The Weekend Getaway That Wasn’t

Colón, Panama

Only 3 days left in Panama before our flight to Colombia? Let’s book a tour and make the trip to the beautiful San Blas Islands located on the Caribbean side of the country!

NOPE! The local Kuna people & the government are fighting over tour permits. Trip cancelled.

No worries. Let’s go to Colón instead! We can take the Panama Railway back and have a great adventure!

NOPE! It’s Saturday. The train doesn’t run on weekends.

From Mac on the way to the bus station: Oh look! A big giant bin of “Swiss Watches” for only a dollar each! I’ve been thinking of getting one for a while now.

NOPE! It died 4 hours later.

Ok. Well let’s go to Colón anyways, wander around and take in the sights.

NOPE! Colón is a shady town and we were told by friendly English-speaking vegabonds to tightly hold on to our belongings. One guy tried to sell me a level.

Fine then. Let’s just cut our losses and get the bus back to the city.

NOPE! Fate intervenes and we run into a friend from our Spanish School!

Together with him and two Chileans, we hired a taxi to drive us around to see the sights of Colón. It turns out the sights of Colón aren’t actually IN Colón, but a good 40 minute drive down a bumpy road. Not a very comfortable ride with 4 fairly tall people crammed into the back of a Hyundai Accent.

San Lorenzo

The San Lorenzo Fort today is only a partial remnant of the fort that existed in the 1700’s. When Henry Morgan was doing his thing and destroying cities in 1671, he managed to mostly destroy San Lorenzo as well. The fort was rebuilt on a cliff in 1761 where it remained. Today the crumbling masonry walls and overgrown moats are just part of what once stood at this location.

Gatún Locks

Having already seen the Miraflores locks in action, we didn’t necessarily need to see their Caribbean counterparts, but as fate would have it, we ended up being stuck in line waiting for a ship to pass through so we could make our way back into Colón. The Gatún locks to the job of two sets of locks on the Pacific side. It was still pretty cool watching the huge vessels traverse the canal. The road that bridges the canal is very close to sea level (it gets raised when the locks are open), so we got the chance to see the lock gates up close and personal.

After a fairly disappointing start to the day, it ended up not being completely terrible and we made it home in one piece. Moral of the story: go with the flow & just see what happens. And don’t buy $1 watches.