Panama City

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  Panama City, Panama
Monday, May 29, 2006

PANAMA CITY THOROUGHLY EXPLORED


The risk of not getting on the Costa Rica ship was nagging at us, but our only alternative was a ¨maybe¨ on a ship out of Panama until I rang the head office of the shipping line in Miami and asked what we had to do to guarantee a place on the 27th sailing. ´ I'll ask the owner¨ was the reply, and 1 hour later we were guaranteed a place. And so we packed our bags and high-tailed it to Panama city.
Panama city is quite an eye-opener. We would not be here if it were not for getting the booking, nor for so many days if it wasn't for full flights to Quito. But given a week here we've really seen everything. What a vibrant, cheerful city with nearly everyone of mixed race and with colossal rear-ends and proud stomachs supporting ample cleavage. Catch someone's eye and you get a beautiful smile. You are perpetually hooted by cabs and buzzed by the most beautiful buses in Central America - red devils. We visited the only national contemporary art gallery (impossible to find) that seemed expensive at $4 to see about 20 pictures, so he dropped the price to $1 and showed us around personally explaining each painting and artist. It is a long strip of a city with a Hong-Kong like financial district of air-conditioning, expensive cars and maids at one end and Casco Antiguo at the other end slightly decaying, still showing the damages from the US rather heavy-handed bombing to get Noriega in 1989, said to be dangerous but now being dressed up for tourists and bristling with police, but still the little back streets were full of life with people living in what looked like stables. We had our best Central American meal in the café Coca-Cola, full of old men passing the day, and an excellent plate of food for $2. And everywhere hawkers hawking, taxis hooting and buses blaring and no-one bothering a couple of sweaty tourists drinking in the sights and sounds.
We are in our usual excellent hotel (Discovery) with walls of 5 violent shades, a 15w bulb but massive TV. The receptionist switched off our air-conditioning from downstairs at one point to get our attention, because Sheila had changed the appearance of the computer in the lobby and she wanted Sheila to fix it. A violent storm left our room floor swimming in water with our books and electronic stuff floating around...fortunately the only real damage was Sheila´s Sudoku book, but we put all the separated pages all around the floor to dry and it looked slightly like a Buddhist temple...but it worked. The mattress is fine and the shower has hot water and we have English films on the TV- the lap of luxury - all for $13.50.
I had not wanted to visit the Canal Zone but I am very glad Sheila dragged me there. Fascinating. And the Panamanians are so proud that they are more efficient and safer than when the US ran it. But the scale of construction is difficult to envisage when you think it is 100 years old and the French lost 22.000 men in their unsuccessful attempt before the Americans succeeded. The big steel loch gates are still the original ones installed in 1914. It can cost up to $200,000 for a single passage with the cheapest being $0.36 for someone who swam the canal and we were told it would cost 10 times that to go around the Horn. They are envisaging spending $5b to increase the width to take even bigger ships. Watching the huge car transporters literally breathing in to get through the locks was riveting.
Getting the car into a container and onto the ship was an interesting experience...but to step back....we were originally going from Costa Rica on a roll-on roll-off car transporter but we told you in our last BLOG there was a 20% chance the boat would bypass Costa Rica so our friends in Boquete put us in touch with Heidy Kam of Grupo Kam who got us quotes and found us a ship that would hopefully leave on 27 or 28 May. The company also assists with police and customs clearance. It seems amazing that you can drive your car across a border in less than an hour of paperwork but put it on a ship and it takes more than a day of sweaty waiting, wrangling and eye popping inefficiency to put it on a ship. First you need a police report to make sure your car has been a good girl, and the police station for this is a less than salubrious part of town - even the police warn you to watch your car even though its parked outside the police station, 2 hours in the police station - at least it was air-conditioned but so fiercely that you needed arctic underwear, then to the Justice department (I am not sure what we did here but where we waited there was a large statue of the Virgin Mary with electric candles flashing - not sure whether this was to inspire confidence or a suggestion that your days are numbered); from there to customs - my mind was so numbed by now that I have no recollection of where it was or what I did other than sign forms, and so we came away with sheaves of paper all covered in official stamps. That was the first day. The second day we had to take the car to the Atlantic side of the canal so it could come back through the canal - yes we asked the same question. Kindly the owner of Grupo Kam let us follow him to Coloń where he deposited us at the Port and then found a scruffy toothless man who was to hold our hand at that end. Everyone, including all the guide books, had told us how dangerous Colon is and to avoid it at all costs. It certainly looked highly suspect with the port area surrounded by the most depressing looking tenement buildings many of which were derelict and abandoned and so the whole area looked like a ghost town. Panama seems to have totally ignored Colon and the very large black population there may be why. But our little man (who charged us $10) looked after us very well and again we were shepherded through a bewildering number of form signings and stamping before finally driving our poor little car into its metal coffin where it was tied down with ropes before the doors were unceremoniously slammed, bolted and sealed. We felt absolutely bereft but the counselling services were very sympathetic. Although everything is slow and rather chaotic most people are incredibly friendly and go out of their way to be helpful. The only worrying aspect is that almost without fail when you put a piece of official paper in front of someone they look at it with a slightly perplexed air as if they had never seen it before, so you go rapidly from soporific boredom to an adrenalin rush every time a different person grabs your precious papers. The ship will get to Ecuador in a week´s time - whether our car will be on it and whether it is actually unloaded we don't know...next episode. We will give other travellers a full accounting once we repossess her, so keep your fingers crossed that all goes well.
Photos will be posted later as our laptop is in the car on the high seas

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