May 16, 2005 - Panama City, Panama

East Coast / West Coast

I've only been here a very short time, but I feel like it´s been months - I've been traversing this land at dizzying speeds. After a good night of bad weather and a couple of days calm sailing, we arrived in Portobello at nightfall the day before yesterday. (Portobello is a beautiful small town on the Caribbean side of the country, a very important place during Spanish colonial times but quite sleepy these days) We were picked up by the owner of the boat yesterday, and --in about an hour and a half driving time-- brought here to Panama City, which is on the Pacific coast. Today we were taken back to Colon (east coast, as I know it) to finish up our check-in process, as yesterday was a Sunday and apparently nobody gets let into the country on Sundays. We spent some time in the duty free zone, which is a huge guarded wholesale shopping neighborhood open to those with a foreign passport, and then took a long bus ride back to Panama. The city, that is. On the Pacific. Technically, that´s in the south of the country, but I've always thought of it as the west coast. So we´ve been riding from north to south (or east to west) and back on a daily basis. But break out the atlas for a minute: if you look carefully, you´ll notice the trip along the Panama canal from Colon to Panama City actually runs slightly eastward from the Caribbean Sea entrance to the other entrance on the Pacific Ocean... Try wrapping your brain around that one!!!

posted by Mahi at 8:45 PM  

- - -