Panama Canal Cruise (travelogue with pictures)

 

Cartagena, Columbia

We took a walking tour in Columbia and man was it hot!  The best thing in Columbia was that we bought a papaya and a mango from a street vendor.  We didn't trust her to cut it (we didn't know how clean her hands were), so we took them on the ship with us and had the chef at the buffet cut it for us.  We were a little worried they wouldn't let us take the fruit on the ship but they did.  We looked for fruit in all our stops but this was the only time it was convenient to buy it.  It was delicious!  I don't think Cartagena is a place I want to go back to.  I didn't feel unsafe (because we were with a large group of people and a guide 😀

In these two pictures we are looking at a wall that is built out of coral.  This wouldn't go over well today.

More pictures from Cartegena:

There were two types of architecture. Every building had to be built in one of the two styles.

Police

In these hot humid climates, there are a lot of beautiful plants and flowers.

One of the popes visited Cartegena once.  A lot of people wanted their picture with him.

Yes, there were bars of some sort on all of the windows.  The vines on the building are sea grapes.  

There were colorfully dressed women walking around the city. 
They want the tourists to pay them to take their picture. Roy snuck this one.

Following the city tour we got back on the boat that had taken us to the city and watched some people from the area dance for us.

This is Mary with the baby Jesus--watching over the city of Cartegena

The girl got both Roy and I to dance.  

Cartagena

Panama Canal and Panama

Before we left on our cruise, Roy and I read a long book by David McCollough called The Path Between the Seas.  The book gave the history of the building of the Panama Canal.  This made it a lot more interesting to see the locks, the lake and the surrounding areas because we knew how much money and blood it cost to get it built.  The French had the first go at it, but though they had a lot of enthusiasm for the project, they were lacking in knowledge.  They had had success building the Suez Canal and therefore thought building this passageway would also go well.  They didn't know that they were going up against the mosquitoes, which meant yellow fever and malaria.  They were also plagued by other diseases.  When the Americans took over, they still had many of the same issues, but they had some key people that helped them to push forward.  One was Dr. Gorgas, who knew that the mosquitoes were killing people.  He had studied extensively and even knew which mosquitoes were the problem. He had previously had success in Cuba in eradicating yellow fever and Malaria.  Unfortunately, not very many people believed that mosquitoes could be the problem, so it was awhile before he had the monetary support to have success. 

There were also many engineering problems and an ongoing debate on whether to do a sea level canal or to build locks.  There is way too much history to tell much of the story here, but I found the book very interesting and informative.  Below are some pictures of our passage through the locks (It cost the cruise line $480,000 + dollars to go through the locks).

We woke up bright and early to watch the process of going through the locks.  It was pouring rain, so most of the people were watching from deck 7 because they were covered.  By 7 AM or so, the rain had stopped.  We have read several news articles recently about the drought in this area.  They typically take 45 ships through the locks each day.  They had cut that down to about 16, but are now back up to approximately 24 ships.  One company has had to move it's business to a land rail company because the capacity of the canal has dropped so low.  In the above pictures we are looking at the canal from a distance, and the tug boat on the right is leading us into the locks (we were told that the tugboats cost upward of $400,000).  

Our ship is entering into the first lock.  After the ship is fully in, the doors close behind and the water level slowly begins to rise until we are ready for the next lock.

                                               We were guided into the locks by man power

This ship was ahead of us.  It is waiting to be released to drive into Lake Gatun

Here you can see the gate opening for the ship to proceed into the 2nd lock

This is the view from the back of the ship. 

This bridge is for vehicles to go over when ships are not going through the lock.  The whole bridge moves as the gates to the locks are opened.

We watched this big tanker go through the locks after we did.

After ending up in Lake Gatun, we were shuttled to shore and we boarded the bus to go visit a traditional village where the people live as they did in the past.  It was a two hour bus ride to the village, and a two hour ride back, so I kind of wish we'd stayed on the ship, but it was a good experience.

Our guide stopped during our long bus ride and bought bananas, papaya and pineapple.  I would have been upset if he'd stop to buy for himself or the village, but they did serve it to us, so it was okay.

This young boy helped people into long dugout canoes (with motors) for the ride to the village.

In this area, the river was clear and pretty, but apparently in other areas it was murky; and some of the other tours were told that they never swim in the lake or rivers because of crocodiles. I saw people in the water swimming as we rode in the canoes.  They were near the shore.  Maybe this was an area of the river where there was not as much concern about crocs.

The young girl on the right is tattooed with paint, thankfully it washes off after about 10 days.

One thing we noticed on our two hour bus ride is that Panama is a very dirty city.  The highways were littered with garbage.  Mini dumps were everywhere.  Here someone is attempting to burn some of the garbage on the side of the road.  We asked the guide about it.  He said, "Does anyone else have any questions."  Then he answered but he was kind of hard to understand.  Something about the garbage company deciding not to collect the garbage anymore (because of money, I assume).

The villagers talked about their lifestyle, they sang and danced for us and fed us some local food (fish and plantains).  At the end they were selling their "crafts" to earn money to send their kids to school.  We spent about $35, then saw the exact same souvenirs, so the "crafts" were obviously not handmade as we'd been led to believe. 

Costa Rica

Roy loves trains, so when there's an option to travel on one, he usually takes it.  It might be a good
 idea when you're in a not so wealthy country to think twice. 
 The train was fine, it just wasn't air conditioned.  We Americans are pretty spoiled. 
We took this train through a jungle and looked for monkeys.  We saw a few.

someone's home

This is about the best monkey picture we got from the train.

Following the train ride we took a bus past a banana plantation.  If you look at the bottom of the bananas you see what is used to start another plant.  We couldn't go through the plantation because in the past having lots of visitors caused fungus in the plants.  

After the bus ride, we rode on a tourist boat to see the animal life along the river.  They said not to swim in Costa Rica rivers--they are infested with crocodiles.  This one is a caiman. According to Wikepedia, a caiman is an allgatroid This one is a baby.  The babies get washed downstream, so larger ones were upstream where we didn't go.

Flycatcher

There is a sloth in the lower middle of this picture.  We never would have seen them without a guide.  Costa Rica has two types of sloths--two fingered and three fingered.

Before we got back on the ship we walked around a conservation park and saw monkeys, large turtles, birds etc.  

This is why I like a cruise--you can get sun and relaxation

This was one of the better meals, but we had to pay extra for it.  A lot of the cruise lines are going in this direction to make a little extra money.  I had lobster and Roy had a large ribeye steak with lobster on the side.  The desserts were disappointing.

Jamaica

Jamaica was quite beautiful.  There was garbage along the highway, but not nearly as much.  In Jamaica we went on an innertube ride down the river. There are NO CROCODILES IN JAMAICA.  They assured us there were no snakes or even spiders either.  They said if you see a "spider" it is a banana bug.

We took small busses to get to the river.  Lucky for whoever is reading this long travelogue, we chose not to worry about getting a water proof case to take pictures on the river. 

This was a fun activity. The river was covered with bamboo and other foliage so we didn't need to worry about the sun.  
    

On our way back to the ship

Grand Cayman

Our last stop was the Grand Caymen.  This was a really beautiful island (it seemed like we were in America except that we were surrounded by water.  English was the main language here.  Since it was Sunday we chose to go on a walking tour of some caves.  These caves were discovered in 2016.  In order to capitalize on them, they had to be dug out so that people could walk through them.  The guide had been involved since the beginning and even showed us a rock that he "discovered" when it fell on his head as he was excavating.

The guide told us a lot about the bats that lived in the caves.  He showed us some bites on his arm.  The babies are bigger and their bites hurt more.  These are fruit bats and they are not just nocturnal.  They fly around all the time.  As long as you don't bother them, they don't bother you.  This guy has to dig out the bat dung every three weeks, and that apparently bothers them.  Also, he told us not to drink from our plastic water bottles while in the caves because the bats will definitely react negatively to the noise.

 

This is a giant air plant that was seemingly growing out of another tree.  

This is called roots cave because the wild fig tree has such strong roots that they work themselves through the rocks.

roots

This lake has a layer of bat droppings on it's surface, so you wouldn't want to go swimming.

This was interesting.  There was a stalactite forming within another stalactite

crab 

The bus driver stopped at a beach to let us look at the reef for a few minutes before he took us back to the port.  It was a beautiful day and hardly anyone was in the water.  I asked the bus driver and he said that people were probably in church.  When I asked if the people were religious, he gave the "so so" motion with his hand.  We did see several churches on our way back to the port--one was The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  If we had realized that we probably would have gone to church instead of to the caves.

This was a couple from Orlando, Florida that we enjoyed visiting with throughout the cruise;  Kristy and Greg Butler. They were pretty devout Christians and we had a lot in common.  I was able to share a little bit about the church.  We were good and used the correct name of our church, and then Kristy asked, "How are you different from the Mormons?" 
  The waiter really wanted to be in the picture with us.  

We came home to this after being in excessive but wonderful heat for 10 days.   A couple of days after arriving home, we drove to Logan to help Crista out because Matt had to have surgery on his Meniscus.  Unfortunately, it was so badly damaged that the doctor couldn't do a great fix on it, so he just trimmed it up.  He told Matt that running was probably not the best idea.  Matt is trying to figure out how much running he can still do without making everything a lot worse.  We almost had to take an alternate route into Logan because we saw a sign that said Sardine Canyon was closed.  We lucked out because it had been closed about an hour before.  It was pretty hairy with snow blowing off the mountain.  We planned on coming home after Matt was done with surgery, but after making them dinner, we took one look at the snowstorm and the snow covered roads and decided to spend another night in Logan.  We got to spend some quality time with the Vances.  I got some great baby time with Zack.

I know this seems like a lot of pictures, but I cut a lot more than I used.