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Published: June 22nd 2011
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M- Our first stop in Central America was Panama City. Apparently there are three things you must do in Panama City – the Canal, the old town and look back at the city skyline from the causeway. We stayed a couple of days and did all three. The fourth, which is obligatory, is to sweat several pounds every hour. The first three you could really do easily in a day but we wanted to break ourselves in gently to the first few days of our RTW trip outside of the US. Re the fourth, we gained short relief from it by retreating to our B&B's pool.
We visited the old town first. It is a Unesco Heritage site and undergoing a huge revamp because basically it is mainly derelict and about to fall down. It sits at the end of a peninsula the rest of which is occupied by a very, very poor inner city neighborhood/slum. The kind you really don’t want your taxi to stop in. The streets of the old town are narrow and cobbled and the houses are being restored in a wide array of colors. When completed it should look great although one hopes they don’t
go too far and make it look like a latin disneyland.
There is quite an impressive gold leaf alter in one of the churches. Apparently when the city was being ransacked by a pirate the locals painted the gold leaf black to hide it. Take a look at the photo, that must have been one pretty dumb pirate to miss all that gold!
The people we interacted with in Panana City were very friendly and helpful. One of the local military police even shepherded us through the checkpoint and security scan outside the presidential palace so that we could get a better look. Either that or he was trying to sell us the place, my Spanish isn’t that good so I made sure not to sign anything.
Next up we went over to the causeway. A couple of marina’s with some pretty nice boats but nothing else. However the view back to the city was spectacular and was made even more so by the afternoon rainstorm which unfortunately I forgot to capture on film.
The following day we went to the canal. The few people I know that have visited it or sailed through it all
said it was worth a trip. Well - it was worth it, although I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’ve seen many locks on canals in the UK and France and, guess what? It’s exactly the same just on a massive scale. Instead of you pulling or driving your boat through the canal this one uses four train engines on two tracks to pull the boats through each of the locks. I believe there are 12 in total running in two parallel sets of six. If you make the trip pay the extra couple of bucks and to get the full ticket which covers the museum tour and the movie as these give you a much better idea of the real scale of what was accomplished.
The following day to avoid the humidity we headed up into the mountains to Boquete. Shame it took us 12 hours to get there but it was worth the trip. See Kate’s blog for more details, although I have added some additional photos from our coffee plantation tour here that she didn't have at the time of blogging.
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