Panama: Panama City

Panama City
We arrived at our hotel in Panama City around 9 pm and met Shanu there.  Please do not picture the Holiday Inn.  Hotel, on our budget, means a spartan room with beds and a bathroom.  The mattresses are thin, the sheets are ragged, the floors are tiled, and the other furniture (if there is any) is beat up.  There may or may not be a TV or air conditioner.  Such a hotel in the U.S. would be only a den of drug dealers and prostitutes.  In foreign countries, such a hotel is the home of perfectly respectable budget travelers (euphemism for poor/cheap tourists).  But do not assume that this country does not have nice hotels.  We passed several beautiful, luxurious hotels on the way to ours, but you have to pay out the wazoo for them.  Ours was a mere $9 per night per person.

The next morning, we had breakfast in our hotel.  I gleefully ordered toast and “jugo de naranja y te con leche” (orange juice and tea with milk) off the menu with impeccable Spanish.  One cannot truly appreciate being able to successfully pronounce a foreign language until one has struggled hopelessly with tonal Chinese for at least a year.  We paid for our breakfast in the local currency, known as the balboa.  It is the U.S. dollar.  That’s right: Panamanians are all going about their business with George Washington’s face.  They do mint their own coins though, which have the same color, dimensions, and value as U.S. coins, but with different pictures.  (A pay phone at the Miami airport couldn’t tell the difference and accepted the coins from the Panamanian mint.)

Our main event for the day was to see the Panama Canal.  Since we eschew organized tours whenever it is logistically possible, we made our way to the Mira Flores locks on our own.  This entailed walking through the city to a bus stop.  Panama City reminded us of many “third-world” cities: small shops built wall-to-wall, markets spilling out on to the sidewalks, fruit vendors and sunglass sellers sitting behind small stalls, buses, delivery trucks, taxis, cars and pedestrians all competing for space and creating noise.  These cities are alive in a way that most American downtown revitalization committees can only dream of.  But they are every environmentalist’s nightmare: the air is thick with plumes of stinking exhaust emitted from every vehicle.

Panama Canal: Mira Flores Locks
We had to walk a bit from the road to locks, and I was impressed by the total lack of harassment we were experiencing.  Here was a major tourist attraction without children trying to sell us crap?  No beggars parked out front?  Generally, paupers and juvenile sales reps are the unavoidable reminders that it is the poverty of the country that enables us to travel through it so cheaply.  But we didn’t have that reminder in Panama and Costa Rica, and, not coincidentally, our travel turned out not to be as cheap as I had anticipated.  It ended up costing about $80 per day for the two of us, whereas Vietnam (with lots of children trying to sell trinkets) was only $30 per day.  If children spend their days in school instead of being forced to beguile tourists into buying crap, perhaps that’s the sign of a developing country with its priorities in order.  And the beggars?  Could it be that the state was taking care of its people well enough that they weren’t relying on the pity of tourists to get money for their daily rice and beans?  Thinking about the trade off, I decided I was quite willing to pay more as a tourist to travel through countries where the people were not living in abject poverty.

At the Mira Flores locks, there was a large building with an observation deck where we could watch the giant container ships pass through the canal.  Meanwhile, a man on the loudspeaker told us interesting facts about the canal such as:

Casco Antiguo
We went back to Panama City and wandered around the old parts of town, which were literally crumbling before our eyes.  Some buildings were also being torn down or remodeled as the area became gentrified.  Across the bay, we could see the downtown skyscrapers, many still being built.  Shanu, who has been to all the countries in Central America now, said that Panama City was by far the nicest and most developed city.