Panama City Tourists...

Freighter going through the Miraflores Locks (top row L - R, then bottom row L - R)

Dave and Joe Hummer at his shop. (sorry about the fuzzy shot)


Canadian tourists, eh!


This is the back of a local bus.... No wonder there are so many accidents!?

What do think this road sign means? Hmmm! Perhaps it just can't be translated.

February 21/06

We are still in Panama City. We are ready to fly to Cartagena, Colombia tomorrow, hopefully?

We visited the airport to speak to the customs officials about leaving the country without the motorcycles. (Our passports are stamped with a note that prohibits us from leaving the country without the MCs unless we get authorization from the customs office) At the airport there are official hospitality assistants to help English speaking tourists. We were helped by a young fellow (Javier). Calls to various customs only created more confusion. We did not explain ourselves well. Finally Javier visited the Immigration office and asked if there would be any problem with us leaving the country without the MCs. The answer he received was ..”No”. Guess we will see tomorrow??

Based on this information, we made arrangement with Joe Hummer (our mechanic) to leave our bikes with him for the week so that we could get the bikes tuned up, oil change, etc. The challenge this morning was getting the bikes to his place. There are no maps of Panama City that can be used for navigation. All we had was Joe’s address. Even when I called to ask him for directions he didn’t know where to start, but we had a plan. . . We rode to the downtown beach area. This was easy access on the toll road from our hotel. Then we hired a taxi. Linda and Jenny rode in the taxi and Dave & I followed on the bikes. Best $5. we ever spent! There was no way we have found Joe’s place without the driver. Even he had to stop and ask directions a couple of times. Joe was great. We made a list of work we needed and Joe is storing the bikes for us for the week as well as our riding gear.

After leaving Joe’s place, we hailed a cab and went to the MiraFlores Locks on the Panama Canal. Luckily a large freighter was passing through the locks as we arrived. It is a interesting operation. It cost the freighter in the pictures, just over $100K to pass through the canal. Guess it’s cheaper than going round the cape? Carlos, our next cab driver, gave us a nice tour of old Panama City and dropped us off in the downtown hotel/business area. We walked around for a while but were unimpressed with downtown Panama City and jumped a cab back to the hotel, where there is a pool and cold beer.

Hopefully, the next report is from Cartagena.