2026 Blog Post 4

Our ship docked at Colon, 12th January 2026, the Caribbean Atlantic Panama Canal entrance and world’s 2nd largest duty-free zone after Hong Kong.

90 minutes’ drive to the Pacific-lined skyscrapers of Panama City, a sharp contrast to the Old Panama ruins and old colonial city’s narrow, uneven, roads, brightly coloured buildings, some covered with graffiti others beautifully restored, trendy Gesha coffee shops, (Panama’s famous coffee specialty), restaurants, upmarket retail stores, hotels, shops selling Panama hats. The kind of place Sheryl needs much more time to explore . 

Suddenly a 20-minute hard rain shower, then again the sweltering tropical humidity. We bumped into a shop owner, Sephardi Jew with yarmulke, who asserted that there are 25 000 Jewish people living in Panama, largest Jewish community in Central America. That’s about two times more than in Cape Town (?)!

Panama is an isthmus between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that includes, at 60 kilometres wide, the narrowest land mass connecting North and South America.

The original people of Panama rowed the Chagras river to central Panama from the Caribbean, then on Mules to the Pacific.

With the 1848 California gold rush, a quick transcontinental transit became imperative. The Panama railroad, once New York Stock Exchange’s top stock, was completed in 1855 amid swamps, floods, disease causing over 5000 deaths. It enabled prospectors to avoid extreme USA overland hardships or the lengthy, time-consuming, hazardous Cape of Horn Sea route.

President Teddy Roosevelt had a burning desire to build the Panama Canal. A two-ocean navy is much more expensive than a one-ocean! The USA provided pivotal support to Panamanian separatists leading to Panama’s1903 independence from Columbia, then secured the Panama Canal Zone from the new Panamanian Government: a 10-mile-wide land strip inside Panama, 5 miles either side of the canal, governed by the USA which enabled building of the Canal.  “Zonians” like John McCain were born in this Zone. It was ultimately fully transferred to Panama on 31 December 1999 and competently run by Panama ever since.

But building the Panama Canal did not come easy, as covered in our next blog post!