Bananas in the city

After a lot – and we mean A LOT – of hassle, the Colombians finally let us leave their country (sure, Colombia was absolutely fabulous most of the time but at this point we were just so thankful to finally being able to get out of there and move on) – and we were off to Panama (again). Almost every German child learns early on that Panama smells like Bananas. (If you are non-German and find this rather odd check out 'Janosch' and you will soon be in the know). So our mission for our visit to this country was clear: follow our noses and find the sweet promised smell.

We started our search in Panama City, the cosmopolitan capital of the country. With a skyline that would make most Northamerican metropolises blush and a beautiful setting on the pacific coast this is not a bad place to be. The flashy malls, yacht clubs and seaside parks show the still great US-American influence on the country's culture – and we enjoyed it quite a bit on our first afternoon when strolling along the oceanfront and ending our long day at the huge movie theater of glitzy Multicentro Mall. The modern world big city fumes made smelling any bananas impossible in the downtown area, though.

Therefore, we headed down to the old city of Panama, Casco Viejo, that sits on a rocky peninsula northwest of the city centre. Today it crumbles away along some streets while others have been completely restored to their former glory. This makes up a very appealing mixture of old and new that kept us wander around the cobblestone streets for hours (although the first one was spent trying to get rid of our newest loco that kept following us around and even sat down at our table with us when we went into a restaurant for breakfast...). We visited churches, marveled at the beauty of Teatro Nacional and the Palacio de las Garzas where the president resides, enjoyed the view from the Paseo Bovedas that leads along the old city wall and hid inside the astoundingly interesting Museo del Canal Interoceanico when it started pouring.  The canal was – and still is in the mind of every Panamanian- a marvel of engineering work and a wonder of the world. When the French started to build it, they were soon defeated by nature as tropical diseases killed thousands of workers and the available machinery had too little power to built the canal through the jungle. The French, in a way, were ahead of their time. So the US-Americans stepped in when they saw the time had come – and with medical knowledge, that time high-end machinery and a modernization of the whole area they finished what the world (and especially they themselves) needed so badly: a passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean that enabled world trade to increase immensely. We stayed in the museum long after the rain had stopped. Afterward we took a cap to the other side of downtown, to Panama Viejo. That is weird, you might think – going from one old Panama to the next. Panama Viejo is in fact not only the old town but the oldest town – this was where the very first Panama City was prospering for over 150 years before the pirates around Henry Morgan destroyed it in 1671 and the Spanish moved their new city to Casco Viejo. The ruins of this first settlement now lay in a beautiful park and are quite worth the visit. Some of the many churches and convents are still recognizable as such and many walls of what once must have been grand living houses remain intact so that you can lose yourself in a labyrinth of small, grassy alleyways that were once the main street of the most important city of Central America. We climbed the restored tower of the cathedral (an image of which can be found on the Panamanian coins) and were, once more, rewarded with astonishing views over both, old and new Panama City. The vista was picture perfect – but there was no smell of any bananas in the air. We concluded: we have to get out of the city to find what we are looking for.

So the next day we ventured a little ways out of the city to the famous waterway that divides Panama and the Americas. At the Miraflores Locks we could see the canal at its busy best: huge freighters (that barely fit the locks) and (seemingly) small sail boats were lifted either up or down from or to the Pacific’s level while hundreds of tourists watched in awe and got bitten by a million mosquitoes in the meantime. Behind the locks the visitors could also witness the work on the next generation canal that will be a lot bigger than the original one, allowing for much larger traffic to cross through. The thundering sound of blowing up dynamite and the clouds of dust and dirt that spit up into the jungle on the other side of the water conjured up quite a vivid picture of what work on the canal was like a hundred years ago. To get an even deeper inside we spent hours in the visitor center's exhibition about the canal's history, present and future. It is astounding that the canal actually belonged to the USA until quite recently (1999) – only since then is Panama completely sovereign over all its territory and can control its most important source of income. No wonder the Panamanians are so excited about THEIR waterway. After having watched yet a couple of more ships being slowly transported through the locks and sniffing around for some sweet banana-smell without any success we realized that we were still too close to the city to find what we were looking for – we had to get out into the country. Easier said than done since we first had to escape the taxi-mafia that rules around the Miraflores Locks and robs tourists of their money. A miserable walk through pouring rain later we caught a reasonably priced cab and got back to Panama City. We went to the bus terminal only to stand in line for three hours before being able to purchase our tickets for the next available bus that went sometime the afternoon. But we made it – and were off sooner than expected (the buses leave when they are full, even if that means it's half an hour before the stated departure time) to the northern countryside of Panama – and hopefully the smell of bananas.