We have been here a week now, and I am going to combine all those days into a single post.\u00a0 We stayed in our\u00a0original hotel only one night, then moved to another, Residential Texas, that was\u00a0almost as nice, but less expensive.\u00a0 We have\u00a0stayed mostly in a central area of the city, where there are dozens of hotels located.<\/p>\n
This is a very strange city;\u00a0\u00a0modern and bustling in some ways,\u00a0 yet limited and lacking in many others.\u00a0 There are sections with towering high-rises and skyscrapers, and construction is everywhere;\u00a0 but the traffic, noise and dirt are among the worst we have experienced.\u00a0 Other sections are dilapidated slums and zones with little more than rubble and dirt.\u00a0 Modern stores and malls are close by to street vendor stalls and ancient\u00a0market areas.\u00a0 After 7:00 in the evening, \u00a0it can be darn tough to find a place to eat,\u00a0 yet the same area at noon looks and feels completely different, with open restaurants on every corner.<\/p>\n
Levi read online somewhere\u00a0that \u00a8this city suffers from a lack of city planning\u00a8,\u00a0 and maybe that sums up what I am trying to say.\u00a0 The traffic is horrendous, and every important thoroughfare seems to be under construction at the same time.\u00a0 Partially completed bridges and overpasses are everywhere, and important roads are closed at random times and then open again later.\u00a0\u00a0 At times, very large, noisy\u00a0crowds gather on busy streets and wait for busses to arrive for them.\u00a0 Last night, the power was out for several hours in a large portion of the ‘downtown’ area.\u00a0 For a city that seems large at first, you realize after a while that it is actually not that big at all,\u00a0 just very spread out along the Pacific shoreline.<\/p>\n
We did do some sight-seeing.\u00a0 We visited the ‘old city’, which was a very cool colonial area that was allowed to become completely dilapidated and run down.\u00a0 Partially surrounded by tenement slums and 60’s era public housing projects, the old city is now being renovated on a large scale, and will someday be beautiful again.\u00a0 It was amazing to see how\u00a0badly this historic area was allowed to decay before it was decided that it should be restored.<\/p>\n
We re-crossed the Bridge of the Americas, which is a very impressive structure itself, and affords a very dramatic view of the city.\u00a0 We rode out\u00a0on the Amador, a causeway that extends out quite a ways into the Pacific, and offers exceptional views of the canal, the city, and the islands at the canal entrance.<\/p>\n
We visited the Miraflores Lock, and the Canal Zone museum, which were interesting and worth the drive.\u00a0 Seeing the remnants of the US presence was interesting, also.\u00a0 The architecture and landscaping of the old Canal Zone area was very recognizable to anyone familiar with other US military installations.\u00a0 We stopped for lunch at the largest indoor mall either of us had ever been in.<\/p>\n
We spent a lot of time this week making calls and trying to arrange our passage from here to South America.\u00a0 We finally arranged air transport for the motorcycles to Bogota, Columbia.\u00a0 That is ironic, since Columbia was the one country we were going to try to avoid.\u00a0 But the cost and convenience won out, and Bogota it is.\u00a0 We dropped the bikes off at the Tocumen airport this morning, and paid large sums of cash<\/span> money to get them to Bogota airport by tomorrow morning.\u00a0 Any other plan was just too difficult and\/or expensive to consider.\u00a0 We have reservations on a flight out of here tomorrow morning, and we\u00a0hope to be in a hotel, in Bogota, reunited with our transportation, tomorrow night, Friday.<\/p>\n \u00a0I have had enough of Panama city, and will be glad to be\u00a0leaving it behind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We have been here a week now, and I am going to combine all those days into a single post.\u00a0 We stayed in our\u00a0original hotel only one night, then moved to another, Residential Texas, that was\u00a0almost as nice, but less expensive.\u00a0 We have\u00a0stayed mostly in a central area of the city, where there are dozens […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[6,18],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1560"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1560"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1562,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1560\/revisions\/1562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}