Panama

So, the Panama Canal was on my bucket list and it didn’t disappoint.  I don’t know why I found it exciting but that’s just the way I roll 😊

It’s a much more urban city than I was expecting.

We were entering from the Pacific Ocean, in which we had spent six weeks travelling 22,000 km from Southern Australia where the Indian Ocean turns into the South Pacific.

We first made landfall just before 5am and saw the pilot board.  The Captain had given us a timetable of events and interesting facts … the Canal is so big that it needs multiple pilots to navigate different sections; there are three bridges to re-join the land mass that the canal has split and there are six locks – three at either end.  It was going to take us about 12 hours to navigate.  Apparently, container ships take twice as long and there were a fair few of those queuing up to get in!

You should be able to see that the centre lock on the right-hand side is almost empty, the difference in levels is huge!

After a bit of emptying and filling, our ship was in the lock and it was a tight squeeze … that’s got to be the definition of a ‘fag paper’ and by the different colours on the bumper strip, some Captains weren’t as gentle as ours!

Through the lakes, the Captain is left to his own devices, but whilst in the lock the ship is actually tethered, steered and dragged by engines called mules.

We’d heard that there were crocodiles in the canal and indeed we did see one basking on the bank.

We were then convinced that every blur on the grass was a predator, more often than not they were either crocologs or logodiles 😊

We christened this one ‘Crocolog Island.’

Some spectacular bridges and the 33km Gatun Lake later we were coming towards the exit on the Atlantic Ocean side into the Caribbean Sea.

We called this one the tuning fork bridge.

Bang on time at 4.15pm we exited the Panama Canal and I put a tick on my bucket list.