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View of Panama City from Ancon
Panama is a wealthy modern city that in many respects looks like any other financial and banking capital.The journey from Santo Domingo to Panama City was long-winded (I had 7 fun-packed hours at Miami International airport) but pretty straightforward. Having been picked up from the guesthouse at 4.30am, I eventually arrived at Tocumen airport at 8pm so I was very glad to find that it was as easy to get a taxi into the city as all the guidebooks said it would be. Tocumen is about 20 minutes East of Panama City and the contrast with Santo Domingo was apparent from the get-go. Gone was the relaxed, caribbean vibe and attitude to driving, replaced with what seemed to me a more ´western´ approach. For a start, the taxi was in one piece and for seconds, the driver managed the entire journey without once honking his horn or cutting somebody up.
The Hotel Marparaiso itself is pretty unimpressive with an all-pervading smell of mothballs and a generally damp feel to all the rooms. However, it´s well-placed for all the main areas of the city and because there´s only me and one other person on the first part of the tour through Panama and into Costa Rica I´ve got a room to myself, which is a real luxury after
View of San Felipe from Ancon
The oldest part of modern Panama City sharing with 3 others for the past seven weeks.
Because I arrived a few days ahead of the official tour start date, I had to amuse myself on Tuesday, which I did by taking a so-called city tour organised by the hotel. We didn´t see much of the city but did visit the city´s main tourist attraction, namely the Panama Canal, which, cliches aside, is a truly amazing feat of engineering. Designed and built in the early 1900´s to provide passage for shipping between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, thus cutting out the need to circumnavigate South America and Cape Horn, it stretches 50 miles from ocean to ocean. Ships using the canal pass through a series of locks that firstly raise them 26 metres to the level of Lake Gatun in the centre of the Panama isthmus, and then lower them back to sea level. Watching a massive container ship pass through the Miraflores locks, which empty of and fill with millions of gallons of water in a matter of minutes, you are reminded that despite all the stupidity in the world, humans are sometimes capable of real genius.
On Wednesday I visited the San Felipe
Ship passing through the Miraflores Locks
These are the last set of locks ships pass through before heading out into the Pacific ocean. area of the city. This is the oldest part of modern Panama City and dates back to the 1500´s. Although people still live there, it is obviously in the process of being turned into a tourist area, which means it´s an odd mixture of beautifully restored old buildings next to derelict facades and what can only be called slums. By way of total contrast, today I spent the afternoon being eaten alive by mosquitos in the Parque Natural Metropolitane. This is essentially a small section of tropical rainforest lying about 10 minutes outside the city centre and laid out with a series of short trails. As neither me nor my fellow Gapper Emmett are much in the way of David Attenbourough we weren´t able to identify many of the beautiful trees or birds that we saw, but we both knew a monkey when we saw one, which was probably the highlight of my week so far! It´s such a thrill to be just feet away from an animal you´ve only ever seen in a zoo or on the telly, in it´s natural habitat, just getting on with snacking and scratching as nature intended. Unfortunately, the particular monkeys we saw had
San Felipe
The oldest part of modern Panama City an uncanny knack of turning into unidentifiable brown blobs when photographed so you´ll have to take my word for it.
Tommorrow we leave the city and head inland to a small mountain village called El Vallee de Anton. After the heat (30+ degrees) and humidity of the city, I´ll be very glad to get a change of air and to feel like the tour is really underway.
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