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Panama Canal
Has to be seen! Well after being deprived for 2 months we jumped at the chance of movie watching and 1st world shopping centres!
I know ...sad! But hey we loved our 4 days here.
We arrived in that tiny 16 seater plane (after a fantastically scenic 1 hour flight from Bocas) to our hotel transport waiting for us. Love being organised! Daniel at the hostel at Bocas had given us the name of a cheap but decent hotel that very conviniently offered free transfer from the airport.
Our first walk around to orientate us took us to the promanade along the sea and past the marina. It reminded us so much of Durban back home...a lovely long paved path along the coast with the highway running paralell (my spelling has gone to pot! I am sure that doesn´t quiet look right).
Quite breath-taking until you notice the immence amount of pollution in the sea water and the fact that disgustingly, the sewage pipes seemed to pump the waste right into the bay!
Past the fancy Inter-Continental hotel and past a few fancy pooches and their dog walkers...welcome to the city of the rich! Oh so far from that horrible Honduras ity of
Shop ´´til you drop!
Embarrassed to say it but we spent hours in the malls! Tegucigalpa!
Taxis were really cheap and after being ripped off just once ($3 one way fare!) we discovered that you could get almost anywhere in the city for $2 or less.
It is an incredibly American city, full of Mac-Ds, Wendys Burgers, Popeyes Chicken, Baskin & Robbins etc (you have the idea!) and of course banks EVERYWHERE!
Ken discoved the casinos, which, with a glint in his eyes dragged me into 2 or 3 of them. No luck luck though.....could have been good though ! Imagine winning a few thousand dollars in Panama City. What a thought!
Did I say that the shopping was great? Oh yes ! I am sure I did!
We discovered two of the three massive centres, and to be honest we could have been shopping in any great centre in SA or even Blue Water in England. Very unlike anything we had experineced in the other Central American cities.
We managed to see Mission Impossible 3 (I think before it even hit SA or London) and some other new one. Great for us , all but one movie was in English.
We figured that we better squeeze in one or two touristy
Local bus
Always bright and colourful things and of course couldn´t miss the canal.
It is incredible big and impressive.....just a tad more awesome then seeing little Goring Lock or Fort William Lock in England!
We were there when a huge grain carrier was passing through and so could see the whole process in action. The ships pay according to their size and weight and if I recall the most expensive charge to date is in the region of $145000!
A boat traveling from New York to San Francisco saves 7,872 miles by using the Panama Canal instead of going around Cape Horn. The canal is estimated to see 5% of the whole of the world trade and they are planning to widen the canal to accomodate the huge workload at a cost of around $5 to $7.5 billion!
Just proving to you all that I was listening to the talk when we visited!
The other trip we did was to the old city. Some seriously old and beautiful buildings. We visited the presidential palace and generally just strolled around. That part of the city is quite poor and so was like being thrown back into poverty stricken central america again....seemingly far away
Panama city sky line
View from the old city from the Kenneth Cole and Gucci shops!
We stayed 2 nights in the hotel and then moved into a backpackers to be more social. We bumped into two Swiss girls that we had met up with in Honduras and Nicaragua who were flying back home. They had been travelling all over with little ´´Pueblito´´, a wooden children´s horse (you know the ones with an animal figure at the end of a broomstick). Pueblito started his travels in France (owned by a French couple) and he has a little name tag around his neck saying who he is, and asking if he might travel with you. The idea being that you take little Pueblito on your world travels, taking photos of him and then sending a photo to the family in France so that they can see where he goes in the world!
Well Aurelie and Anny had him for 2 months in Central America and were battling to pass him onto the next willing body. Ken rightly refused to lug the horse anywhere! But you know me, abit of a sucker.....and I thought he was quite cute, so I gamely offered!
Ken says that I am like a big child, keen for the adventure and fun but always forgetting Pueblito in taxis, leaving him behind in our hostel rooms etc!! Poor Ken now has the job of reminding me or checking that I have him under my arm!
Now, our next adventure starts....South America!!!
From Panama City to Lima, Peru here we come!
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Renzo
non-member comment
hi friends how are you
hi, thanks for send me this mail, i hope both are passing alright in your trips around the world, i hope you see both again, and but the way nice photos, theres a lot of here in the computer of this hostel, nice places that you visited good he. i'll send you a mail when i enter again see you good lucky friends.