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.