Panama City Day 2

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  Panama City, Panama
Saturday, March 15, 2008

It's the end of the day on Sat 15 Mar now, our 2nd day in Panama City!  It was another hot humid day here, probably about 90 degrees and 60% humidity.  We don't really HATE heat/humidity that much or anything, but it was nice going inside off and on today for the
AC.
 
To tell the truth, yesterday was kind of rough!  It started off our trip on a difficult note.  We were very tired from the red-eye flight, we found that the hotel we booked was in a not-real-pretty part of town, Panama City is quite crowded with lots of traffic and car exhaust, etc etc.  As we both know, sometimes you have to be patient when traveling - it's not always 100% fun and easy 100% of the time!
 
Today, much better!  We took the tourist boat through the Panama Canal today, one of the great wonders of the world!  It really was interesting and cool to see from our boat the Pacific Queen (3 decks, about 250 people aboard).  We did the partial transit only, going through the two locks on the Pacific side and into this big lake that the ships use to get to the Atlantic side, where there is a third lock that lets them back down to sea level.  We did not go all the way to the third lock, we got off the boat at the halfway point in Lake Gatun and the bussed us back to Panama City.  Almost everyone on the boat continued on to the Atlantic side, but honestly seeing two sets of locks was plenty!  They all work pretty much the same.
 
It was really cool pulling into the locks that we shared with a VERY big oil tanker called the Libera.  They closed the lock gates behind us and then started raising the water level of the lock - we and the huge oil freighter slowly rose up easy as can be!  We raised 27 feet in each lock chamber that we went thru.  Starting out the top of the wall of the lock would be a bit above our heads, then 8 minutes later when the finished raising the water level we'd be looking down at that same wall.  Then they'd open the gates in front of us and we'd sail through to the next lock!
 
There was one mishap!  A small sailboat pulled into the last lock chamber with us.  When they finished raising us up in the lock and opened the gates, we started moving and suddenly heard a big crash and a bunch of people yelling from over where that sailboat was!  We didn't really see exactly what happened but looking down from the top deck of our boat it seemed the sailboat was somehow stuck to our boat!  After a moment our boat and theirs separated and we both continued on.  They had to pull our boat off to the side for a bit and check what had happened.  We went down to the lowest deck of our boat to check what had happened and found one of the big windows had been smashed in!  Somehow, the sailboat's bow had come right through that windows!  There was broken plexiglass everywhere and one lady who was sitting by the window was getting checked out by paramedics.  (She turned out physically fine, but a bit shaken up.)  They finally covered up the window with cardboard and we continued on.  Not sure what happened exactly!  And also not sure whose fault it might have been!
 
Fun Canal facts:
 
Operates 24x7x365
34 ships per day pass thru, on average
In the morning, all traffic is one-way Pacific to Atlantic, then reverses after lunch
"Panamax" is the name given to largest vessels that will fit in the locks, they can hold 4,500 of those HUGE shipping containers
Newer vessels have been built larger than Panamax, largest of all can hold 12,000 containers!  They are building new sets of locks that will accommodate larger vessels, should be open by canal's 100 birthday in 2013!
No pumps are used on the locks, all water is fed by gravity coming down the Chagres River
Cost to transit canal is based on the weight of the vessel
Average cost for one Panamax ship to go thru canal: $100,000 US dollars
Highest toll ever paid: $330,000 (huge cruiseliner)
Lowest toll ever paid: 30 cents in 1928 by some guy who convinced canal authority to let him swim through!  (Remember, toll is based on weight!)
 
The canal is very cool!  It's an incredible engineering marvel, so simple in how it works but on such a grand scale!!
 
We woke up early for the canal, leaving Hotel Acapulco at 6:30a, and finished around 1pm.  We found one really great souvenir shop with some different and interesting stuff, and with the nicest, friendliest, welcoming owners!  We were talking about all the places they have traveled (US, Europe, Russia, all over Central America), talked about sports, etc etc.  They were very encouraging of our attempts to speak Spanish and then they'd switch to English when we got stuck.  They filled us in on the local baseball stadium (Rod Carew Stadium) where we hope to see a game this week.
 
I just LOVE meeting people like that when we travel.  One of the main reasons I travel is to get some understanding of what it's like to live in the place, what it might be like to grow up there, what makes a person from that place different from a person who grew up in the US.  (And in what ways they are the same.)  That always teaches me something about people in general, and about my own country, and ultimately about myself.  Very enriching!
 
We have been talking LOTS about what traveling we like to do, what makes a trip fun?  Costa Rica was pretty easy, with SO much adventurous stuff that's all set up for travelers and easy to find.  It's pretty much an adventure playground with all the national parks, beaches, jungle canopy ziplines, waterfall rappelling, volcano, etc.  Panama is less set up like that, they aren't as far along with the whole eco-adventure-tourist thing yet.  It's harder to find the fun things to do.  Also, here in Panama we are in the biggest city, in Costa Rica we spent zero time in the big city and went straight for the nature tourist adventure areas.  Here in Panama City, we know there are probably lots of fun, culturally enriching, interesting things to do!  But they're a little harder to find than Costa Rica.
 
Lesson: we really needed to do some more research back home before leaving - learn more about the neighborhood the hotel is in, look up the schedule at the baseball stadium and find out where it is, find some salsa dance lessons and figure out what dance school we like, try to find some nightclub that would be good for us to try, find out what plays are on stage at the theaters here, look for dance performances here.  Some of those things might have been difficult to find from LA, but they're proving difficult to figure out here too!  Here we have less Internet access than back home, and we want to spend our time during the trip DOING fun things, not searching out the fun things to do. 
 
We have two guidebooks for Panama (Lonely Planet and National Geographic guidebooks), but guidebooks don't really give much info for how to find culturally enriching stuff and that's what we really want!  We had a VERY interesting talk about how guidebooks would need to change to be what we need them to be.
 
Finally today, we went to a great restaurant with Mexican food called "El Patio Mexicano."  Wherever we travel, we seem to find one or two places that have food that we like and those become a sort of home base for us.  We know we can get good food for us there and that's very important for us.  Tonight's place also had a very helpful and friendly staff.  We will definitely go back there and we'll be able to ask them questions about fun stuff to do in the area, etc etc.
 
Well, that's it for now!  Thanks for coming along with us on this trip too.  I hope you are finding these Travelpod postings to be as interesting to read as we find them to write.  Feel free to post responses online if you like!  Or you can just email us too, we are checking email daily or every other day.
 
Tomorrow we have reservations at a different hotel - La Casa de Carmen.  Hopefully will prove to be nicer and in a nicer neighborhood than Hotel Acapulco.  We'll let you know!.

Dave waiting as Pacific Queen docks

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Oil freighter Libera precedes us into lock	Lock gate closing behind us	Sailing into the next lock	One of the HUGE freighters we passed

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