Panama City

March 18, 2014

Panama City

Leaving Colombia was quite difficult. First of all it so beautiful there, you don't really want to leave. Then, leaving Colombia to get to central America is very expensive. I thought about every options. The cheapest one was to get to Tampa and then going down to Mexico, but I had to ask for a visa (or I could use my Italian passport but I had to wait to renovate it). No way. Another option was going to Cuba and from there going to Mexico. I liked this idea, but I still had to request a visa (tickets were quite cheap). Then I checked ticket prices to get to many different cities of Central America (all of them were expensive). I thought to go to Panama by boat, it costs a lot, but on the way you spend some nights in a Caribbean Island, but I had to wait some days, maybe more than a week for the first boat leaving. So I just bought the cheapest airplane ticket I found, the one to Panama City (considering that it only few km from Cartagena, the airplane ticket was very very expensive, but it was the best option for me).

Even if Cartagena is a big city, there is no connection with Panama, so I had to make a stop in Bogotà for one whole night. Fortunately I found a good spot to sleep on a bench at the airport and I woke up just before the boarding.

When I arrived in Panama City I took a bus to get to the centre... 2 hours of hell! The bus was completely full and every one was pushing, sweating, talking. I asked some information to the bus driver, but I couldn't understand any word he said. Then I asked to other passengers, but I still couldn't understand anything. Suddenly I couldn't understand anything locals were saying. Not even on my first day in Perù I had so many difficulties to understand Spanish. Like always I didn't book in advance for a hostel, but I heard about one in the centre and I went directly there: full! This was the first time in seven months that I found a full hostel. No problem, I just walked away to look for another place. I soon discovered that almost every place was full or overpriced. Then I decided to go to Casco Viejo, the old city, to look for a hostel. Even there every place I went was full. I started to be discouraged, till when I arrived to the area were the locals live and there I found a single room in a very ugly hostel. I was so tired looking, that I happily took the room. I left immediately my backpack there and I started exploring the city. The old town is a mixture of very decadent buildings and beautiful restored ones. Only in the last few years they understood that they should preserve the old town and from what I could see, they are doing a very good job. Casco Viejo is lovely, with its little streets and colonial houses and churches. From the old town, they built a nice promenade to get to the newest part of Panama City. Suddenly I felt like in Tel Aviv - Yafo. Huge skyscrapers everywhere and with different shapes and colours connected with a little nice old city . That's a big change after travelling for long time in South America. I am now in a big city, with big and modern buildings and famous brand shops.

What am I doing here?!?

I went back to the old town (my Yafo) and by my luck I arrived the day they were organising a big event with music and a fashion show. But when I came back to the hostel I decided that I would have leave soon. One of the things I wanted to see was the canal. You can't go to Panama without stopping at the canal. I soon realised that the canal wasn't that near and that the best place to see it is near Colon, on the Caribbean cost. So I was thinking to go there, till when I read what Wiki Travel wrote about this city:

" Walking Tour: You'd have to be insane! It is highly dangerous to walk around Colon."

So I decided to skip Colon and the canal, but visiting the museum of the canal. This was one of the most interesting museums I visited during this trip (all the information were written only in Spanish, so for most of the tourists this museum is useless) .

They gave a full explanation about how the canal was built, life story of the engineers that projected the infrastructure and the people who actually digged the canal. These were people from all over the world, according to their country their quality of life was very different. For example Americans were living in nice houses, while South Americans, Indians, Africans were living all together in place similar to favelas. During the work they had lot of problems : many people died because of the yellow fever, workers lived in very precarious conditions, they were actually working in a swampland. Besides this, many times a storm destroyed all their work. The canal had (and still have) a strong political and economic influence: for 50 years the canal was practically American and Panama was like a colonial country.

This year is the 100 anniversary of the canal and it's still used by many cargo boats and few cruise ship . What I was surprised to discover is that big boats that want to cross the canal need to pay something like 200000 dollars (yes, the number of zero is correct), but for them it's still cheaper than circumnavigate South America and wasting two more weeks doing that. Every time a boat need to pass, they need to pump a huge amount of water in the locks and this is for sure very expensive.

Another section of the museum explained about the development of the communication systems and the techniques use to put cables underwater. Very interesting!

I saw some videos about boats passing through the canal and that's really impressive. You can search some videos on YouTube. Unfortunately I wasn't allowed to take pictures or video inside the museum and to describe everything I learned takes too long.

One more thing about what I learned there. During my trip in Latin America I noticed that many streets and cities were named Colon, but only reading some information at the museum I realised that Colon, Cristobal Colon, is our Cristoforo Colombo (and for all the ignorants that are reading, Cristoforo Colombo was Italian, not Spanish). Thanks!