Great friends of ours from the US were able to come down and meet us in Panama City. Seeing familiar faces on the road is always welcome. I'm (Bill here) going to randomly litter this post with pictures from our time in Panama, so the pictures won't always match the text.
Our wonderful friends who came to meet us in Panama! (more on that below)
Before meeting up with Doug and Kelly, our time in Panama was spent first in Punta Chame, a spit of land that juts out into the Pacific about two hours outside of Panama City that is bathed in strong winds throughout the winter months. Getting there via the public bus system was an interesting experience given that I was hauling around a 50 lb bag of kitesurfing gear that is about the size of a human body. In fact, the captain on the boat from Colombia called it El Muerto "the dead one". The bag is made to look like a golf bag so we don't have to pay baggage fees. I wish I had a picture, not just so you could see it, but also because it's being shipped back to the US right now through the Panamanian postal system, and I'm guessing it will get lost and a picture would maybe help find it... oh well.
Punta Chame in full swing of kite season, notice the white caps on the water to the right
Anyway, we got to the regional bus station in Panama City and found a long line leading to a kiosk that says "Chame", this is where we want to go. I had Kenzi wait with our bags while I got in line. It moved quickly, I got to the front, bought two tickets, and then casually wandered over to see Kenzi. I mention that I got the tickets but don't know where the bus is and I don't know what time either... but I got tickets! Cherish the little successes! Ha ha, isn't this funny?
Sunset over our home on the beach for five days on Punta Chame.
About 30 seconds later the guy that sold me the tickets came up to me, abruptly took the tickets back and returned my money... and all my happiness at scoring tickets was drained... After a few sharp exchanges in broken English, Spanish, and French it appears that after buying the bus ticket I must go directly to the bus. The way this works is that a constant stream of people buy tickets and get on a constant stream of buses headed to Chame, no dillydallying!
Me posing with my gear after a solid day of kitesurfing
So Kenzi and I shuffle with all of our gear out to the bus. Turns out the bus at the front of the queue is too full to take us and all of our gear, because the luggage compartment just doesn't have space. I offer to pay for extra seats but there aren't enough, so the ringleader, the guy that initially took our tickets back, sent us to a bus that hadn't yet been filled with passengers, the bus that is next in the stream. We load the bags through the window of the bus, because how else would you?
The bus was full!
From here things go pretty smoothly. At one point there are some live chickens on the bus. They are boxed up and remain heard but not seen. I'm not sure if this bus counts as a fabled chicken bus but I do get a kick out of saying we rode on a bus with chickens.
Anyway, we rode to the turn off for Punta Chame, and at that point the guy collecting money, who yells out the door constantly where the bus is going in an attempt to drum up more passengers, what we've taken to calling the "fixer" for the bus, tried to charge us double fare for the four seats we took up. I dug my heels in. I understand that we took up four seats and I was willing to pay for four, but I was not paying double on top of that. Luckily we had exact change for the standard fare on four seats and eventually the fixer relents and disappears.
Digging your heels in over price gouging in a foreign country is something that we've just had to get comfortable with and this time I find out later we were 100% in the right: on the return trip to Panama City we were charged what I paid per seat, on top of that the fixer was less of an opportunist and we didn't get charged for extra seats because of our oversize luggage. By the way, we're bickering over $10 here... but at least this once I didn't get taken for a sucker tourist and that feeling is pretty darn good.
We get a taxi to the place were staying at in Punta Chame.
The sort of house/Hostel/resort where we stayed in Punta Chame, right on the beach.
Punta Chame turned out to be a great kitesurfing spot. The place we stayed could have been better but it's perfect for kitesurfing. We meet a bunch of interesting people, many were on extended vacations like us. The best part for me though is that I mastered a new trick, the backroll, which is very satisfying:
Strange thing about this spot: the tidal span is enormous compared to any other place of similar latitude I've been too. I know that land mass/geography play a huge role in tidal span but usually the large span tides are all in high latitudes. Places further south like Florida usually have tides that are almost imperceptible. The tide here is very noticeable:
These pictures are taken from the same place at high and low tide showing the giant tidal span in Panama.
Aside from kitesurfing, Panama has been lodged in my brain as an interesting place since I was a kid.
The Panama Canal is considered one of the largest and most difficult engineering projects ever and since I'm an engineer at heart, checking it out has always been on my list of things to do. I learned about the American triumph in building the canal where others had failed. While that's great for the American ego, even more impressive is what the canal offers to global commerce: 22 days less transit time for freight between the Atlantic and Pacific. The canal was built over 100 years ago and remains largely unchanged in its functionality, however since 2016 it has a second widened set of locks to accommodate even larger ships.
Larger Ships! Kenzi remembers our guide saying that this ship could hold 500+ cars.
For ages the canal zone was a possession of the United States, that was followed by a period of joint US/Panamanian control and now the canal is controlled by a Panamanian-owned company, the "Panama Canal Authority". Technically the entire waterway is considered international waters and according to our tour guide, the Panamanian government has little control beyond accepting the profits of ~$1.5 billion per year. Another interesting tidbit, the US and Panama are still quite intertwined as we use the same currency, US dollars are the Panamanian currency.
Bridge of the Americas, the first re-connection of North and South American after the Canal was built
We did a partial transit of the canal, from the Pacific to the man-made lake in the middle. There are three locks that lift the passing ships from sea level up 86 feet to the lake. All of that lifting, nearly the entire canal, is powered by the rainwater that accumulates in the lake. Each time a ship enters a lock to ascend, water from the lake is drained into the lock and the ship is raised to the same level of the lake, this happens in three stages, in three separate locks. Here is a time lapse of the steps up coming from the Pacific:
Adding to the amusement of taking a joy ride through the most serious machinery of international trade was that there were two boats smaller than ours making their way through as well. The toll for the partial transit for our boat was $4500, the two smaller boats were estimated at $1200-$1800. So if you want to take your private yacht through the Panama Canal, it will cost you.
Sunset over the Pacific side of Punta Chame
The normal freighter transit would continue across the lake, descend through three locks and enter the Atlantic via the Caribbean.
The canal requires constant maintenance. This is a dredge which digs and sucks sediment out of the channel so that boats always have deep enough water.
There is significant maintenance to be done on the canal, the dredge shown above keeps the channel deep enough for the ships. Additionally the gates on the locks need to be removed and reworked every two years, so for a dollar Panama bought this massive crane, shipping cost was extra though... "Titan" previously knows as "Herman the German" from the the US, who seized it from Germany after WWII:
$1 Titan or "Herman the German", A giant crane for Maintenance on the gates for the locks, shipping was extra...
The other interesting bit of history is that the US invaded Panama... airplanes, tanks, soldiers, the whole kit and caboodle but from the looks of Panama City today you wouldn't know it.
Modern cosmopolitan city or money laundering capital? I don't know...
In addition to checking out the canal with Doug and Kelly we also took a road trip over to the Caribbean Coast to check out a small island, apparently misnamed "Isla Grande" which was quite nice:
Isla Grande? Not really, but the water was warm and drinks were cheap.
On the drive we passed through a small town that was having a baseball game and it looked like the whole town, along with the next two came out to see the festivities. The diamond was right on the road, and on top of that the outfield overlaps with the road... so we literally drove through a baseball game to get home:
From the car window, don't let a road interfere with your aspirations for a baseball field! (road is in the lower left corner)
Panama was a great stop on the way for us. While the downtown was a sprawling complex of high rises we also enjoyed driving through the countryside and were amused by the ability to drive in a few hours between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Just like Colombia, this might not be on the top of your list of places to go to escape the North American winter, but perhaps it should be.
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