The next two days will be spent in tropical Panama. The ships passengers spent today touring the various sights in Panama and tomorrow we will cruise through the canal. Colon is Panama’s second largest city and is located on the Caribbean or Atlantic side of the isthmus. The city was founded in 1850 and is named after Christopher Columbus. Besides being the Atlantic entry point, Colon is known for its vast free trade zone where buyers from all over the America’s come to buy various goods for retail sale.
The country is most famous for the canal which allows ship to move from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean without having to go around the tip of South America saving over 800 miles of sailing. The canal is a little over 50 miles in length allowing ships to move between oceans in less than a day.
Today we took the Flora and Fauna of the Panama Canal tour which was a premium tour booked through Viking. We boarded our bus in Colon and took a 90-minute bus ride to the Gamboa Rainforest Reserve Marina where we boarded small boats that could hold approximately 20 people. We left the marina and entered into the main channel of the Panama Canal to begin our journey toward the back waters of the Panama Rainforest. We quickly discovered we were on the water with some really big ships. It was really an interesting experience to be at water level in our little tour boat next to the gigantic ocean-going vessels.
After riding in the canal for about 30 minutes, we a made our way into a small tributary that feeds into the canal and Lake Gutun. We approached a small island where two other small boats were floating along the shoreline to find several White Faced Capuchin Monkeys in the trees. Guides on the boats were trying to coax them closer to the boats with peanuts and bananas.
We continued further up the stream and around several other islands where we encountered many other animals and took in the beautiful rainforest.
The bottom picture is not mislabeled. On first glance this look like an Alligator or maybe a Crocodile, but it is neither of those. This is a Caiman which is from the same linage as Alligator, kind of a distant cousin. Caimans inhabit Mexico, Central and South America.
After returning to the ship, we attended two of the ship’s enrichment presentations. I haven’t talked about the on-board enrichment program yet. Viking has an extensive enrichment program on all of their ocean cruises designed to provide cultural, historical and archeological information about the areas visited during the cruise. I will do a post specifically about the enrichment program on one of the upcoming sea days. Today, we listened to a presentation from the on-board archeologist about the development of transportation across the isthmus, first by trail in the late 1500’s followed by railroads in the mid 1800’s and finally the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. The second presentation was from one of the on-board historians entitled “Panama — the nation built on Wall Street”. A fascinating story of how wall street investors purchased France’s option to build the canal from Columbia and ultimately brokered Panama’s bid for Independence and convinced the US government to build the canal; naturally that meant the US government had to buy the rights/land from those same investors.
We ended the day with an on-board performance by the Panamanian Folklore Dance Company. A colorful demonstration of Panamanian traditional dance.
Tomorow, we cruise the Panama Canal! The process of transiting the canal will take from eight to ten hours. The canal pilot is scheduled to board the ship at 7:15 and we should approach the first lock by 8:30. We plan to take a lot of pictures and we will share them here.
Don & Kully's World Cruise on Viking Neptune 