At Sea – Though the Panama Canal

This was the unique aspect of our cruise: the transition from the  Pacific and the Atlantic via the Panama canal.  If you’re unaware, this is the only way of sailing between the two without going all the way around Cape Horn, around the bottom of Chile and Argentina (Which we’re doing later in the trip!  Chan needs to see penguins) which means the Panamanians control a massive amount of freight from Asia to Africa/Europe and America to America, oddly enough. As an aside, the Chinese are funding a competing canal through Nicaragua which sounds…ambitious.  Our Nicaraguan guide from the other day wore an expression of near-terminal scepticism while discussing the subject.

Yeah.  Best of luck.

Anyway, the canal isn’t just a channel through a single land mass (as I imagined, having never bothered to look it up): it consists of a series of locks, two major canals (in the traditional sense) and several lakes to sail across.  See the diagram above. It took about 8 hours, starting about 07:00.   The cruise line hires an official historian to give us commentary of just about everything: the history of construction, the ships we could see, the method of piloting and guidance etc. 

 
The guys above are the canal pilots that come aboard to drive the vessel.  The trucks on rails with the guide cables are called ‘Mules’ and drag the vessel through, very slowly.  The ‘rails’ are actually a rack and pinion system for the mechanically-minded.   You perverts.

Obviously, the cruise line didn’t miss a trick in sending out photographers to film and photograph us lot waving like maniacs off our balconies. We all made our own posters to brandish because we are 6 years old:

We’re the best in our kindergarten class

And the canteen laid on a special  cake, which I’m pretty sure no-one ate because it was too pretty.  I realise that that last sentence was staggeringly naïve.

I’ll have fries with that

Commence photo dump:

 
 
 
 
 
 
  

 

So yeah, it was thing to have said to have done.   We also had a bit of a surplus of champagne to drink while we watched it all go by as we won a couple of bottles in various ways (including a Mr and Mrs competition – dodged a bullet there).

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch:  Heute sind wir durch den Panamakanal gereist. Wir haben auch viel Champagner getrunken. Es war ein guter Tag.