The Panama Canal is terribly named. It’s a big artificial lake with locks at both ends. The lake is full of pretty islands, thick trees on all of them, rare beaches in amongst the banks cleared bear by bow waves.
It’s quite pretty. I suspect it’s even prettier if you’re able to get closer in, explore a little more. There’s wildlife too, although we hadn’t even entered the first lock when I saw deer, the only time in Panama. There was a crocodile too, bathing in the early morning sunshine.
The locks were two foot wider than the ship. Literally, we had too small a gap to fall down on one side as we scraped rotating tyres intended to keep us from touching the other. To keep the ship central and steady there are electric trains attached to the ship, steel cables never quite going taut.
I look pictures and explored the ship, finding new vantage points. My favourite spot on deck 7 was very busy, except before 8am when the sun was too low for it to provide shade. I got sunburn. Deck 6 offered the best view forwards, and I found steps there that went straight to the bridge, only common sense stopping me entering and saying hi to the helmsman. They have a serious light hanging from the bridge.
By 2.30 I was bored of it. We still had one lock to go but it looked no different to the other two as we approached so I abandoned the wind swept deck and went to hide in the ship’s cinema. The film was old, it had Geoffrey Rush in it, but not that old: it also had Daniel Radcliffe.
I was surprised to still see land by the ship when I emerged. We’d passed the locks and were heading towards open water. The front deck was nearly empty, just one woman there, said she’d been there since 5.45am. That’s 11 hours stood in the wind, which was getting stronger, occasional gusts making walking difficult. She’d missed the crocodile, didn’t know the difference between crocodiles and alligators. I admitted my own ignorance, suggested the primary differentiator is that crocodiles eat people; alligators eat their pets.
As we passed the final breakwater into the Caribean Sea I counted two dozen ships, most of them at anchor, waiting to transit. I was alone on the deck by then, view becoming ‘sea’ and the wind reminding me I’d been too long in the sun in the morning.
Walking back through the ship there were some interesting odours. People earlier had mentioned their taps running brown so maybe the plumbing was broken. It smelled that way.
It seemed a sensible time to back up my photographs. No ‘net access so can’t create the remote backup but they’re now on three different devices, one of which doesn’t travel in the same bag. I’m up to 4700 for the trip, plus over 400 on my phone – most of which have been posted here.
I had a late dinner, getting to the restaurant at 7.30. It took a while for them to take my order but the food wasn’t an overly wait after that. They did seem to be short on waiters though, even with half the restaurant empty. I arrived at the same time as a man in a wheelchair, his wife asking for a shared table. He seemed mentally fully functional but his speech lacked consonants, a little too loud and exceedingly hard to understand, especially if you’re slightly deaf. So I asked for a table to myself, got one, ended up sat near them anyway. I could handle hearing him chatting to the people on his table, no requirement for me to understand him myself.
The Penang Chicken was quite nice.
The conversation on another table less so. “..and that’s when the bowel ruptures,” explained one man, his partner listening avidly.
There was a new comedian on board, this one deserving of the title. He did the usual American stand up, observations on life, but managed self-deprecation and dry humour, rare on that continent. I smiled a couple of times, laughed once, mostly sat trying not to fall asleep but that was very much due to being outside his target audience, rather than a lack of craft from him.
A surprising 6km walked today, all of it on the ship. We technically did stop in Panama but only in the locks and they don’t let you off to look around. Shame. After five consecutive days of needing my alarm to wake me going to bed at 1am feels foolish, but without time travel that’s now the best I can do.
