PANAMA CITY AND THE PANAMA CANAL

 

 

What can be said about a 15-hour bus ride, from one capital city to another through the major portions of two countries, and much of it in darkness?  It is a test of endurance.  It is not fun.  You can’t even see.  The intense sunlight glare during daytime hours prevents any real viewing of the passing scenery.  You can’t even blog.  The guy seated in front of me (this is my fate; I have the world’s best parking karma, but the worst when it comes to who is placed in front of me on planes and buses) is overweight, chatty, and hasn’t taken his Ritalin.  Not only can I not focus or hear myself think between his aggressive bouncing, but my computer screen makes a hefty crease across my abdomen.  The computer is stashed in record time.

 

We arrive at 3 AM in Panama City from San Jose.  The bus station is new and modern.  A taxi driver makes a call to my designated hostel, only to find they have no 24 hour attendant.  I am quick to decide I’ll not be sitting up and trying to sleep it off in a terminal somewhere in unfamiliar territory.  I ask him to seek out a cheap hotel, one that can essentially be rented for about four to six hours.  It doesn’t take much imagination to conjure up the type of company this resulted in when I soon found a place that would accept my terms and payment limitations!

 

After the minimally necessary three and one-half hours of sleep, the gal at the receiving desk wakes me up and wants another full day’s worth of payment for continued use of the room.  I argue that I should be able to pay the balance between a full day’s room rate, and what has been paid already.  To no avail.  She has apparently heard this argument before.  Since I want to see the Panama Canal and not be riding all around town in taxis to find a suitable room, I uncharacteristically demur and just pay the next day’s full rate.  About $33, if I remember correctly.

 

There is an old fashioned glass-domed luxury train that leaves just outside Panama City at 7:15 AM called the Panama Railway Company.  The taxi driver gets me there after dropping his son off for work with two minutes to spare.  It takes a little over an hour to reach Colon, about 80 kilometers away on the Caribbean side of the country.

 

Along the way, you see intensely green vertical sections of jungle canopy, grasslands, lagoons, and the grayish southern expanses of Lake Gatun – a huge centrally located artificial lake created by damming the Chagres River back in the early 1900’s.  It took four years of rainfall to fill the lake, the largest artificial body of water in the world at the time.  Its purpose is to facilitate a regular supply of water to feed locks on both sides of the waterway.   The lagoons are much like those viewed weeks earlier when entering Guatemala along the Rio Dulce, only sans their Polynesian huts.

 

A bevy of shock troops – otherwise known as taxi drivers – lay siege to me immediately upon alighting from the train.  They want $60 for a half-day tour.  They flash promising signs listing all of what I am promised to see, then pull the signs back quickly.  I am assured of what a good deal I am getting … but of course, “only for today.”  I snort at their pricing.  Previous scouting tells me it is possible to achieve my travel objectives for half this price.  One persistent fellow however, follows.  His price lowers at virtually every pause.  He follows me through numerous intersections and is now two blocks removed from his lair.

 

The point of no return for him.  He now MUST make a deal.  We negotiate on exiting the Caribbean coastal port city of Colon – a seedy nightmare much like Porto Limon in Costa Rica – over to the Gatun Locks.  Visits will take place there to the old canal and the Gatun Locks, and then the “Nuevo Canal” where construction began in 2007 on an additional set of locks, expanded to meet the needs of modern supertankers and luxury liners. He is to wait in the interim, then return me to the bus station in Colon, where I will make a return to Panama City (which should take two hours by bus).  We agree on $35 for this combo.

The world famous Panama Canal is the result of of human imagination and ingenuity that goes back as far as the 16^th century when Spaniards first arrived at the narrowest point between North and South America, and realized the 50 mile-wide isthmus is the narrowest point between Europe and the Orient somewhere far off to the east.   A railroad first built by Americans helped moved tens of thousands of 49ers past the dangers of unfriendly natives in the American west on their way to California gold fields.

 

The first practical effort to build a bisecting waterway began with the French in 1880.  Their efforts endured heroically for 15 years, but fell victim to financial mismanagement and malaria, which killed over 20,000 workers in the course of their efforts.  Immediately after declaring independence from Columbia, Panama contracted with the United States in 1903 to complete the canal.  It was finished on August 15^th, 1914.  The US managed and controlled the waterway until Dec 31^st, 1999, at which time authority devolved to an autonomous Panamanian government authority, the ACP.  

 

It goes without saying that the Panama Canal remains one of the great engineering marvels of the world.  Over 15,000 vessels annually use its shortcut passage to bypass a long trip around Cape Horn at the southern tip of Argentina.  Ships worldwide are still constructed with the dimensions of the double locks at both ends (Gatun and Miraflores) in mind so as to be able to achieve this economy.

 

A middle set of locks (the Pedro Miguel Locks) stretches the journey out somewhat.  Overall passage takes eight to ten hours, from Colon on the north to Panama City on the south.  The locks themselves are 305 meters long, and 33.5 meters wide – sometimes only allowing two feet of clearance to either side for the largest of present day liners and tankers.  A mind-blowing 52 million gallons of fresh water is lost each time a ship is raised and lowered within these  double-doored water gates.

 

Also prominent in the overall canal passage is the Culebra/Gaillard Cut, a 14 kilometer excavation through Panama’s Continental Divide which so prominently shows in early construction films of the canal.  The material taken from this dig would have filled the Great Pyramids of Giza up to 63 times.  My grandfather worked on maintenance and expansion of this and other sections of the canal in the 1930’s.  At my father’s funeral back in October, some rather prominent photos are shown of the work being done, and the housing they lived in while stationed there.

 

Fees are higher than expected.  The Panamanians have carefully calculated what the lost time rounding Cape Horn and cost of added fuel would add to a journey, and priced their transit rates  somewhat marginally less.  Modern fees for passage can exceed $400,000.  Cruise ships pay over $125 per passenger.  The lowest fee ever paid (based on weight) was by 130-pound travel adventurer Richard Halliburton (The "Pride of Memphis, Tennessee"), who swam through over the course of eight days in 1928.  Cost of passage is just low enough that ships don’t hesitate standing in line for up to three days to enter the canal.  The lineup of offshore vessels waiting to enter reminds me of large yachts clustered for our annual 4^th of July fireworks program on Lake Union in Seattle.

 

A ship’s passage from coast to coast would therefore look something like this.  Starting in the Caribbean at Colon to the north, ships enter the canal passage and are raised 28 meters in three separate elevation steps to the high point, Lake Gatun.  From there they journey south through Gatun Lake, to the straight line Culebra Cut/Gaillard Cut, descend at the Pedro Miguel Locks, descend further to Miraflores Lake and then the Miraflores Locks, and finally emerge under the “Bridge of The Americas” arch at the Panama City Pacific end.

 

The Gatun Locks remain impressive even 100 years after their completion.  I watch as a Polynesian registered tanker named “Buddy” traverses its entire length.  It first enters from the Caribbean, then enters a primary lock chamber, and takes about ten minutes for that cavern to be filled via gravity feed from water uphill in Lake Gatun.  It is raised yet again in an intermediate chamber.  Then finally, it is raised to the level of the lake.

 

At each step, the ship is carefully tendered.  A Panamanian pilot is aboard.  Huge electric  “mules” (six to eight for each ship) ride cog railway tracks to each side of the locks to both pull the ships forward, and maintain tension so that side-to-side alignment is balanced.  Again at times, passage provides only two feet of clearance from gate walls, so equanimity is critical.  Huge humps where the lock water gates are located, allow these mules to ride up and over them and maintain constant contact (and tension) with the ships by way of steel cable mooring lines.

 

The Nuevo Canal is perhaps five minutes away by car from the Gatun Locks.  It was approved in 2006 by a plebiscite of the Panamanian people, who enthusiastically endorsed expanding the canal in a $5.2 billion project begun in 2007.  It was expected to be completed in 2014 in time for the centennial of the canal, but will run at least three years behind that.  The new mega-locks are to be 60% wider and 40% longer than the existing twin-locks which have served so admirably these last 100 years.

 

An open viewing overlook area reveals a massive pit, larger than any modern construction project save for the Three Gorges Dam in China.  The amount of rebar and steel reinforcement going into the concrete retaining walls and rolling (no longer swinging) gates is said to be 18 times that which was used to construct the Eiffel Tower in Paris.  Humans working on the structure are nearly invisible, dwarfed as they are by the scale of the project.

 

As part of the new expanded (third set) of locks being added at BOTH ends of the waterway, the canal expansion also (1) is to include a 6.1 kilometer Pacific Access Channel, directly joining the Miraflores area locks with the Culebra cut (2) widens and deepens the entrances on both the Pacific and Caribbean sides (3) Deepens Gatun Lake and the Culebra Cut (4) Raises the level of Gatun Lake by 1.5 feet (5) Adds a water conservation/recycling system for the new locks so that 60% less fresh water is used for each ship passage.

 

My tour ended, an air conditioned public bus better than we have back in Seattle is taken back to Panama City.  From there, maximizing the diminishing time remaining in both Panama and the trip overall, a local recommendation is followed.  Visit San Felipe rather than Casco Viejo.  This is the dignified part of the old city that remains crumbling in parts (like Havana), and has been colorfully and beautifully restored in others (like in Granada, San Cristobal, and Antigua).  The restored restaurants and boutique hotels are a particular delight.

 

I stop at the Restaurante Casablanca and have the best $9.75 paella bowl ever presented on the planet.  Nobody ever made it that well for that reasonable a price!  Two local beers – Atlas and Balboa – compliment the seafood nicely.  The first evening of the first full day in Panama City ends anticlimactically shortly thereafter, pursuing yet more souvenir shops, artistry displays, and the evening forget-me-not (the caipirinha) at a 4 kilometer breakwater known simply as “The Causeway.”

 

This palm-shaded walking, driving, skating, jogging, cycling and shopping haven was built by the US military with excavation tailings from the Panama Canal and connects four otherwise isolated islands: Naos, Culebra, Perico and Flamenco.  Views looking back over an inner harbor into the old city are very tranquil and the attractive blue and green skyline of modern Panama City’s towering glass skyscrapers can be enjoyed from here without the noise, pollution and traffic congestion of the city itself.