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.