This might actually be quite a short entry – I hear everyone heave a sigh of relief! We´re currently in David, which is the third biggest city in Panama, in the west and not far from the Costa Rican border. We sort of haven´t really done Panama justice as we´ve already booked our bus ticket to San José in Costa Rica for Saturday when we´ll have spent the grand total of nine nights in Panama! However, we´ve got to be quite selective from now on, otherwise we´ll never make it home!
Anyway, back to the story…the Panama canal. Do you want some facts about it? We´ll refer to the Rough Guide…the original excavations for the canal took place in 1881, under French management. The expedition was led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the same architect who designed the Suez canal. The project was a disaster with the proposed sea-level canal proving technically unfeasible and as many as 20,000 workers dying from yellow fever and malaria. They gave up in 1889. The US began the next venture in 1903, after the US supported Panama´s bid for independence from Colombia (who wouldn´t recognise a previous treaty allowing the US to build the canal). The US then had “all the rights, power and authority…which it would possess and exercise as if it were sovereign” over an area called the Canal Zone, extending five miles either side of the canal. Panama did get paid - $10 million as a one off and then $250,000 per year. Although this sounds like a lot of money, the canal apparently makes around $1 million per day at the moment so you can imagine how much more the US got out of it. It took a lot of time and effort to build the canal (about $387 million and 75,000 people) but the first ship eventually passed through it on August 15, 1914.
After a lot of hassle, including US invasions when they considered that conditions in Panama were unstable, the canal was handed back to Panamanian control on 31 December 1999 and apparently about 16,000 Panamanian workers lost their jobs as soon as the US army withdrew…so it wasn´t all a good thing. It´s now generating a lot of money for the Panamanian government so let´s just hope that it all gets put to good use! The canal has also had quite a large influence on Panamanian culture, with lots of migrant workers being drafted in to help build in, mainly West Indians, who then settled here so there is a lot of cultural diversity.
Anyway, that´s your history lesson over…so, what´s it actually like. Now, when we´re talking about a canal, we´re not talking about the Grand Union here! It´s huge! We passed a couple of BIG cargo ships but they didn´t look at all out of place and you could easily have got four or five alongside each other. When I think of canals, I think of nice straight sides and narrow strips of water but the Panama canal has sides that make it look like more of a river and has various islands etc. scattered about within in. The main source of water is the Chagres river, which we also visited, and apparently they lose 50,000 tonnes of water each day through the passing of ships! They´re charged according to how much they weigh with the highest charge being over $1 million and the least being 27 cents for a guy who swam it! Oh, and it´s 80km long…so it´s big. Having said all that, we didn´t see the Gaillard cut very well, which I think is the narrowest bit…
Our trip began on the Chagres river (oh, and also we didn´t get our private trip this time, we were joined by two German couples who were all very nice), where we went around for about half an hour with Mario, our guide, pointing out all sorts of birds. We´re not really bird people (one of the German guys was and rather impressively seemed to know most of their names in English as well!) and so can´t remember the names of all of them, but the ones we can remember (probably the most common ones) are: blue herons, American coots, mangrove swallows, turkey vultures, pelicans, wattled somethings, flycatchers, osprey, annies (not sure about the spelling of that one but that was the pronunciation) a snail kite (later on), some ducks and lots more…it was amazing how he spotted some of them as even with him pointing things out exactly and using binoculars, it took us a few minutes! This was especially true later on with some of the wildlife, although our captain, Jakobe, was even more astute there! Whilst on the river, we also saw the homes of some of the local Embera Indians, and also their dugout canoes, which they´re quite speedy in!
After our trip around the river, we entered the canal proper. The tour we had chosen was more of a wildlife tour on the canal, rather than a tour of the canal, which was really nice, although we didn´t get to see any of the big locks in action which might have been quite interesting. Oh, and the other thing about the canal is that it´s really beautiful, with rainforest on both sides. It actually felt a bit more like the rainforest experience we had been expecting in Ecuador…probably because a boat trip was involved. Without going through the day step by step, we explored the canal and its islands (from the boat), in search of the wildlife and saw…howler and white-faced (or cappuccino) monkeys (the white-faced monkeys were running up and down the canal bank while the howler monkeys were asleep in the trees), sloths, turtles, long-nosed bats (asleep and clinging to the tree trunk all in a line) (Chris – they have really long noses!), iguanas (up in the trees) and we went to look for caimans but didn´t find any of them. We also passed a few of the cargo ships using the canal, which was quite cool, although we felt quite small beside them!
We had lunch on a little island which was lovely and there were some howler monkeys in the trees about 100 yards from our table when we arrived, which was cool. While Mario was preparing lunch, we also stayed on the boat and went for a ride down a little river, which was really cool – the boat only just fitted and it was all very pretty. After lunch, we went for a final turn around the Chagres river where we were looking for caimans and then returned to Panama City. It was a really good trip, with a really knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide, and if anyone is interested in it, it was with Ancon Expeditions.
When we got back to our room, I was shattered (the heat really wears me out) and ended up going to sleep for a couple of hours! After that, we went to check email and have some dinner and that was about it for the day.
The next day, Sunday, we decided to go to Parque Nacional Metropolitan, which is a little bit of rainforest within Panama City. We got a taxi over there and were greeted by a very friendly guy who works as a guide there who showed us some stuffed animals, whose relatives we may see in the forest. Amongst them was a snake and Chris asked if there were many snakes there – 15 types apparently, 2 of which are poisonous, although the guy said we weren´t likely to see any and he was right, fortunately! There are five trails in the park and we managed to do all of them – luckily the information on the park boards was wrong as it said it would take 2 hours each to do some of them! I think the longest we took was about 40 minutes, including a 5 minute sit down. Again, we managed to see quite a lot of wildlife, although this consisted mainly of lizards, some butterflies and a few turtles (in a pond). We also saw an agouti though, which was cool – a bit like a raccoon I think…we saw some birds as well, although we´re not sure what any of them where! Oh, apart from a woodpecker – we can work that one out! And on the way back down one of the trails, we met the guide we´d seen at the entrance with another guy who pointed out a very pretty red and blue bird that´s a member of the quetzal family. As well as the turtles in the pond, we also saw a cool lizard that ran across the water! One of the trails took us up to a viewpoint with nice views out over the park, Panama City, the canal (if you looked really hard) and the bay.
We spent about three hours there and then got a taxi back to our room where we had lunch. After lunch, we went to look at a park that was quite close by, which turned out to be a children´s playground and then (on my suggestion), went in search of a shopping centre and/or cinema with air conditioning to escape the heat for a bit! We walked along the seafront, which was quite nice apart from all the traffic and came to a mall, which didn´t look that exciting from the outside but was absolutely huge! Neither of us have ever seen anything like it! It also had a cinema so we went to see Hitch with Will Smith, which was very funny. After the film, we had dinner there and then went back to our room to pack up.
Yesterday (Monday), we left Panama City and made the 7 hour journey to David. Although that sounds like quite a long time, it passed quite quickly and the bus we were on was quite comfortable. The Rough Guide wasn´t particularly effusive about David, calling it hot and dusty, so I for one wasn´t particularly looking forward to it, it just seemed like a good place to come to get to the highlands to escape the heat for a couple of days! It´s actually a nice enough city though and is quite green, especially out in the bits away from the centre, which is where we´re staying. We´re staying in a place called the Purple House Hostel, which is quite cool and does what it says on the tin – it´s more or less all purple, including the walls, the plates, the cutlery and even the feather duster and the fluffy toilet seat cover! (The toilet´s white.) It´s quite a friendly place and it felt really nice to sit in an armchair and watch a film last night. It´s also handily close to a great supermarket!
This morning, we went to explore the sights of David, which consist of the main square, which has lots of trees but isn´t as pretty as some we´ve seen, and a little museum, which was quite interesting. We felt a bit bad though because there was no fee to get in but the bloke showed us around and I´d have been quite happy to give him a couple of dollars tip. Unfortunately, all the change we had was 63 cents! So, that was David! (Chris – I also decided that enough was enough and after 7 months, decided to get my haircut which will hopefully help with the heat.) We had an enormous sandwich at Subway for lunch (yet another American fast-food chain racked up) and now we´re here, doing this! Tomorrow, we´re going to be heading to Cerro Punta, which is a village in the highlands that´s supposed to be very nice. From there, we´re hoping to do a 4 – 6 hour walk on Thursday to Boquete, another nice highland town, then on Friday it will be back to David ready to set off to Costa Rica on Saturday. Oh, and there´s also going to be a solar eclipse on Friday so we´ll hopefully try to watch that. ´Til next time…
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