy, the tour guide on the boat was an impressive personality. Perfectly fluent in English and Spanish - idiomatically, and with an encyclopedic knowledge of the canal.

Got off the boat at the spot where we rented the pedi-bike.

Back at hotel - ran in the gym - another folkloric show which would have been annoying had not the kids doing it been so earnest and put so much work in to it.

Here are random pictures.

Panama 3 - Porto Bello, Colon, Gatun

Our first day out of Panama City, we left on the bus this morning for Porto Bello, on the new Camino Norte connecting Panama City to Colon. This is a relatively lightly travelled (at least while we were on it) four lane divided highway that apparently cut travel time from Panama City to Colon from 3 hours to 1 and change.

Most of the way to Colon, we turned off to the old city of Porto Bello. After calling at Porto Bello, Columbus moved down the coast to Nombre de Dios to establish the original Spanish customs facility for the new world. After various pirate depredations, shipwrecks on the coral reefs, and the realization that it was difficult to defend, in 1597, the Spanish moved the customs site to Porto Bello.

Porto Bello is easily defended, at the head of small narrow bay, with mountains all around as look-out points. Nevertheless, it was attached seven times by pirates, most noteably Francis Drake, who died there and was buried at sea in a lead coffin. Despite the large amounts of treasure retrieved from those waters, his coffin has not been found.

Porto Bello is a dead town. Somewhere along the way, a "black Christ" destined for Cartagena was unloaded there, and it never left. It has since become a major pilgrimage site. The original three forts (on either side of the bay and at the customs house) were reconstructed in the 1700s after Vauban's designs, though never completed since by that time the importance of the Spanish trade had dwindled.

All that's left today is the customs house and the remains of the forts, and the black Christ. It fascinates me that the Spanish didn't leave more behind. Compared to Lima or Rio de Janeiro or Boston or New York, all of the wealth flowed through Porto Bello, and none of it stayed - not for artisans or tradespeople.

The museum has a short video - very good history overview. The church is still accessible. The ruins of the forts are scattered about. Other than that, it is almost the caricature of a dead Caribbean town. There was puppy lying on the cement floor of the artisan's market. Zac fell in love with it and has commented on it several times - "Sooo cute...." I would have liked to spend more time there just getting in to the total slowness of the place, having a soda at the road-side stall, looking through the market, etc. But you really have to get in to the "stopped" nature of the place. There are no beaches to speak of. Pictures to follow.







Then on to the city of Colon itself, a spot apparently visited by Columbus on his last trip to the Americas, though the city was not founded until 1850. Apparently Caravan was the only tour company housing tourists in Colon, and you can kind of see why. Though there are a couple of nice hotels, they are oriented towards the Free Trade Zone business people, casinos, and cruise ships. Even by my relatively relaxed standards, I'm not sure I'd walk around after dark there. There are Tourist Police everywhere.

We ate at a Radisson - a perfectly nice buffet, but I was surprised by the police presence in the lobby. Turns out the head of the Tourist Police was meeting with the owner of the hotel about the security situation.

If you followed the jump to the Wikipedia "Colon" article you have a sense of the situation there. In Colon itself, the public housing apartment blocks are just about as grim as any I've ever seen. But outside Colon, on the way to Porto Bello, we passed through two or three small towns with very neat subdivisions of working-class housing, overall giving the impression of a tidy thriving community. That's sort of the "Costa Rica" part of Panama. Which makes the situation in Colon all the more puzzling.

Caravan seems very concerned to support the local arts scene, and commissioned a Colombian designer to do contemporary fashions based on Kuna Molas. It turns out the hospitality director at the Radisson is the mother of the ex-Miss Panama, who in turn runs a fashion school. So this was an opportunity for the students to practice modelling for an audience - us. It was a little surreal, but I got one or two pictures (it was against the light).

They also did some local dancing featuring last year's winning Carnival costumes. Overall, it was pretty cute.





We went to the Gatun locks, where there does not appear to be a visitor center, which is a pity. I did get some shots of the new construction for the new locks, and we saw a tree sloth on our little walk.

Then finally on to Radisson in the rain forest. Not quite as exotic as it sounds, but very nice and quite new - built around an existing golf-course. I went out for a run around the golf course. The front-desk attendent was very nice, but didn't know about how far it was. She said it usually takes out 45 minutes. I wanted to kid her that she must be a fitness coach, because it took me exactly 45 minutes, with some walking thrown in because it's VERY hilly and VERY VERY humid. I also did see the evening passenger train from Colon to Panama City go by - locomotive at each end and 6 passenger cars.

Zac and my dad and I swam in the eternity pool that the hotel has - I'd never been in one. Kinda cool. Here's the view from our room, including a little peek at the Centennial Bridge:

Panama day 2 - Jordan Sr. Sees The Canal

Today was pretty simple: we went to Panama Viejo, and then to the Miraflores locks on the canal.

Panama Viejo was the location of the city from 1516 when it was founded until 1675 or so when the Spanish governor, or Captain James Morgan, depending on which story you believe, ordered it burned. In the case of the governor, the motive was to keep it out of the hands of Morgan; in Morgan's case there is no obvious motive.

The site was deserted for a couple of hundred years, and has only been researched and restored recently. Really, it's a lovely park with a bunch of walls and the outlines of the original cathedral. Most noteworthy is the tower formerly attached to the cathedral and also used (ineffectively, it seems) as a lookout tower.

Dad rather ill-advisedly decided to climb to the top of the tower after telling Zac and me that he wouldn't. But he seems to have survived.




There's a small museum associated with Panama Viejo - worth perhaps a bit more time than we gave it, but only because I'm the kind of person who reads all the exhibits. It did have a small model of Panama Viejo, which I'm hoping Zac got a good picture of.

Lunch was on the third floor of the Miraflores Locks museum, with ships passing literally right off the balacony. It was hard to eat with all the excitement going on. I got a limited number of pictures before the battery on the camera died (both batteries). And some video of ships moving very slowing into the locks.


The locks really are a place some of us could stand around all day watching the ships go by. We have many unanswered questions about the locks, like why are there two chambers on the Miraflores locks? Wouldn't one do? And why are there two doors at each end of each lock?


One would have hoped such questions would have been answered by the museum, which is rather slick, but pretty low on information. The visitor's center does have a nice auditorium in which they play a rather lame movie about the canal. Better they should have bought a Discovery Channel or History Channel show and edited it down.

Still, the museum is fun and does provide some background, like the fact that the French moved about 1/4 of the materiel needed to excavate the canal, the the Americans the other 3/4. And that Walter Reed, of Army Hospital fame, collaborated with the Cuban(?) scientist who figured out that mosquitos carried yellow fever. A massive public health campaign (spraying, eliminating standing water, etc) eliminated the problem in Panama. No mention of Malaria, though.

In the evening we had dinner at the hotel (which is a pretty decent though slightly disorganized buffet), and the Caravan folks had arranged for a group of folk-dancers to do a little display of Panamanian dances. They were enthusiastic, and it was pretty good.


The people with us one the tour are far nicer than they have any right to be. As usual, if I'm willing to let my pre-conceptions go, people are pretty nice. Most are somewhat more outgoing than I would be (particularly the older women - I think there are a certain number of husbands who are being dragged along). But all whom we have encountered are perfectly fine conversationalists, so it's a pleasant group to hang around with.

Panama day 1

We arrived at 10 pm after a long (5:30 hour) flight. It was long enough that the fact that the in-flight entertainment didn't work was in fact rather tedious. Continental has a system like Jet-Blue's Direct TV except that they charge for the movies and cover the lower right part of the screen with an ad until you pay. No one in coach could get their credit cards to charge.

By unhappy chance, I selected the one row on the plane that does not have a window, so we didn't even get that bit of entertainment. Continental listed the food as a "snack" but it was really rather substantial hot sandwiches and a salad, rendering it rather superfluous that we had a supper at the concourse diner (really good vanilla malteds) and bought snacks for the plane.

In the end I was glad we switched from the back to the front of the plane because it vastly decreased the amount of time it took us to go through immigration. The line behind us was long.

I noticed at the terminal that Panama smells like Latin America - what ever that means. But it does smell different from the U.S. Just as Europe does.

An uneventful cab ride through the dark outskirts of the city led us to our very nice hotel. Rather than pay AT&T $2.30 per minute to call home - as Di insisted we do despite my assurances that if the airplane crashed, it would make the news - I broke out the computer and Skyped margy's cell phone.

Sunday we slept in, had a fine breakfast buffet at the hotel, and after some confusion about changing rooms (as we had arrived a day before our tour began), we decided to go to the Calzado Amador - a peninsula created by fill from the canal excavation, connecting a number of islands on the east side of the city.

Recall that Panama runs basically East-West at this point, with the Pacific to the South. A little negotiation with the cabbie revealed that the Calzado Amador is referred to locally as "el cau-way" - that would be "causeway" to English-speakers.

We rented a two-person-powered pedal cart and spent a hour and a half pedalling up and down the causeway, including a stop at the yet-to-completed Frank Ghery bio-diversity museum,of which we seem to have neglected to take any closeups. Planned opening: end 2011


Zac and I worked pretty hard in the heat, and I was ready for some refreshment. Panamanian beer is all light lagers, not particularly my favorite. But at the Greek place we found overlooking the water, some hummus and a fried corvina (cod?) was very refreshing.


Returning to the hotel, in the end we're not changing rooms. Dad's napping and we're waiting for the 6pm tour get-together.

All in all, a much more laid back vacation than we're used to.

Blog Hiatus

Much water over the dam in our lives, so this is a place-holder post where I'll try to catch up. Long long story short - Zac and Jordan and Jordan Sr. are in Panama working through Jordan Sr.'s bucket list. Posts on the Panama trip to follow.