Two hours drive along the coast takes you to Panama City, a booming place of skyscrapers - and the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal. This monumental triumph of human engineering is magnificent to experience from a boat transit, but it came at a terrible cost: over 25,000 deaths, a revolution and poisoned US/Latin American relations for a generation.
Our little boat was dwarfed in the gigantic locks of Miraflores and Pedro Miguel, tiny under the Bridge of the Americas and insignificant as we puttered through the Gaillard Cut through the Continental Divide – the biggest excavation ever undertaken by Man. Huge container ships and cruise liners alternated along the course of the Canal and the rainforest grew ever denser as we entered Gatun Lake at 85 feet above sea level.
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