Voyage of Discovery 2

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you."
Carl Jung

I found it rather tickled me that there is a port called Colon at the Caribbean end of the Panama Canal, or is this just my schoolboy sense of humour?  It's our second port of call for some shore exploration and the canal beckons. 

Having lived [someone recently told me I can't lay claim to having "grown up"] near the Mon & Brecon Canal most of my life, canals are a continuing fascination for me, maybe because of the variety of wildlife - birds in particular - that occupy the watery margins.  So a visit to the Panama Canal is a must.  This famous shortcut from the Pacific to the Atlantic is over 100 years old, having opened for traffic in 1914.  Before that, our guide also referred to Panama as an alternative route for the '49ers in the California gold rush, a "short cut" avoiding the more dangerous passage to the North.  It's all relative of course, there were many deaths from Malaria, Yellow Fever and Cholera - as there were during the construction of the Canal at the turn of the century.  The canal was eventually completed by the US after a French attempt was curtailed because of the high mortality rate.

It was busy when we arrived, queues of traffic and people waiting to get in; fortunately our guide has our tickets ready and it's a relatively quick entry for us.  The Visitor Centre has a viewing area overlooking the locks and there's a good view of the action, especially as the first transit of the day, a ship stacked with containers, is being gently manoeuvred into position for passage through the locks.  Real boys toys stuff this, on a massive scale.  Almost disappointingly it all goes smoothly, not even a container falling off to provide some drama during the 26m descent through the three enormous locks from Gatun lake to the Ocean [well, the Caribbean anyway] - amazing considering well over 14,000 vessels go through each year.

Our return trip to the ship was peppered with frequent stops to admire the local wildlife - Toucan, Monkeys, Coati Mundi [the furry animal not the musician] and the inevitable Sloths, including one that was sedately making its way down the tree for its weekly visit.