We were up at silly o'clock for this trip ... but we caught the Bridge of the Americas at sunrise, and that's quite a sight.
It is written, somewhere, that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. That might be true for dates, job interviews and the like, but it doesn’t necessarily apply to places. We’ve visited a number of cities we weren’t too impressed with at first sight, but grew to like.
Panama City struck us as a warren of high rise: the guide said they weren't quite skyscrapers. He pointed out an ugly brown confection that was an attempt to ape Dubai's Burj al Arab ... by Donald Trump.
Our hotel was fairly comfortable and the food good. We needed to get an early night, for the cruise on the canal started really early. And, hopefully, that will give me a better impression of the place.
The Pacific Queen is a good sized ship carrying many passengers along the length of the canal. We didn't do the whole thing, but probably the best bit, though the Miraflores and Pedro Miguel locks and through the Gaillard Cut, to reach the highest point of the canal, where we disembarked and boarded a coach back to Panama City.
(Fun fact: The lowest ever toll paid to transit the canal was paid by American adventurer Richard Halliburton, who paid 36 cents to swim the length of the canal in 1928)
What we saw was truly a marvel of engineering. We compared these locks with the Five Rise Locks at Bingley in West Yorkshire and the Caen Hill Locks in Wiltshire, England, and there was just no comparison. Two-stage Miraflores is perhaps the best known of the three, 1.8 kilometres (just over one mile) long and raising/lowering ships 16 metres (54 feet). There´s a visitor centre where people can watch the operation (which usually takes about a half hour).
If you talk about canals to a British person, and they’ll probably imagine a scene of laid-back leisure, where nobody’s in a hurry. This is by no means the case on the Panama Canal. It’s all mainly business. Cargo ships, the occasional cruise ship, attended by the tugs flitting attentively about, as well as locomotives, referred to as "mules" (above) which haul the ships through the locks.
(Another fun fact: The canal´s Caribbean end is WEST of the Pacific end! And I’ll bet you just got out a map or an atlas to check!)
There are really three Panamas: the concrete canyons we saw on the way in, and didn't like very much. We had to be driven through this, though, to get to Panamá Viejo, the original city founded by pioneering Spanish settlers in1519. Being on the west coast of Central America, they unfortunately thought themselves safe from attack. So they didn't think to build defensive walls, and thus were vulnerable to attack by pirates, culminating in the burning down of the city 1671 by the privateer Henry Morgan, leading the surviving citizens to build elsewhere. So all that remains are ruins (which are by the way a UNESCO World Heritage Site). But a train conveys visitors to a museum on the site, which, with models, artefacts and paintings explains about the site very well
That "new" Panama City, built and settled beginning in 1673, is now the Casco Antiguo (above), which devolved into a slum for many years but is now packed with charming, cleaned up colonial architecture, several historical sites and museums (including one dveoted to the canal), and a slew of cafés, bars, shops, galleries, restaurants, and boutique hotels.
Then after we’d seen what’s left of old Panama, a drive to a viewpoint on the causeway provided an opportunity to photograph the modern city, which from this distance, looked rather impressive. After all, a lot of business goes on here. I once heard it said (but haven’t been able to confirm) that, if every ship registered in Panama were to converge on the country, not even the entire length of the canal would be able to accommodate them. And that’s just one business
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