(The ship is rolling a bit tonight - first time I had noticed that!)
We awoke early today to find our ship at the entrance to the Panama Canal. For the next 3 hours or so we were able to watch, from different places on the ship, the workings of the two locks as we lifted to the level of Gatun Lake. It was particularly interesting to see two huge cargo ships come down in the other direction. Sam watched most of it from the "bow camera" on the TV while I scurried around the decks for different vantage points.
Can you believe Holland pays a toll of about $400,000 to pass through?
Our afternoon excursion was called "Rainforest and Gatun Lakes Cruise and Locks". We tendered ashore to meet our bus and guide "Gee" (a former national park ranger). We drove through the Panama countryside for about 40 minutes to "Aventuras 2000" dock on Gatun Lake. We would board a small craft and tour around some islands looking for wildlife. (We didn't see much). Gatun Lake is man-made, as part of the canal project, and thus not very deep. There are tree stumps poking up so its a little treacherous. Sure enough, our boat got hung up on a submerged tree. Try as he might, our driver could not get the boat free. There were two other boats cruising the same area as ours who came over to assist. Between the three drivers, I have never seen a more incompetent bunch, they couldn't figure it out. The tried ropes for pushing and pulling to no avail. These boats use a single outboard motor so they don't have much power. Finally, one of the other boats went back to the dock, discharged its passengers, and came back out to us so we could transfer ourselves to the other boat. Even with all that weight gone, that boat would not come free. We wonder if its still there?
Returning to shore, after a good laugh, we re-boarded our bus and drove a bit over to the "New Locks" and a really nice facility and visitor center. This second set of locks were opened in 2016 and greatly increased the capacity of the canal by allowing much larger ships to pass through.
Our bus drove on the city of Colon when we met up with the ship which had turned around in Gatun Lake, after we had left for our boat ride, and returned back down through the canal.
After dinner tonight we enjoyed a show in the main theater by a magician/illusionist, T.J. Tana, who left our head spinning! He was hysterical!
We sail to Costa Rica overnight. Tomorrow is our last excursion - a trip on the Tortuguera Canals for wildlife.
No comments:
Post a Comment