Trip to Panama

My brother and I made a trip to Panama a couple of weeks ago. The initial purpose was to take our father through the Panama Canal, but it turns out that he didn’t feel up to it, so we went by ourselves. The area was pretty interesting from the historical point of view. It was fun to find myself in the middle of the areas that we have been taught about the with regard to the early explorations of the new world. Columbus was there, Balboa is evident everywhere, the great pirates sailed these seas (Henry Morgan, Sir Francis Drake, etc.). The cannons shown in the photos were intended to protect the gold and other valuables stored at Portabella, on the Atlantic Coast. After many pirate raids, they finally put up massive, well armed fortifications on both sides of the harbor. These armaments were never used, which either means that they came too late and were no longer needed, or they were so formidable that it was not necessary to us them. Maybe it was a kind of “cold war” tactic that was just too much to attack.
We did manage a trip through the canal, which was totally different than what I had in my mind’s eye. The canal is not a big ditch across the isthmus, but rather a few locks and ditches connecting huge manmade lakes. There are three identical pairs of locks on each side, bring the ships up to the level of Lake Gatun. There is a cut through the continental divide that is almost 8 miles long, and then the trip though Lake Gatun is about 15 miles. There is also higher elevation lake that supplies water to Lake Gatun and electrical power to the project. The whole thing is a VERY impressive project. They are beginning the construction of a third set of locks paralleling the two that are already in place.
Some of the stories about the building of the canal are pretty impressive. For example, when the French were attempting to build the canal they had so many corpses to deal with that they put them into barrels, pickled them, and sold them around the world for medical specimens. They sold so many that they funded the construction of a very large, modern for the times, hospital. Unfortunately, they hadn’t figured out what the cause of the malaria and yellow fever was. In an attempt to make a pleasant setting, and to keep the ants under control, they planted lots of well watered flowers, and put the bed posts in containers of water. This created wonderful environments for the mosquitoes, bringing the cause of the problem right into the hospital – where it enhanced the availability of corpses for sale. They lost 35,000 people in the hospital, and possibly that many more who died outside of the hospitals. At one point they had so many critically sick people that instead of admitting them to a hospital bed, they were admitted to lay in their coffin! That would be a pretty good clue about how sick you were.
One day we took a tour to an “Indian Village”. It was a rather confusing event to me. We got there by outboard motor powered dugout canoe, which was pretty neat. They first took us up the river to a waterfall, which brought up all of images of heading up a river with the natives in the middle of the rain forest (which was in fact what we were doing). We came upon a large dugout with hundreds of cases of Coke Cola stacked in it. It turned out that this was a film crew filming a Coke advertisement. You just can’t get away from civilization any more.
After the walking trip to the water fall (I managed to slip and fall into the creek on the way back from the falls), we went to the village. The village appeared to be in the style of a real village, but the people didn’t live there. They worked there during the day giving shows to the tourists and selling stuff that they said they made. Who knows if they really made it or not. There were some nice baskets, wooden carvings and small carved animals. I left my donation at the souvenir hut. The ladies danced while the men played music. It was fun, and nice to see them doing this, but it was also kind of weird being some sort of “voyeur” looking at their cloths, music, buildings, etc. The ladies were topless, so that was kind of odd too because of the “presentation” aspect of the events. The story about them was that the tribe had lived in the rain forest near a border (I didn’t figure out which one) as farmers. It got the point that they couldn’t get their crops to market, so they moved to this rain forest, which then because a national forest – meaning they couldn’t farm there either. In an attempt to keep their village together and live the life that they wanted to live, they began this tourist business. If that is all true, then I guess it is appropriate to go and see what they have to show. If everyone spent as much on souvenirs as my brother and I did, they should be doing quite well.
There is a lot of very poor people in the country, especially in the cities. Most of the cities are what we would call “slums” with extremely poor folks with no obvious source of income. We were warned many times to not go to those locations any time of the day. In fact, the “safe” locations for the tourists butted right up to those that are not safe. We got shooed out by the “tourist police” whenever we got too close to the other side of the street. It was kind of hard to tell where we were because it all looks about the same, terrible. The business district of Panama City is modern, clean and safe. However, we couldn’t find any interesting entertainment in town. We had lots of folks offer to help us find strip joints, “sex clubs”, “clean” ladies, and the like – but no place that just had local music and people enjoying themselves. There are lots of small, and not very interesting, casinos in the area – this is where you find the “clean girls”. Not much for us to do. I suppose you could find more if you spent a bit more time.
I found that the tourist support folks (hotels, tour companies, hotel transportation, etc) to be extremely untrustworthy. It wasn’t that they were dangerous or anything like that, but extortion is their way of doing business. I constantly felt like I was surrounded by a bunch of thieves trying to get all that they could out of me. There was never a time that it seemed like any of these folks were in the least bit interested in our welfare; it was totally focused on making as much money, in the shortest period of time, as possible. I tend to be kind of lax about this sort of thing, so ended up on the wrong end of the deal many times. I started to learn to treat everyone as a bunch of lying cheats, but that took much of the fun out of the trip. My brother made a personal connection with one of the bell hops at the hotel, which started to make all of the difference. He helped us find inexpensive transportation, good local restaurants, things of interest, etc. However, he was certainly not the norm and it only happened because of a personal connection. My advice if you decide to go there – BEWARE, you are not seen as a friend, you are seen as a mark!!