If you folks ever come to Panama City, give the JW Marriott a shot. This is the view when you sit out on the 14th floor terrace. There is the pool that you can see. But do you see the dark area beyond that? Notice carefully on the left side of the picture. You see a few people who seem to be under water? That is because they are. That is another pool – an infinity one at that. And then you see the Pacific Ocean beyond that.

We came back to our hotel room to find a huge tray with a map of Panama and many chocolates placed on the map where they originate from. And a really large chocolate in the shape of the hotel we are staying in (JW Marriott) where the hotel is!!

Look what happens to the boat (actually two sailboats are tethered together). Notice how they go down in front of our eyes as the water is lowered before the locks are opened for them to proceed! And this is only one of the few locks! Crazy engineering feat.

To understand the engineering challenges, simply think of the four ropes that are tethering them to the land so that they do not hit the walls. How do you deal with the fact that the ropes now need to “give” as the boat gets lowered?

That is the Panama Canal! You can see a set of locks. And a few ships waiting behind. And a large one crossing in the parallel channel away from us. The ships fit very tightly in the canal. So, they have to be guided by the railcars on either side that you can see. In fact, all ships are categorized as Panamax if they can fit into the Canal. Now, there is another newer one built a few hundred yards away from this original one that can take bigger ships.

And you have to use a Panama Canal pilot to cross. The other two requirements are that you have to pay the tolls 72 hours before crossing and you have to fly a Panama flag in your boat when you cross. The toll runs into tens of thousands of dollars. The highest ever paid was $450,000! The lowest? 38 cents by an American swimmer who swam the distance of the canal!

But here is the crazy thing. I always thoughts the locks existed because of the height difference between the Atlantic and the Pacific. They are indeed different but not that much. The engineering marvel of Panama Canal was in utilizing the large lake of Gatun to minimize the digging. But the lake is 86 feet above the ocean level. So the locks lift the ships up to Lake Gatun and then bring them down on the other side!!

Also, geographically, the route is where the land mass takes the shape of a “S”. This means, when you go from the Atlantic to the Pacific, you will be driving the ship west to east (northwest to southeast to be precise) and not the other way round!!

All my childhood in India, I had heard about the Panama Canal. Of course, I had to get there as soon as we checked into the hotel room. We grabbed and Uber and went to the Miraflores locks to watch how they move the ships thru the locks.

Incredible number of highrises. As a matter of fact, Panama City has the most number of skyscrapers in all of Central America. For that matter, even in all the Americas, it is only behind New York City and Chicago. (I think Miami and Panama City have very similar numbers)

We crossed over from the Atlantic side to the Pacific side. As you can see the Pacific side water is not a great sight. The water is fairly murky and the shallow depths mean the tide comes in and out over a large swatch of area pulling and and out a lot of soil.

Panama City is visible in the distance.

Looks very green from here. We just crossed over from the Caribbean/Atlantic side.