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).