Jan. 31 – Feb 5 – A week in Ciudad Panama

We have been here a week now, and I am going to combine all those days into a single post.  We stayed in our original hotel only one night, then moved to another, Residential Texas, that was almost as nice, but less expensive.  We have stayed mostly in a central area of the city, where there are dozens of hotels located.

This is a very strange city;  modern and bustling in some ways,  yet limited and lacking in many others.  There are sections with towering high-rises and skyscrapers, and construction is everywhere;  but the traffic, noise and dirt are among the worst we have experienced.  Other sections are dilapidated slums and zones with little more than rubble and dirt.  Modern stores and malls are close by to street vendor stalls and ancient market areas.  After 7:00 in the evening,  it can be darn tough to find a place to eat,  yet the same area at noon looks and feels completely different, with open restaurants on every corner.

Levi read online somewhere that ¨this city suffers from a lack of city planning¨,  and maybe that sums up what I am trying to say.  The traffic is horrendous, and every important thoroughfare seems to be under construction at the same time.  Partially completed bridges and overpasses are everywhere, and important roads are closed at random times and then open again later.   At times, very large, noisy crowds gather on busy streets and wait for busses to arrive for them.  Last night, the power was out for several hours in a large portion of the ‘downtown’ area.  For a city that seems large at first, you realize after a while that it is actually not that big at all,  just very spread out along the Pacific shoreline.

We did do some sight-seeing.  We visited the ‘old city’, which was a very cool colonial area that was allowed to become completely dilapidated and run down.  Partially surrounded by tenement slums and 60’s era public housing projects, the old city is now being renovated on a large scale, and will someday be beautiful again.  It was amazing to see how badly this historic area was allowed to decay before it was decided that it should be restored.

We re-crossed the Bridge of the Americas, which is a very impressive structure itself, and affords a very dramatic view of the city.  We rode out on the Amador, a causeway that extends out quite a ways into the Pacific, and offers exceptional views of the canal, the city, and the islands at the canal entrance.

We visited the Miraflores Lock, and the Canal Zone museum, which were interesting and worth the drive.  Seeing the remnants of the US presence was interesting, also.  The architecture and landscaping of the old Canal Zone area was very recognizable to anyone familiar with other US military installations.  We stopped for lunch at the largest indoor mall either of us had ever been in.

We spent a lot of time this week making calls and trying to arrange our passage from here to South America.  We finally arranged air transport for the motorcycles to Bogota, Columbia.  That is ironic, since Columbia was the one country we were going to try to avoid.  But the cost and convenience won out, and Bogota it is.  We dropped the bikes off at the Tocumen airport this morning, and paid large sums of cash money to get them to Bogota airport by tomorrow morning.  Any other plan was just too difficult and/or expensive to consider.  We have reservations on a flight out of here tomorrow morning, and we hope to be in a hotel, in Bogota, reunited with our transportation, tomorrow night, Friday.

 I have had enough of Panama city, and will be glad to be leaving it behind.