On those rare occasions when you think about Panama, no doubt you think of it as a transit point, not a destination.
This skinny strip of land that ties North and South America together is famous for the Panama Canal, a shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that revolutionised the shipping industry. Its airport is another major north-south transit hub, reinforcing the idea that Panama is a country to go through, not go to.
Yet being blessed with an excellent location hardly explains why Panama repeatedly tops the lists of the world’s best countries to retire to. It was time to investigate, and after a week of exploration, Panama tops my list of places to return to.
This S-shaped land, 770km long, has all the elements I look for in a holiday. Its dual coastlines offer plenty of beaches and tiny Caribbean islands with only a handful of other guests. There’s a jungle, not all as intimidating as the notorious Darién Gap, but more manageable areas with sloths and monkeys to spot and hikes into the wildness.
For history buffs, there’s Casco Viejo, the colonial centre of Panama City full of ancient buildings and pretty plazas. The city was established by Spanish conquistadors in 1519, but destroyed in 1671 by pirate Henry Morgan, who cunningly attacked from the jungle, not the sea. Excellent stuff, everyone loves a pirate story.
The King of Spain ordered a new city to be built in 1673, and today the centre boasts numerous old buildings in various states of repair. Five of its most precious churches were recently reopened after a decade-long restoration project to create a historic circuit.
The coastline near the old centre offers fabulous views across the bay to the modern financial hub, where architects are competing to create the most stylish, not just the tallest, skyscrapers.
The old and new centres, the suburbs and the airport are all linked by an efficient network of metros and buses. The metro from the airport to my city centre hotel cost about $1.50. But my favourite bus journey took me right out along Amador Causeway, a narrow strip of land that culminates in Mirador Flamenco, where ferries depart for some islands in the Pacific.
I just went for the bus ride, with stunning ocean views on both sides, and the excellent Biomuseum en route. The museum displays are in both Spanish and English, and one exhibit explains how Panama was the last part of the Americas to be formed. Millions of years ago the north and south continents were separate, until undersea volcanoes spewed out enough lava to create a chain of islands, which gradually trapped sufficient sediment to form a land bridge between the two. Life has flowed in ever since, first with animals migrating from the south and north, and then humans.
Its Caribbean coastline was strategic for Spanish colonisers who ruled for 300 years, using it as a transit point to take plundered Peruvian gold to Europe. After gaining independence in 1821, Panama tied itself to Colombia, until some influential citizens staged another independence revolution in 1903, backed by the US, which was itching to build a canal across the country. The US had boots on the ground again in 1989, when it invaded to overthrow the then president Manuel Noriega on charges of racketeering and drug trafficking. Now most invaders are retirees, with the population in the mountain town of Boquete reputedly almost 25% US expats.
My tour guide on a boat trip across Lake Gatun spoke in a rich Caribbean accent as he explained the human heritage. “There’s no one way that Panamanians look — we’re a country built with people from all over the world,” he said. “The Spanish arrived, and they introduced slaves from Africa. Then the US built the railroad, the Chinese helped. The French arrived to build the canal, and later the Americans took over, using Caribbean labour. Sixty-percent of the people who came to build the canal were from the Caribbean and they stayed,” he said. “Europeans arrived, and the Indians, and everybody stayed and built this melting pot. Anybody can be Panamanian.”
The boat trip was great fun. Lake Gatun was created by damming the Chagres River to make a reservoir for the central part of the cross-country route. Ships entering through a set of locks at the Pacific or Atlantic sides are raised 26m to cross the lake, then lowered back to sea level at the other side. It’s freaky to whizz around a lake surrounded by jungle, then suddenly have a towering container ship beside you.
Since the “islands” in the lake were originally the tops of mountains, the monkeys of 1913 must have been terrified when their jungle was flooded and they were stranded on the peaks. Now their descendants are accustomed to speedboats full of tourists holding out fruit to tempt them on board. There are signs saying, “Don’t feed the monkeys”, but if you take away their ability to forage for themselves, it seems only fair to play Mr Delivery.
To see the canal in action, I took a bus to Miraflores Locks, where a film explains how the canal was started, spluttered to a stop, was completed many years later, and finally expanded in 2016 to accommodate ever-larger vessels. Watching gigantic ships carefully inch through the locks is fascinating. Heavy-duty engines called “mules” guide the ship on either side as it enters, then the gates are opened, water pours out of the chamber, and the ship descends. The ocean-to-ocean journey takes eight to 10 hours, through six sets of locks that use gravity, not pumps, for the whole operation.
What Panama City doesn’t have is a beach, so for some sandy downtime I booked a two-day trip to San Blas, a string of islands run by the indigenous Guna population. The excursion started with a 5am drive through spectacular mountain scenery to the Caribbean coast. A local boatman steered our small group of tourists to Yansailadup Island, which you can walk around in about 30 minutes. The only buildings among the palms are a handful of chalets on stilts above the water, a hut with divided bedrooms, a dining area, a toilet block, and a separate area where the host family sleeps. I arrived on Christmas Eve for the joy of spending Christmas Day on a Caribbean island with nothing to do but read, sunbathe, swim and eat, and the hosts excelled themselves with a turkey and ham feast. Tourism is quite new here, and a sun-baked expat boat-dweller who moored up to join us reminisced about how these islands were almost deserted just a few years ago.
Plans to snorkel were scuppered by a lack of the promised equipment. The pre-booking tour notes had warned at length that these islands are basic and unsophisticated, and things may not work as expected. I didn’t much care. When I was ready for air conditioning, a hot shower and a sparkling swimming pool, it was all waiting for me back in Panama City.
This article was first published in Business Day.
