El Cangrejo, Panama City

My dear friend David put together this nice map:

View ~GEZZdBEi.kmz in a larger map

Thanks a million, David!

After almost four weeks (this even beats cricket!), the final score of kilometers vs. flat tires is 3024 - 0. Prost!

San Felipe (Casco Antiguo)

After a short early morning ride, I am at a coffee place in San Felipe, the old part of Panama City. I took the same route as yesterday, with grand views of ships going through the locks,

and onward through the Gaillard Cut,

And finally some leisurely pedaling along the waterfront in Panama City,

I still have about four kilometers of riding left to get to the hotel where I'll be staying until Tuesday, and I am kinda hoping to finally have a flat tire...after all I have been carrying three spare tubes with me all the way from Mexico! I will send a report with stats etc. later today before I start consuming libations at the German Brewhaus that's supposed to be near my hotel.

Gamboa

Technology meets wilderness - the road from Panama City to Gamboa is mostly just a stone's throw from the Panama Canal as well as the Panama Canal Railway.
The canal is an enormously impressive engineering feat. There were two sets of locks I passed as well as the Gaillard Cut through the Continental Divide with another big bridge, the Centennial Bridge. (The apparent pyramid in the background of the picture below is the bridge suspended by cables.)

Some sections of the road through the rain forest with screaming monkeys created the impression of untouched wilderness...until the next oceangoing ship appeared around the corner.

Just south of Gamboa, there was an interesting bridge crossing; this one was interesting not because the bridge was huge, but because it was small and narrow,

The place I am staying at is quite a treat. I keep thinking it is like in the middle of the rain forest...but wait...it is in the rain forest,

Isla Perico

I am writing this from one of three little islands south of the Panama Canal entrance that are connected to the mainland by the Amador Causeway. (You can see the causeway on the first picture below in the background.) Crossing the Bridge of the Americas at the Pacific entrance of the Panama Canal was quite...I am going to use a word here that's often used very inflationary these days, especially among college students whose brains are not stuffed as densely as their parents' wallets...awesome. After what I had read and heard, I knew that bicycles were off limits on the bridge and that the police might stop me trying to get onto the bridge. There was in fact a police checkpoint on the north side of the bridge with several officers, but I decided to nod politely and speed through. No problem. (In case they had stopped me, I was prepared to hand them one of my Pan-American Diversions cards and, using up all my Spanish in the process, explain that I am doing this for a movie production for ridegeist punto blogspot punto com :-) Again, the view and the experience were awesome,

even though I would recommend it neither to novice cyclists nor to the faint of heart,

South of the bridge was a structure that, from the distance, looked like the remainders of a building that had fallen victim to a major storm,

Looking at it more closely, it turned out to be a construction site bearing a striking resemblance to the 'Experience Music Project' in Seattle. It did indeed turn out to be a building designed by Frank Gehry (Panama's Biodiversity Museum).

San Carlos, II

Main activities today included food intake, considerable time spent in the water, as well as attempts to blur some epidermal color contrasts caused by local exposure to UV radiation...

Here's the plan for the next days: tomorrow I'll stay near the Panama Canal entrance on the Pacific side and then in the rain forest for one night. Then I'll have several days left to enjoy Panama City before flying back home.

San Carlos

Today it was only a short ride that, due to pleasantly ferocious tailwind, mostly felt like flying. From here it's only about 100 km to Panama City, the end of the current journey; but I think I will take a short detour and stay in Gamboa for one night. Gamboa is in the middle of the rain forest by the Panama Canal between the Pacific and the Caribbean and there's supposed to be a nice resort.

This is a short post, since my netbook isn't waterproof...back into the water....

Penonome

Some easy Sunday morning cruising along the highway to Penonome,

It was pretty hot as most of the days, so my water mileage is not very good, maybe about 60 mpg or 4 l / 100 km. When I arrived in Penonome around noon, I was very delighted to find a decent hotel with functioning - as opposed to merely noise-generating - A/C and cable. So I could chill out in the cold breeze while watching Camioneros del Hielo, my favorite TV show. I had the choice between a room on the third floor and one on the first. I choose the one on the first, which, besides me not having to carry my bike up and down again, also has the benefit of being located between the two hotel bars. The security guard at one bar entrance has a shiny revolver in his right hand and a wand metal detector in his left hand. It looks like it will be an interesting night.

Santiago

What a spectacular ride today. This was probably the least populated section on this trip. It started off with views of the Chiriqui Highlands in the background while I was riding through a mostly agricultural region,

Then things became a little bit more dramatic (and exhausting), as sections of the highway were on ridges with great views,

and quite a few uphill and downhill sections,

This may sound like a strange comparison, but I found the route topography somewhat reminiscent of the Blue Ridge Parkway, even though vegetation, people, etc. looked very different (especially this time of the year). About 50 kilometers or so west of Santiago the road conditions became a bit challenging (reminded me of the Autobahn system in East Germany before 1989, which, due to lack of resources, had mostly been left in its pre-1945 state by the Communist regime). But then, I wasn't going at 100 miles per hour, so I could easily avoid all the huge cracks in the concrete and the kitchen sink-sized potholes. For tomorrow night, I am planning on spending the night in Penonome, and then spend a few days by the ocean. Splash!
There was a question about coffee: coffee is good, and available, not only in Panama. On my first trip to Chiapas and Guatemala years ago, there was only Nescafe everywhere. Now you can often get delightfully delicious coffee even at truck stops. I was thinking of going up to Boquete, but it's not a through-route east, so I skipped it.

David

A new year, a new country. Last night in Golfito I spent many hours at a bar and had a great time - there was not much going on in terms of New Year's celebrations; it was more like a usual crazy Saturday night. On the way to the border, I saw this ice cream vendor:

The other day in an email to my sister I commented on the obvious prosperity of Costa Rica in stark contrast to other countries I passed through. Prosperity is also quite obvious in Panama. (A regular supermarket was stocked with items such as Bitburger Premium Pils and Lindt chocolate.) That said, there is also a high poverty level and Panama has the second most unequal income distribution in Latin America. So I was surprised I didn't see any armed guards outside businesses such as gas stations during daylight hours.