Seven Slow Days in Panama

After a red-eye flight from Las Vegas to Panama City, we stayed at a new AirBnB right on a main square in Casco Viejo, the part of town built in the early colonial period.  Our balcony overlooked the square with a great view of the church on the opposite side of the square. This was an ideal location to explore the colonial city and enjoy the sunsets from the balcony.

We took a walking tour, walked the beltway/causeway.  We also visited the Panama Canal Museum in town.  The walking tour and museum helped us understand the unique history of Panama and Panama City.  It was initially a collection point for the systematic looting of gold by the Spanish of Central and South America, then a dangerous way point for fortune seekers headed to California for the gold rush around 1849, and then eventually as the gateway city to the Panama Canal. The canal was completed in 1914 and controlled by the US until the 1999 transition to Panamanian control. We also visited the excellent Bio Diversity Museum, that gave us more insight into the plants, animals, people, and geography of Panama through the millennia.

Monkeys!

We hired a guide to take us inland towards Gamboa where we got on a small boat and travelled in the lake-portion of the canal to some islands where three different kinds of monkey live.  The smaller monkeys (Capuchin and Tamarin) ate grapes and pieces of bananas from our hands, but the howler monkey have no interest in getting food from people, so we just watched them forage in trees.  For dinner we found a great restaurant that served a surprisingly good falafel,

We spent two days at an inland location near the canal called the Summit Rainforest and Golf Resort.  18 holes in a rain forest.   We hiked to a hilltop for a great view back towards Panama City as well as further inland. 

The next day we took an Uber to a rainforest station, but the road was too rough for the low riding Kia sedan, we we paid the driver to wait while we walked in to see what was there.  Howler monkey troops in the distance making a tremendous racket.  The station was closing as a precaution for the coming storm, so we walked back out in the drizzle and went home.  Not all adventures work out, but it was a nice walk in a rainforest. 

The next morning we did a nature walk at the resort with a knowledgeable guide who showed us plants and described their uses.  There were many leaf cutter ants busily doing their leaf cutting and journeying. The resort also has an enclosure for butterflies, for frogs (green poison dart frog shown below) and iguanas, and a rehabilitation station for sloths.  Beautiful butterflies, interesting iguanas and frogs, but the highlight was spending a few minutes with a baby 3-toed sloth (mother had died) that is being raised by our guide/caretaker in the resort’s sloth rehabilitation facility. Susie was over the moon by its cuteness.

We even saw a Coati near the hotel.

Panama Canal Locks (at Mia Flores

We hired our driver again to take us to a hotel by the airport (early departure to Colombia ), with a stop at the Mira Flores lock where there is a viewing station to watch ships go through that lock.  Not a fast process but really interesting to see a lock at work. click through the slideshow below to see the water level drop.

We only experience a small part of Panama, there is so much more to see and do here, but our free layover with Copa Airlines was limited to 7 days. Perhaps we’ll be back, but probably not, there are so many other places to see.

Next stop is Cartagena, Colombia. If you have time before you go, here are three quick videos to watch: feeding monkeys, leafcutter ants at work, and Simba, the baby sloth.