Take me down to Panama City
“Where the air is hot and the old town’s pretty, for my last proper stop before home...” This, then, is it. If not my last blog, certainly the final one covering a destination on my trip. After crossing a large part of Panama, I got a good look at the country and it looked good. From Bocas I boated back to the mainland before traversing the highlands, with forested hills as far as the eye could see. Then it was the Panamerican Highway for several hours all the way to the capital. Unfortunately a crash on the outskirts caused an hour and half’s delay to an already lengthy journey. This was compounded by the unfathomable logic of having a toilet on board the coach but keeping it locked. After close to four hours, it was unlocked by a member of staff who looked increasingly annoyed and inexplicably bemused as half the bus joined the queue.
The congestion was a taste of things to come, with the city at times feeling like one big traffic jam. It’s the only truly modern global city that I visited, with a high rise skyline and all of the trappings you would expect, which is really what drew me to it. I based myself in the old city, which is on a small peninsula offering great views across the water to the aforementioned cityscape. There’s also a raised ring road around it that made for a nice walk with the sea and parts old and new on display. The old city itself is a tight grid of colonial buildings in various states of repair, with churches, plazas and museums on offer. Its faded and crumbling splendour is undergoing a period of regeneration and revival and it was a joy to wander its maze.
For such a cosmopolitan place, I was surprised by the surface paucity of vegetarian options, but digging a bit deeper I found some and did just fine. With the discovery of a microbrewery almost literally next door to my accommodation, a purveyor of a decent selection of bottles not much further away and not one but two superb gelaterias, I quickly revised my opinion to pretty damn good. Indeed, one of them is battling for top spot along with Antigua’s offering: the rich, creamy rum and raisin was arguably the best I’ve ever had (and it’s been a default choice this trip) and the spiced chocolate orange was like Christmas exploding in my mouth. This didn’t come cheap, but nothing here really did, especially as taxi (I had my first Uber experiences) was the primary method of transport.
I took a trip to the Biomuseo, a new and still developing museum of biodiversity and natural history, with some geography, anthropology and paleobiology thrown in for good measure. It’s well-curated and housed in a distinctive Frank Gehry building, all funky coloured sloping roofs. I then walked the causeway which it is located on, down to the extremities of the city jutting out into the Pacific. The old city also boasted the Canal Museum, giving an informative history of this monumental achievement.
And of course it would have been remiss of me not to go on the obligatory excursion to the country’s biggest icon - and I don’t mean the hats. I visited Miraflores lock and it really is an impressive feat of engineering. The exhibitions overlapped somewhat with the museum but the real highlight was watching the ships inch their way through. The biggest vessels the locks can handle have clearance of less than a metre either side and these behemoths pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to cross between the two oceans. It felt like a suitably grand highlight to end my stay not just in the city or the country but Central America as a whole.
The congestion was a taste of things to come, with the city at times feeling like one big traffic jam. It’s the only truly modern global city that I visited, with a high rise skyline and all of the trappings you would expect, which is really what drew me to it. I based myself in the old city, which is on a small peninsula offering great views across the water to the aforementioned cityscape. There’s also a raised ring road around it that made for a nice walk with the sea and parts old and new on display. The old city itself is a tight grid of colonial buildings in various states of repair, with churches, plazas and museums on offer. Its faded and crumbling splendour is undergoing a period of regeneration and revival and it was a joy to wander its maze.
For such a cosmopolitan place, I was surprised by the surface paucity of vegetarian options, but digging a bit deeper I found some and did just fine. With the discovery of a microbrewery almost literally next door to my accommodation, a purveyor of a decent selection of bottles not much further away and not one but two superb gelaterias, I quickly revised my opinion to pretty damn good. Indeed, one of them is battling for top spot along with Antigua’s offering: the rich, creamy rum and raisin was arguably the best I’ve ever had (and it’s been a default choice this trip) and the spiced chocolate orange was like Christmas exploding in my mouth. This didn’t come cheap, but nothing here really did, especially as taxi (I had my first Uber experiences) was the primary method of transport.
I took a trip to the Biomuseo, a new and still developing museum of biodiversity and natural history, with some geography, anthropology and paleobiology thrown in for good measure. It’s well-curated and housed in a distinctive Frank Gehry building, all funky coloured sloping roofs. I then walked the causeway which it is located on, down to the extremities of the city jutting out into the Pacific. The old city also boasted the Canal Museum, giving an informative history of this monumental achievement.
And of course it would have been remiss of me not to go on the obligatory excursion to the country’s biggest icon - and I don’t mean the hats. I visited Miraflores lock and it really is an impressive feat of engineering. The exhibitions overlapped somewhat with the museum but the real highlight was watching the ships inch their way through. The biggest vessels the locks can handle have clearance of less than a metre either side and these behemoths pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to cross between the two oceans. It felt like a suitably grand highlight to end my stay not just in the city or the country but Central America as a whole.
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