Panama City

We finally left the South American continent behind and headed to Panama.

We checked into a pretty nice hotel in the old town, which turned out to have quite a bit to offer us in the following days: power outages, internet issues, an air conditioning unit that didn't work, and an alarm system that went off uncontrollably at night and was hard to manage. Not exactly restful.

Moreover, we got properly swindled for the first time on the trip (or maybe we just didn’t notice) in a supermarket around the corner, where we were charged two or three times the price for the beer. Annoying, but manageable.

The old town was very beautiful, although in some places it was pretty run down and probably beyond saving, which gave it a morbid charm that we had often experienced on our travels.

We visited the canal museum, which provided a good overview of the history of canal construction, racial segregation, and injustices among the workers (US Americans and Europeans were paid in dollars and benefited from social perks, while, for example, Indian and Latin American workers were paid in the local currency and much less). It also covered the process of handing over the canal from the US to Panama.

This was good, as at the Miraflores lock system, you could observe how ships (though not the very large ones, as there’s already a larger and more modern one, and an even larger one is under construction) were transported down towards the Pacific (the operation only goes in one direction through the canal and changes throughout the day). The lengthy process is quite nice to watch if you are patient and have enough time, and you were rewarded with friendly waving from the waiting sailors on the ships. However, the rest was a joke. The entrance fee included an Imax 3D film hosted by Morgan Freeman, which was just low-grade in both content and quality. Crackling speakers, scratched 3D glasses, poor effects, and politically diluted content. But that was probably just our perspective; the many US tourists around us unanimously found the film