Panama

Two connections, half a day in the air

Getting from La Paz to Panama meant two layovers: La Paz, Cusco, Bogotá, Panama. End to end it ate up most of a day.

The La Paz to Cusco leg was the roughest flight of the whole trip. The air over the Andes threw the plane around to a degree I had not experienced before — frightening, but genuinely impressive.

Panama City. The twisted tower is the F&F Tower

The monkey tour

The morning after I arrived I joined a monkey tour. The boats leave from Gamboa, where the canal meets the Chagres river, and head out into Lake Gatún.

The lake was created by damming the river for the canal, so the hilltops that stayed above the water became islands. Monkeys live on them, and the boat pulls up close enough to the trees that they come down to the gunwale.

I got to hand fruit to several different kinds. The capuchins are the bold ones — they climb straight onto the boat.

A white-faced capuchin, right on the boat

Afterwards we walked a forest road, and a guide found a sloth high in the canopy and set up a telescope on it. Without that I would never have picked it out.

Humid, and oddly familiar

Panama is properly tropical, and I was there in the rainy season, so it was humid the whole time. It felt much like Vietnam — which, after months of dry high-altitude air, I found easy to live with.

Prices were not La Paz cheap, but for how developed the city is they were low.

Drinking a Geisha

Panama is also coffee country, and the variety it is known for is Geisha. I went to a roaster in the city to try one properly.

The bags give the origin as Boquete in Chiriqui, grown at 1,450 m. Geisha sat on the shelf alongside Pacamara, Bourbon Amarillo, Catuai and others, all single origin, all Panamanian.

I drank one there and bought beans to take home.

What the canal does for this country

I spent an afternoon in Casco Viejo, the old quarter.

The canal museum there is what made the country click for me. Laid out room by room, you can see how completely the canal underwrites Panama's economy — the French attempt and its collapse, the American construction, and the handover to Panama.