Day Ten: Panama Canal

A Man, A Plan, A Canal, Panama!

I have always wanted to say that from the Panama Canal and now I have. :-) Waking in the morning on the Pacific and going to sleep that night on the Caribbean, now that is something.

On Day Ten (sigh, we are up to the double digits), we woke to find 15 ships nearby (nearby in ocean terms). This is after cruising with nary another ship in sight unless we were docked. Ah, we must be approaching the Panama Canal. The ships were varied in their style: container, closed cargo (automobiles most likely), ones carrying four cranes on deck, small ones, big ones. We are the only cruise ship around and I know we do make a lovely sight.

We rise quickly and scurry up to the heliport all the way forward on deck five, at all other times closed to passengers. Maybe 50 or so have arrived before us but there is plenty of room at the very prow of the ship. Pressing myself against the rail, I could do a mean Titanic (movie) number. We approach the beginning of the Canal and see many ships anchored in the ocean. We can see Panama City; its skyline is impressive, skyscrapers, a Trump Tower even. And a huge huge green dredge. (They are digging a new and deeper channel for the Panamax ships.) We see the Pan American Bridge looming in front of us. When you cross under that, you are in the Panama Canal.

We have been standing outside for more than half an hour and I decide to go to early morning stretch. Bennett will not abandon his post and as the deck has gotten more populated, he does not leave the optimal viewpoint of the front railing. I am glad to go to stretch though as it does open the day and after all, it takes 8 to 10 hours to transverse the Canal. When stretch class is over, the gym empties as everyone goes outside to see the Canal passage. Then it dawns on me that the treadmills are also at the very prow of deck ten, only with glass in front of them. Hey, why not? No crowds to fight, same vantage point.

So I begin my 50-minute power walk into the first lock of the Canal: Miraflores. There are two parallel channels and the Maersk Danang is to our starboard going the same direction as we are. The Danang is forward of us so I see the huge ship enter the lock, be raised up as we enter our lock, the gates open for the Danang as we are raised up, the Danang exits, our gates open, we exit. All as smooth as silk. As cool as the other side of the pillow. And I walked the whole thing! Or even more so: the first lock area is 1.8 miles and I have treadmilled 3. 6 miles.

I meet Bennett and we take a leisurely breakfast (an omelet for me, waffles for Bennett) in the Cafe on deck 10. We are about to enter the second lock, Pedro Miguel (actually the third; Miraflores comprises two locks). We can see below to the mules (the mini train engines that tie to the ship and pull the ships through). The Infinity has 18 inches clearance on either side. And doesn't budge an inch side to side, so true is the pulling operation.

All through the morning, now that we have passed the three entry locks and are 85 feet above sea level, we travel a narrow passage - the Colubre Cut. We sit in the quiet cardroom on deck five with floor to ceiling windows and watch the jungle vegetation pass as we slowly waft down the narrowest portion of the Canal. American moment no. 1 came when the lady a few chairs down from me says to her friend, "This is like the jungle ride at Disney World." Not.

After enjoying the morning, we fortify ourselves with lunch at the Beachside Pool Grill as the ship exits the Colubre Cut and moors in the Gatun Lake, the largest man-made lake in the world. We take a tender to the shore (the entry on to the tender is much smoother than at Cabo San Lucas but Bennett points out that we are on a lake not an ocean this time!) and disembark at the Gatun Yacht Club. Our tour bus is waiting.

This time we have three young ladies for tour guides, Grisel (Gree-celle), Zuni (Soo-nie), and Elida (A-lee-da). Our first stop is the Gatun Locks landside; this is the series of three locks that take you down 85 feet back to sea level for exit into the Caribbean. We stand on bleachers for half-an-hour or so and see ships go through the whole process. We saw our old friend, the Danang, again and next to it the Kiel Express. It was fascinating to watch the ships enter the lock, descend as the water pours out, and sail out the other end, all with the mules and hard workers moving like clockwork. We have a swig of water from the water fountain as it is marked El Mejor Agua en el Mundo because it is from the fresh Gatun Lake. It was definitely clear tasty cold water. And now I can lay claim to having had a drink of the mejor agua en el mundo.

We drive through Panama and see the former US military properties that to me now look like that History Channel show, the End of the Earth about how the world as we know it would decay if humans vanished. But the Panamanians are quite proud of the bachelor quarters, the commissary, the bowling alley, etc. as they have been made into "luxurious" housing.

We arrive at the Sol Melia Panama Canal. It used to be the School of the Americas (military academy for the likes of Pinochet, Noriega) but is now a resort hotel. We stroll around the hotel and have bread (a big fat braided roll) and a slice of turkey. Zuni calls the group back together to explain that we are going to be divided into three boats, take an "eco-tour" of the Gatun Lake and then visit an indigenous village. Her cell phone rings as she is talking; she apologizes for answering but it is "her boss." When she gets off the phone, she is even more apologetic. There had been heavy rains in the village that morning and an africanized bee hive has been washed away. So the africanized bees are swarming. And we were not to go near the village. Ugly American moment no. 2. Some in the crowd begin loudly griping. We paid for the village tour! Take us back to the ship!! Give us our money back!!! Me, I'm thinking the boat ride sounds nice and keep me away from them bees.

In the end, some folks stay in the hotel lobby but enough of us for two boats walk down to the lake. We get on a flat bottom boat that holds five rows of four passengers and has a canopy over top but that is about it. We don our life vests and start our eco-tour. We see trees and vines and green green green. We see the tip top of logs sticking straight up from the water. They are petrified trees that have been completely submerged for nearly 100 years since the lake was filled in. The lake is a preserve or those trees would have been stripped for the hard hard wood. Indeed, the small islands dotting the lake are hills that were in the valley and the island is the tip of the hill. We see the "living shoreline" where the U.S. planted hardy grasses from Vietnam that do very well. We approach a shoreline far from the hotel and see monkeys in the trees.

And our boat dies. And the boat pilot floods the engine. Well, no crocodiles nearby . . . yet. But I do fervently disbelieve that I have survived the mountains of Monte Verde on a broken bus only to meet an equally morbid end in a jungle lake. At some point, the second boat pulls up near us, the second boat pilot scrambles from his boat to ours, he works on the motor in the back, and voila it starts back up. But it never sounds that great to me. Of course, our pilot continues on his merry way, intently looking for more monkeys as he scrapes the bottom of the boat across trees and logs. It is a wee bit hard to enjoy the monkeys but at last he crosses back over the lake and we pull up to the dock. This was not just a small lake, mind you. This was a huge expanse with hidden coves, and islands, and dense green vegetation. Our two boats were the only ones out there.

We reboard our bus and drive to Colon. Remember Panama City was at the Pacific end of the Canal and now Colon is at the Caribbean end. The Infinity has docked at the Cristobal Pier in Colon to take us back on. We drive through Colon at dusk. A busy city with NO traffic lights, none at all. You just muscle youself through left turns from one main street to another. We drive through poor poor sections. People sitting out everywhere. We drive onto the dock. We wander through the duty-free stores. Bennett finds a Cuban cigar. We board the Infinity. They welcome us home. And I feel like I am back home.

Well, we must do Persian Gardens to cleanse away all the excitement of the day in Panama. First, however, we go to the hot tub near the indoor pool (if you call a giant pool surrounded top and sides with glass an indoor pool). The hot tub is huge and hot hot hot. And we are all by ourselves, completely, as everyone else is eating or shopping at the duty-free zone. It is a magical hot tubbing time. On to the baths. Then a quiet dinner in the cafe. Then down to Michael's Club, a little piano bar. Then a stroll outside all around deck four as we pull away from the dock. Another superb day south of the border.

Mallory, no archaeology really but they do talk about the indigenous culture a lot. Many many Indians, and their influence in Central America seems much more pervasive than in the U.S. But as you can tell if you have read this far, nature kept us away from seeing the indigenous village ourselves (it probably would have been a souvenir trap anyway!). I miss you and Natalie and am thinking about you both!!