Panama

September 17 - 19, 2004

By mistake of an airline overbooking, we landed for a couple of days in Panama City.

Blog Entry from September 18th

Yesterday morning, we showed up at the airport in El Salvador and purchased tickets to fly to Ecuador with a one hour layover in Panama. They made an announcement in Spanish-only in which I caught her say "four hundred dollars" and something about "flying tomorrow". The flight was overbooked! I jumped to volunteer to stay over for the night. The airline put us in a great hotel in downtown, where we were given a seafood buffet for dinner, an omelette bar at breakfast, and a great lunch! We were booked for the same flight the next evening at 7PM. So, during the day, the airline sent us on a free tour out to watch a ship pass through the locks of the Panama Canal!

Just now, we got to the airport, and the airline representative said we can stay another day! For us doing them this great favour, he's going to give us another $300 flight voucher. So.... We're getting $700 in flight vouchers with COPA Airlines, two nights at a 4-star hotel, 6 awesome meals, a tour to the Panama Canal, and tomorrow we can take a taxi to get some pictures in the colonial center! All this for what I thought at the time was an over-priced $550 airline ticket. I can't leave this without commenting on how clean I feel. After travelling for four months, my concept of clean has changed. Nowadays, a room is acceptable when the bugs aren't some kind that bite, and there seems to be no requirement for an acceptable bed. Last night I must have taken an hour long shower with truly hot water and high pressure. The sink even had hot water! We could flush toilet paper in the toilet! Shannon used a blow dryer! (This was the first time since she burned up her travel blow dryer in a 220 Air Conditioner outlet during our first week of travel in Baja California, Mexico.) Maybe tomorrow, I'll have time to jump into the giant, clean swimming pool!

Blog Entry from September 22nd

After being held over in Panama for two nights and treated lavishly, the airline gave us one final gift of a seating upgrade to business class for the flight to Ecuador. Our stay in Panama was wonderful and first class all the way, but I must say that I don't feel like I've touched the country like we have the others, or maybe more literally I should say that I didn't get dirty from Panama. Riding public transportation, eating in local restaurants, lodging in locally owned hotels and hostels, and just spending time walking the streets really gives a different feel for a place. The plushness, yet distance from the locals that I felt in Panama really tells me that our low-budget method of travel is the one I prefer for this trip.

Panama City (September 17, 2004)

Panama City is by far the most American feeling city that we've visited. The city generally clean with paved streets and has a high rise downtown, Chicago-style slums, a partially-restored old center, an entertainment district, and expensive suburbs.

Read Shannon's blog: Panama

Panama Canal (September 18, 2004)

“Why are the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean at different levels?” I’m not embarrassed to admit that I used to wonder this. But now, I know that they are not. The trick to the Panama Canal goes something like this: On the land mass between the two oceans, there is a giant, high altitude, man-made lake. Ships crossing the canal are first raised up from sea level to the level of the lake, where they cross the lake, and then are lowered back down to sea level at the other side!

Here is a little of the history that I picked up on the creation of the canal and the country of Panama itself. For more (and probably more accurate) information, I encourage you to research a bit on the Internet. Originally, French architects started work on the canal trying to simply dig a channel straight through. After working over 20 years and losing thousands of lives on this task, they envisioned the current engineering design, but by now the job was bankrupt. Around 1904, the US stepped in and bought out the contract and at the same time backed Panama’s independence from Columbia.

Somehow, the lake was blasted into existence and is the key to the design. Because no pumps are used in transferring ships through the canal, the high altitude lake water is used to fill the locks, and then the lock water is dumped down into the ocean. With 24 ships passing the canal per day, they go through an awful lot of water, and the system is at the mercy of the heavy tropical rainfall in the zone. Canal authorities watch the lake level closely, but they say that to date, they have never had to close the canal because of low lake levels.

The canal was opened in 1914 and handed over to Panama in 2000. In between these years, the canal and the land on either side was operated as an American military zone. Today, the Canal Zone is clearly the area of high-end development in Panama City. Expensive hotels, exclusive shopping malls, and luxury housing have sprung up in the former military zone.