Colon: Panama's Caribbean Side

Colon, at the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal, is a major seaport. Unfortunately, seaports tend to attract rough characters and, in times of recession, poor, unemployed rough characters. Many tourism professionals advise visitors not to walk around there without a professional guide.

Colon resembles many other Caribbean cities whose architecture was heavily influenced by Spanish occupation: Many long, rectangular whitewashed buildings, usually two stories, with red tile roofs and often embellished with colorful wood trim. A drive down the city’s two main boulevards revealed a city that once must of have been very attractive but has run badly to seed.

But Oh!, the other attractions nearby:

- Gatun Locks, the Panama Canal’s biggest and busiest, with a vistors’ grandstand right above the action;

- Portobello, site of the ‘Black Christ’ and the 15th-Century fort that once defended the New World’s richest gold and silver shipments;

- A delightful little island, mis-named ‘Isla Grande’, with gorgeous beaches, colorful local fishermen, and a potpourri of seafront restaurants.

With a hired car and guide, we saw all of this in eight hours. We also passed at least two very attractive public beaches one could while away an afternoon on.

Quick Tips:

We encountered differing opinions about the safety of tourists walking unguided in Colon. My Panama City guide and local hotel employees called it ‘very dangerous.’ My traveling companions’ guidebook said, probably exaggerating, ‘You cannot walk a single block without being mugged.’

Our driver/guide in Colon disagreed; he said that may have been true in the past, but was no longer. The central esplanade certainly looked safe enough, with too many pedestrians present for bad guys to pounce without being seen. If you choose not to walk it, at least hire a taxi to drive you from 16th St. to the ocean, where there’s a small replica of Rio’s famous ‘Christ of the Andes’.

While the central Paseo looked tourist-friendly, the streets leading to it from the railstation looked seedy. We drove them, but did not leave the car to take pictures. I regretted that while composing this journal. My friends did walk a short way toward town, returning un-mugged.

Best Way To Get Around:

Hiring a car and driver/guide for the day will cost or more. I was lucky enough to meet two other Americans on the train and the whole eight-hour-plus day cost just each. It was probably the greatest sightseeing bargain during my six days in Panama.

Take a bathing suit and towel if you’re going to the island. There’s a small hotel with a private beach; if you’re with a guide they know, you can use their facilities without charge.

If you’d rather not pay a driver for a full day, you could probably find a local taxi to take you to the Canal. There’s shade, drinking water and bathrooms, and enough shipping action to keep yourself occupied. It would be best to have your driver return for you at an agreed-upon time; there might not be a cab available when you are ready to return.

Colon proper has a huge duty-free shopping and warehousing zone. It looks more like a military supply depot than a market, but there an many upscale, multi-story retail stores there with name-brand merchandise at tax-free prices. Take a taxi.

There’s also a large, modern shopping center by the cruise-ship docks.

It takes 8-10 hours for the average ship to transit the Panama Canal. YOU can cross the isthmus by train in under an hour. You’ll travel in style and comfort, in creatively refurbished coaches from the best of the classic 1950’s U.S. streamliners. Some have been fitted with ten-foot-long open observation decks; one has a full-length dome with roof-level seating.

Opened in 1855, the 47-mile Panama Canal Railway was the world’s first transcontinental railway. Once badly deteriorated, It’s now been rebuilt into a steel superhighway capable of hauling trainloads of double-stacked shipping containers at 60 m.p.h. No nostalgic ‘clickety-clack’ here: you’re on continuous welded rail of the heaviest weight currently used on North American railroads.

In fact, my only gripe was: The train runs too fast for serious photography. My photos along Gailliard Cut were unpublishable. Only when the train slowed down for the Gamboa maintenance and dredging base was I able to get photos good enough to share.

At times, the train runs close enough to the canal for riders to see locks and shipping activity. At others, it veers into the jungle --- if the sun is right, we’re surrounded by green and yellow-green rainforests that almost seem to glow. You’d never see that from the water.

Northbound, we first pass the Miraflores Locks. They’re too far from the tracks to inspect, but we’ll get a good look at Miraflores Dam, which helps control the canal’s water levels and generates the power for the locks. After a short tunnel, we’ll get a better view of the smaller Pedro Miguel Lock.

Scenic highlights of the trip are:

- Galliard Cut: The narrowest part of the canal, where the engineers cut their way through shale and bedrock to cross the Continental Divide. It’s also called ‘Culebra’ Cut, from the Spanish word for ‘snake’; the canal curved like one until being widened.

- Gatun Lake: We’re far from the shipping channel, working our way through a maze of small islands or crossing open water on long causeways. These are the backwaters: Again, something you’d never see from a ship. We cross two drawbridges in this region, over the Gatun and Chagres Rivers.

Trivia Question: Do you know the origin of the word ‘posh’? It’s said that the luxury P&O Steamship Line arranged to house its wealthiest passengers on the sunny side of the ship in both directions: ‘Port Out, Starboard Home’. That’s also the rule of the railroad: The canal is always on your left outbound, right returning.

January 2002 schedules had the train departing Panama City at 7:15 a.m., returning at 6:15 p.m. and spending nine hours at Colon.

What to do during those nine hours? Read on. Many of the activities described here can be pre-arranged through your hotel concierge desk or a travel agency. Some of our train passengers just took a bus back to Panama City --- it only costs $2 or so. But there are better things to do ...

Though they’re an inconvenient 48 miles from the comfortable hotels of Panama City, Gatun Locks are one of my most-recommended Panama tourist attractions.

Barely 50 miles wide from Atlantic to Pacific, the Isthmus of Panama has been host to transcontinental traffic since the 1600’s. In the 1850’s, they carved a railroad through the jungle to carry California-bound gold-rushers and their supplies. Finally, after false starts and fearful fatalities to yellow fever and construction accidents, the Panama Canal opened to its first ship in 1914. Unless you want to pay large dollars to ride a ship through it, the Gatun Locks are the best place for admiring this engineering marvel.

Gatun Locks, at the Caribbean end of the canal, are the canal’s largest and busiest. You’re far more likely to see shipping activity here than at the easier-to-reach Miraflores Locks, mainly because there’s only one set of locks instead of the two that ships pass through at the Pacific terminus.

Though you must climb some rather daunting flights of stairs, the visitors’ grandstand at Gatun is larger, higher and more comfortable than the one at Miraflores. It’s also somewhat more friendly to photographers. Although we were ‘skunked’ at Miraflores --- no ships passing while we were there and none scheduled for another several hours --- we saw six ships in less than two hours at Gatun. Several were ‘Panamax’ vessels, meaning that they came within a foot of being too wide or too long for the canal. Specifically, not more than 965 feet long nor 106 feet wide.

Tidbit: Tolls are based on a complex formula based on length, tonnage, and whether a ship is laden or in ballast. According to publicity materials, the lowest-ever toll was 36 cents, paid by an American who was swimming the canal. When I transited the canal in the 2,400-passenger Legend of the Seas in 1996, our Captain said we paid a toll of approximately $200,000.

On arrival at the locks, you’ll be invited to attend short audiovisual presentations on the history of the canal and the mechanics of its operation. You don’t HAVE to view them, but you should. Another tidbit: Those electric-powered ‘mules’ cabled to the ships aren’t for propulsion; they’re for providing precise directional control, with clearances as low as six inches between the ships and the walls of the locks.

When our train from Panama City arrived at Colon, we found no taxi drivers willing to take us on a simple one-way trip to the locks; they’d much prefer we hire them for several hours or a full day. I’d met two other Americans on the train, and the three of us negotiated a set price of U.S. $40 for a trip to and from the locks with the driver waiting with us for two hours or so. (It’s a 20-25 minute drive each way.)

As it turned out, we anted up another $60 and hired him for the full day. But that’s the subject of another entry ...

There’s nothing ‘Grande’ about the Panama’s Isla Grande: it’s an underpopulated Caribbean-coast island retreat so small that one reaches it only by open outboard motorboat. And that’s precisely its charm. There’s said to be one automobile on the island, but we failed to see it. What we did see was a gentle arc of docks and beaches lined with soda-pop stands and small restaurants --- often the front porch of someone’s home.

On the beach in front of them, the boats of working fishermen. Behind them, dense jungle.

For lunch, our guide took us to a nondescript house-cum-restaurant with dining tables on the front porch, about a hundred feet from the water. I skipped lunch; my friends shared a huge order of broiled fish called Cierra. No one could tell us exactly what kind of fish it was, but my friends raved about it. ‘We could stay here a week,’ they declared. The meal, including lunch for the guide, had cost them something less than $5. It had probably been caught that morning.

HAD my companions stayed for a week, a cabin/room at the little Hotel Isla Grande would have cost $45/night for singles or $60 per couple. In addition to swimming, they could have dined, danced and shot pool in ‘Bar el Coral’, the little island’s version of a night club. Our driver/guide knew the owners, who cordially invited us to use Bar el Coral’s bathrooms for changing and to go for a swim on the hotel’s private beach. It was about a ten-minute walk from where the motorboat landed us.

The tourism guide listed at least two hotels on Isla Grande, and locals told us there was a path around the island that would lead us to another hotel, but we didn’t have time to explore it.

Allow about 1-1/2 hours from Isla Grande back to the railstation at Colon, including waiting time for the motorboat. The trip outbound will take at least a half-hour longer because you’ll want to stop for photos along the way.

The Caribbean side of Panama is significantly different from the Pacific coast; the drive to Isla Grande will reveal that to you. The entry ‘Road to Portobelo’ contains some photos that the IgoUgo format didn’t allow me room for here: There’s not much text, but you’ll see some of the sights that make the drive from Colon to Isla Grande worthwhile.

The road north and east of Colon, along Panama’s Caribbean (Atlantic) Coast, is considerably more ‘tropical’ than on the Panama City side. Its settlements are also considerably older.

The community of Portobelo, now a fishing village, was, in the 1500’s, the principal seaport the Spaniards used to ship gold and silver home from Central and South America. The ruins of the large fort built to guard those treasure shipments are right at the edge of the highway and open to all --- a marvelous ‘photo op’ en route to Isla Grande. Expend a frame or two on the village kids: most are a bit too proud to beg but eager to accept a coin for posing next to their dad’s fishing boat.

Near the fort, there’s the church of the Black Christ. It’s a very humble chapel from the outside --- not remarkable enough to photograph --- but has an elegantly simple interior that I found incredibly relaxing to pause in for several minutes. I’m neither Catholic nor religious, but I enjoyed my visit here, leaving the tropical sunshine for the soft glow of votary candles.

There are at least two public swimming beaches between Colon and Portobelo; the larger, Playa Langosta, was said to be especially popular with young people. Our guide said that one of the beaches was white sand and other other black sand, and that one had public changing facilities and the other one did not. I apologize for sloppy reporting, but I forgot to note which was which.

Since I was lucky enough to meet an American couple on the train from Panama City, to share expenses, my entire day’s excursion from Colon cost just $40 --- including lunch, a tank of gas, and small additional tip for the driver. Considering that this included two hours at the canal, nearly two more on Isla Grande, a stop at Portobelo and half-hour tour of Colon, I thought that a pretty good deal.