Panama City

To enter Panama City from the west sees you cross the Panama Canal by means of the grandly titled "Bridge of the Americas", a fantastic early glimpse of one of the principal reasons for coming here at all.
Our excitement was high what with that and the first sight of skyscrapers since Mexico City; we were indeed back in civilisation.

One bus station serves the city, a picture of chaotic organisation with literally hundreds of buses blasting their horns, manoeuvring or just laying over between services.
Once we'd been through the charade of luggage reclamation we made for the taxi rank seeking the Hotel Andino, booked online that morning.

The first cab picked us up and drove just ten yards before the driver asked us to get out again because he didn't know our hotel.
This is apparently common here, drivers don't so much have 'the knowledge' as the lack of it and we were careful to be sure they knew the place we wanted before future rides.

We drove through utter slums on the way to the hotel, Skid Row would look like Malibu against one particular road, but to be fair to the Andino it looked ok from the outside.
Inside was a different matter. Restaurant? Closed. Wi-fi? Not at the end of the hall. Hot water? No. View? Of a razor wire fence. Tiny semblance of a welcoming or homely feel to the room? Not on your nelly.

After going out for dinner and one incinerated fish, alleged chicken and terrifying walk back to the hotel trying to avoid the menacing figures lurking or lying prostrate in the shadows later, we vowed to check-out next morning and find a better place to stay.

We changed hotels alright but it's debatable whether three flights of stairs, disco next door and being on a chicken bus route with an 0530 start-up was an improvement. The racket chicken buses make has to be heard to be believed and you have to wonder too who is around at that early hour to warrant half a dozen blasts on the air horn?

The old part of town is called Casco Viejo and offers a fascinating insight into the past, a little look-see at the present and sneaky peak into the future.
Every building is a colonial beaut and they are in varying states of decay. What is most interesting though is that somebody somewhere is investing millions of dollars in a restoration programme and there are scores of separate works going on to bring the place back to the grandeur of its heyday.

Completed restorations are absolutely beautiful and when the whole lot is finished it will be truly magnificent.
Add the canal, the waterfront, classy shopping malls and investment from the likes of Donald Trump and the Hard Rock franchise and you can see that something big is happening in Panama.

That 'something big' turns out to be the extension of the canal, the full details of which were made apparent to us during a visit to the excellent Panama Canal museum.
The upshot of the extension is more capacity, bigger ships, higher tolls.
The average toll is currently $30,000 per ship but this will rise when the new locks open in 2014 and the current annual revenue of somewhere around £450m is expected to triple.
Incidentally, the highest toll ever paid (it is determined by vessel weight) was $200,000 by a French cruise liner; the lowest was 36 cents by a guy called Richard Halliburton who swam through in 1928.

Being such a forward thinking and cosmopolitan city Panama City offers Hop-On/Hop-Off city bus tours, a great way to see the sights whilst resting the creaking old bones.
We took a tour of the new part of the city, skyscraper central, also visiting the ruins of the original Spanish settlement from the 1500s.
With a high proportion of new world gold passing through the isthmus of Panama this was prime pirate territory and the original city was the focus of Welshman Henry Morgan. I understand he went by the name of 'Jones the Cutthroat'.

All this took care of our first day in the capital but we needed to eat so went into the restaurant next door to our hotel to ask if they had fresh veg.
"Si, si"
"What? Carrots, broccoli?"
"Si, si".

An hour or so later we returned and ordered the delicious looking meat from the pictorial menu and fresh vegetables.
"I don't have vegetable, only salad"
"But you said an hour ago you had vegetables"
"No. I only have salad"

This type of exchange typifies our time in Central America. I don't know if we are mad, they are mad or just that the whole continent has lost the plot.
Fortunately we find it all hilarious, though that's not to say we don't hanker for a bit of half decent service every now and then.

Saturday was a day we had long looked forward to, our visit to the canal proper and specifically the Miraflores Locks.
Before that however I had to try to repatriate myself with my iPhone charger, left plugged into the wall at the previous hotel when we left yesterday morning.
To cut a long story short it proved to be irretrievable. Torn between cursing my own stupidity and wanting to flay the opportunistic bar steward who had made off with it, I consoled myself that we were at least in a city with an apple store, though it was a painful $30 to part with.

The Miraflores Locks are one of three sets on the 60km long waterway and the visitor centre and viewing platform allow you to watch ships pass through.
We secured a great position by elbowing a few chest height natives out of the way and watched agog as the first two ships did their stuff.
It took about an hour for them to pass us out of a total time to transit the canal of around ten hours.
As I stood there I couldn't help but think how much my old Dad would have loved to have seen this. He loved his ships from his youth in Liverpool and this would have been right up his alley.

You might think we've seen enough of buses for a lifetime but our 48 hour pass included a night tour so after exercising our one culinary option by eating next door to our hotel again we braved the Panamanian night to see the city in lights.

Tonight's meal was worse than before. In a piece of misleading advertising that would put even High St burger joints to shame, the plump and juicy steak I pointed to on the menu materialised as a 1mm thick, breaded piece of pork. It also disagreed with poor Kerry to such a degree that she was up in the early hours with the Eartha Kitts.

Anyway, the night tour, a great way to spend a couple of hours looking at the twinkling lights of a fine city from a road called The Causeway which links the mainland with a couple of islands 6km offshore.
In accordance with the need for all vehicular transport on this continent to be late we met with gridlock in the city centre towards the end of the tour and sat immobile for 25 minutes. The long and tiring day thus ending on as frustrating a note as it had begun.

Sunday was a day off, we have them occasionally. We lazed about in the room in the morning and then dodged heavy rain showers and went to the shops in the afternoon.

High on our shopping list were sea-sickness tablets (explanation to follow in subsequent blog), a tricky thing to purchase when you only know the Spanish for "sea" and your farmacist is Chinese.
Once we'd acted out being on a boat and vomiting, to the great amusement of other shoppers, we got there and set about purchase number two: a neck pillow for Kerry.
This one was beyond our youthful shop assistant and was a tricky request for us to act out so assistance was sought in the shape of the assistant's one-eyed father.

His sales technique was rather theatrical to put it mildly: lots of "oooooooohh" noises, jerky movements which may have been bows and rabbiting in Mandarin accompanied by a humorous smile. No neck pillow but with us all cracking up in the end it's fair to say everyone's day was brightened by the exchange.

To compensate ourselves for the culinary abomination of the previous day we travelled to a swanky part of town so that we could get some veg inside us.
We have not yet worked out why the local markets are awash with vegetables whilst expecting to find them in most restaurants is pure folly.

Creamed spinach and courgettes set us up nicely for the 0715 departure by train (yes, T-R-A-I-N, ie, not a bus!!) to Colon next morning.
Toot toot! "All aboard for a one-way ticket to Insanity Central. Change there for a dose of incredulity, armed escorts and hasty exits. Passengers with anticipated connections to Colombia should expect to meet with long delays, pirates of German, Spanish and French origins and, by their innocent and uninformed actions, to lower the reputation of Englishmen abroad.