Panama: 27th December - 6th January
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| I left La Fortuna on Boxing Day to start making my way to Santa Catalina in Panama, where I had booked myself on an expensive three day dive trip, as a christmas present to myself. After overnight stops in San Jose (Costa Rica) and David (Panama), I eventually made it to Santa Catalina from where the trip to Coiba island started. I had read that diving on Coiba was a mixture of Cocos Island and the Galapagos. Sounded too good to be true, but I had to check it out. This is the beach where we stayed on Coiba. |
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| Well it turned out that it was too good to be true; the diving on Coiba was good, but certainly couldn't be compared to Cocos Island or the Galapagos (as far as I know, having never dived those places). There were plenty of big fish though, such as this battleship of a grouper, accompanied by a swarm of pilot fish. |
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| Also lots of barracuda. |
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| And we saw a sea horse too, which are very rarely seen while diving. |
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| Back in Santa Catalina after the trip, I hung out with the surf dudes (Santa Catalina is pretty famous for its surfing, apparently). Here are Christopher from Cologne (he lives about 200m from where my flat was!) and the friendly Portugese guy whose name I've forgotten (oops), preparing their boards to go surfing. The surf was dead though, I've seen bigger waves in Newquay! I spent New Year's Eve in Santa Catalina, although it all passed off pretty quietly. |
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| Micro-perro, very cute but also very annoying. |
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| A couple of geckos on the wall of Rolo's Cabaņas in Santa Catalina. |
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| From Santa Catalina I made my way to Panama City, final stop in Central America before I flew to Colombia. Panama City is by far the most modern and developed city in Central America, and came as a little bit of a shock with all its high rise buildings, glass fronted banks and air conditioned shopping malls. It is also a city of contrasts though, of old and new, rich and poor. And also one of the hottest, stickiest places I've ever been. |
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| These guys were wandering around Casco Viejo, the old part of town, trying to make a business out of taking snap shots of people. I felt sorry for them; in this age of digital cameras, and in a country as developed as Panama, it seems to me that their days are numbered and making a living must be getting increasingly difficult. |
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| Of course, no visit to Panama would be complete without a trip to the canal. I visited Miraflores Locks, which are just 20 minutes or so on the bus from Panama City. The locks raise and lower ships some 26 metres from sea level, and it takes about 10 minutes to fill or drain them. Ships pay tolls based on their length and the amount of cargo capacity they have. The highest toll ever paid was almost US$250,000 whilst the smallest was just US$0.36, paid by Richard Halliburton when he swam the canal in 1928! These ships here are so called Panamax ships, which means they have been built to the exact maximum dimensions that enable them to pass through the Panama Canal locks. There is just one foot of space between ship and lock wall on either side! |
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