David to Panamá City

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David to Panama City

I was thinking this morning; this is just like riding at home except the flora and fauna are different, we ride on the 'right' side of the road and it's hotter than hell. In other words it's nothing like home!

The road to Panama City was hundreds of kilometres of road works, the road surfaces were patchy and bumpy.

Driving out of Santiago I saw a vortex of large black birds. They look pretty neat swirling around, I imagine they are riding thermal updrafts.

We rode over the Panamá canal via the Panamá Bridge which was pretty amazing. I couldn't get a good photo of the canal as they'd put some stupid meshing along each side (possibly to deter people from stopping to take photos). Anyhow, the bridge itself was a pretty cool structure. We then slowly made our way through extremely heavy traffic into Panama City. We used my phone as a sat Nav to try and find our lodgings for the night. I say 'try' as it took us somewhere completely random, dumping us in the slums of Panama City. Gerardo was able to communicate with some locals and a security guard was arranged to escort us to the accomodation thankfully!

The next day we organised a cab which we shared with Jeff and Deane and visited the Panamá canal Miraflores Locks. I've always wanted to go there so I felt pretty happy and privileged to be right there watching the ships pass through and just marvel at the engineering. We also looked through the Panamá canal museum; a fantastic place to visit! After watching lots of ships pass through we met up again with Jeff and Deane and took at cab to the largest shopping mall in Central America. The mall was fully decorated in Halloween decorations and the scale of the place was massive. We didn't see all of it but spent about three hours looking at shops and stocking up on necessities.

Back at our digs for the night we met and got talking to an American girl who worked for the peace Corp and a German guy who is also travelling south like us and was booked on the same boat we are booked to go on.

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