Day 35 The longest roadwork ever (?) and a key milestone

---

Distance driven today: 276 miles / 444 km

Cumulative distance driven: 8,101 miles / 13,037 km (another 8,000 miles to go)

Today’s trip: David to Panama City, Panama

Milestone achieved: we have now completed half the PanAmerican highway :-)

---

We let David in the morning, figuring that it would be a pretty straight forward ride to Panama City. Turns out that, between David and the next major city called Santiago, there were roadworks going on. These were not your ordinary roadworks, but rather what we believe must be the world’s longest roadworks! The entire 194km / 121miles stretch between the cities was one gigantic construction zone. The existing 2-lane road was being widened to 4 lane highway. Somehow the Panamanian ministry of transportation must have decided to widen the entire section all at once, rather than say, do such a massive road project in increments and not totally mess up traffic!

We must have passed thousands of workers, hundreds of excavators, graders, paving machines, asphalt compactors etc. Not to mention the thousand plus trucks that hauled dirt from the construction site, as well as, taking gravel to it. Our impression is that Caterpillars entire annual production of earth-moving and road construction equipment must have been sent to this piece of road. There can simply be no other explanation. In effect, a stretch of road that should have taken a bit over 2 hours to drive, ended up taking 5,5 hours!! When the road construction section was behind us, after we passed Santiago, nobody was happier than us. This must have been the world’s longest road construction section, or at least it felt like it was.

In the afternoon, we finally crossed the Bridge of the Americas, just a few kilometers to the west of Panama City. The bridge connects the north and South American continents, while the waterway beneath it also marks the entrance to the Miraflores locks on the Pacific side of the Panama Canal. Crossing this bridge marks a key milestone, since it also mean the completion of the first half of the 16,000 mile long PanAmerican highway. We intend to stay here in Panama City for 3-4 days to do some serious laundry (you would not believe that stuff that’s accumulated on the surface of my motorcycle jacket during 8,000 miles), search for a few minor spare bike parts that still need replacement, obviously visit the canal, visit a local school we have donated Kindle e-readers to, and of course rest.



Perhaps most importantly, we need to figure out how to get ourselves and the bike to Cartagena in northern Colombia, something that is not a trivial task, since there is no road whatsoever connecting eastern Panama and Colombia. Our best bet is the unconfirmed rumor that for the first time ever, there is a weekly ferry boat leaving Colon, on the Atlantic side of the Canal, and headed for Cartagena in northern Colombia. It’s time to put those research skills of mine into practice and find out whether the rumors are indeed true or not. In either case, Zoe and I look forward to a few days with a minimal amount of riding, before the second leg of the PanAmericnan highway, (which is the harder one) starts in South America.

---