Advertisement
Published: April 26th 2014
Edit Blog Post
Getting into Panama As we are flying out of Panama City the day after the Easter weekend we thought it would be safer to head straight there rather than risk getting stuck somewhere with no buses running. We were right to do so. With only a one day stop-over in David we travelled to the city on the Thursday before Good Friday. Easter is a big deal here so this is a bit like trying to travel on Christmas Eve in the UK. We tried to plan ahead by buying a ticket in advance but that would be too logical for Panama so we were told to just turn up at the bus station an hour before our bus and join the queue. By 7am the ticket office had given up trying to sell tickets and were just ushering people straight on to the buses. This kind of organisation became a bit of a theme throughout Panama.
As a tip to anyone crossing the border from Costa Rica you can pay your exit tax at any Bancredito. This will save you a lot of time at the border. We did not know this and joined the regular queue for
immigration. Along with half of the queue we were turned away to join another queue to pay the tax, then had to re-join the first queue. I can’t help but think the whole process could be made simpler. To get in to Panama you have to show an onward ticket out of the country and they could ask for you to show them either $500 in cash or a bank statement. Luckily we didn’t get asked for a bank statement as we did not know about this either but we have heard of people being turned away. If you are planning to take a boat to Colombia you will need to forge an onward ticket. The hassle of this border crossing made our 10 hour bus ride seem a little bit epic.
Panama City Neither of us knew much about Panama City so it was a bit of a surprise to arrive somewhere with huge shiny skyscrapers. The bus comes in over the bridge of the Americas over the entrance to the canal and you can see the whole city spread out before you. It is a city of contrasts. In the old quarter seemingly feral cats run
riot but are extremely well fed by someone leaving out dry cat food at random intervals. Beautifully restored colonial buildings housing fancy French restaurants stand next to empty shells of buildings covered in graffiti. The main road running through the heart of the city starts in an area that has the sights and smells of India, and ends up in the very wealthy financial district.
One of the best sights highlighting these contrasts was a woman from the native Kuna community wearing full traditional garb, with her husband in a Barcelona football shirt. It would have made a great photo but despite all of our asking the women do not like having their photos taken. Their outfits look fantastic with brightly coloured mismatched fabrics made into wrap-around skirts with a lacy top cinched in at the waist with a waistband, numerous beaded bracelets wrapped around their lower legs to look like boots, topped off with a headscarf.
As everything was closed on Good Friday we took this as a chance to see the city whilst it was quiet. The bus network is very cheap and air-conditioned so we took a ride round. The city as a
whole reminds me a bit of Singapore, with the same overbearing humidity making it hard to walk for more than 10 minutes. In the downtown district we snuck in to the Hard Rock Hotel to see the views from the top floor bar and had fun looking at all of their memorabilia. We have heard that it is easy to sneak into their pool, you just give them a room number and no one checks. There is even a website devoted to sneaking into various swimming pools of fancy hotels in Panama.
Parque Nacional Metropolitan Even though we have seen more than our fair share of wildlife on our trip we tried our luck at seeing some more in the national park in the middle of Panama City. We headed off early to try and avoid the heat and saw loads of animals for such a small area. They have a small pond which has lots of slider turtles in and some basilisks basking in the sun. Basilisks are nick-named Jesus Christ lizards and we got to see why. The lizards were startled when we arrived and ran across the water. Very, very cool to
see and quite fitting for an Easter weekend. We also got to see the Guardabarranco which is actually the national bird of Nicaragua, hummingbirds, a squirrel cuckoo, woodpeckers, howler monkeys, a family of Geoffreys tamarin monkeys, and a very active sloth. We thought that he was heading down the tree for his weekly poo but he got tired half way down and stopped for a sleep. The park has a look-out point where you can see the city and the boats waiting to go into the canal.
Panama canal We even saw more wildlife when we visited the Miraflores locks at the world-famous Panama Canal. On the way in there is a stretch of river where we saw a huge crocodile and a toucan having a fight with some other birds. We were lucky to arrive as a huge tanker was going through the locks. I think it would be a bit boring to visit when there aren’t any boats going through as the canal itself is not particularly scenic. To go along the canal on a boat would be an amazing experience as it is covered on one side by rainforest and goes through a huge lake. However, this was out of our budget so we settled for the lookout point. My favourite bit was seeing the little silver tug trains that run alongside the canal to pull the boats through the locks. It reminded me of Thomas the Tank Engine.
I was a bit disappointed by the museum as it didn’t explain a lot about the building of the canal, but focussed more on the planned expansion. I can understand why they would want to focus more on the future rather than the past as it took many years of campaigning for the canal to be run by the Panamanians rather than the US.
Here are some facts about the canal if anyone is interested:
· It is 77km long and stretches north-south between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans
· The French were the first people to try to build the canal but ended up losing $260m and 20,000 lives. There is a memorial to the people who lost their lives in Panama City
· A boat traveling from New York to San Francisco
saves 7,872 miles by using the Panama Canal instead of going around Cape Horn
· The canal is 100 years old this year, it opened August 15 1914
· It takes 8-10 hours for a boat to pass through the canal
· The lowest toll paid was
US$ 0.36 and was paid by Richard Halliburton who crossed the Canal swimming in 1928
· It takes 52 million gallons of water to fill each of the locks
Advertisement
Tot: 0.143s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 13; qc: 72; dbt: 0.0698s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb