Letter From Atlantia April 09

Panama really could be the most fabulous holiday destination for Europeans. The wild life is wonderful, the climate during the dry season from November until May is warm, if sometimes a little hot when there is no breeze, and it has one of the Wonders of the Civil Engineering world to admire. The Canal. It also has a considerable number of National Parks, and in Panama city they are constructing the second highest building in the world. Owned by a bank of course. The drawback to this wonderful place? A high percentage of the people, certainly in the canal zone area, seem to want to ignore any complicated government restrictions or rules, and make a fast buck for themselves from the visitor. The result is that we don’t know what is true or untrue here, or whether we will be robbed or thrown in jail unless we hand over money to someone somewhere. This seems to be the case from taxi drivers to, apparently, the top of the tree. The latter part of the statement comes from people who live here. A very short sighted policy. Even the supermarket in Colon has taken two additional identical visa payments from us for groceries we bought there. All deductions at the at the same time, and all allowed by visa. The majority of the population we have met here are charming however, and once they have tried to mislead you {either successfully or unsuccessfully} they seem to settle down to being quite friendly.

Thank heavens though for some of the expats and visiting yachtsmen we have meet here, and who have helped preserve our sanity. One such couple were Hans and Marijke from Holland. We met at Shelter Bay marina whilst watching the howler monkeys up in the trees throw twigs and leaves down on us. Apparently David Attenborough had once come here to make a film about the monkeys. He only needed to go about two hundred yards into the forest from the restaurant to look as if he was in deepest jungle. Perhaps he talked quietly and rolled over for them as well.

Hans is the Project Manager for Boskalis Westminster dredging in Colon. They are presently dredging for the extension of a container port but are quoting for the dredging for the new locks which will double the capacity of traffic in the Panama Canal. They were delightful people and took us to an old Spanish fort, called Fort San Lorenzo, at the beginning of the river Chagres which was in a lush tropical National Park.

The River Chagres reaches half way across the isthmus and during the wet season was the main artery for transportation of goods from one side of Panama to the other, before the railway in the 1840s which took many of the gold miners to their destinies in California, and some back again.. The river also saw the transportation of all the gold from Peru and Mexico to Spain, and reputedly has seen more riches travel down between its banks than any other river in the world. Nowadays it is a sleepy backwater cut off by the canal, although there are reputedly gold mines near its sides.

The buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan was well known here. He was a Welshman who rose from the ranks, and who by stealth and cunning sacked many of the Spanish strongholds of the mid seventeenth century around the Spanish Main. He finished up as Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica with vast estates there, since he always sailed with some sort of letter of authority from the British Government and always paid about 12% of his plunder to the British Crown. He overwhelmed our fort of San Lorenzo and took 1400 buccaneers up the river Chagres and then overland to sack Panama city in 1671. They took two weeks to hack their way through the jungle the 55 miles to Panama City and were, by then, starving. They fought 2100 Spanish foot soldiers and 600 cavalry and a herd of stampeding cows, defeating the Viceroy, Don Perez de Guzman, who miraculously survived the attack. Regrettably the town went up in flames and Henry Morgan had to try and save the town himself. He lost a great deal of ransom money due to the conflagration. The average Buccaneer only came away with about £50 a head and Morgan himself with about £1000. Another £10000 went to the Duke of York as the Lord High Admiral and about £6500 to his brother the King. The Panamanians call Morgan a Pirate on all their publicity.

Hans and Marijke took us around Colon in their car. The city had indeed been beautiful about a hundred years ago when they were building the canal and the railway ran properly. Nowadays the train runs once a day each way, so if you want to go to Panama city from Colon you have to stay Overnight in Panama City. In addition Colon certainly does live up to its medical name with mouldering Spanish style colonial houses and a crime wave on the streets that makes it difficult to step out of the car and over the pavement into an adjacent shop without being mugged on the way. Wires festoon the streets and the traffic is always in chaos.

However we are totally cheered up by the busses, which were school bus legacies from the Americans before they gave the Canal to the Panamanians in 1999. The busses are now very brightly painted, and although they make a frightful noise and drive very erratically, they seldom seem to crash. We have seen one or two broken down beside the road. No doubt they make good chicken coops too.

San Cristobel, just outside Colon, thrives on its duty free zone and visitors come here from all over South America for cheap washing machines, computers , etc.. One yachtsman had just bought a flat screen t.v. for his boat, but it came without the essential external speaker wires, so he had to take it back again. 15 miles on the marina bus across the Canal. The bird and wild life here are marvellous. Besides the monkeys throwing bits of wood at us we have seen sloths,

crocodiles,

coati mundi {brown racoons},

agouti, iguanas, geckos, pilot whales,

jumping sting rays, cara cara, hawks,

pelicans. parrots, frigate birds, cormorants {millions of them},

and we have even had a pair of panamanian swallows trying to build a nest inside the mainsail cover. There are two very unhappy swallows here. Will has taken away their nest and closed the gap, so their entrance is no more. No swallows eggs to cook on the way to the Galapagos either.

The Canal authorities are really quite efficient and the waiting time between application and transit is only about five days. This time last year it was about six weeks due to a go slow. The cost for our boat, in total was about $1500 US and the passage took an evening and the day after, with an overnight stay in Gatun Lake. A yacht requires four line handlers as well as the skipper, so we hired a local Panamanian and imported two very experienced line handlers/operators from Scotland. Our son and daughter, Stephen and Susan.

It was wonderful to see them again, and for them to see such a marvel of Engineering achievement;-- and Atlantia with her new coat of paint.

The Canal was built between 1904 and 1914 by the Americans for a ship the size of the Titanic, and they made a first class job of the project. From The east side there are three locks at Gatun which take you to a man made lake 30 metres above sea level. Then follows about 20 miles of flooded valley where you can still see the tops of the trees. The jungle covered islands are very pretty, almost like Lake Windermere, but larger.

The famous River Chagres flows in here but is dammed at the upper side to prevent unwanted currents and to provide hydroelectric power to run the machinery of the lock gates and the lighting at the locks.

After the man made lake comes the Culebra (snake) cut. This runs through the main mountain spine cutting one side of Panama off from the other. Once past this dangerous section, where they are still cutting and dredging,

we came to the Pedro Miguel locks, followed shortly after by the Miraflores locks and the Millennium Suspension Bridge.

It was then under the Bridge of the Americas and out to sea past Balboa. It was much more fun going on Atlantia than it would have been going with Henry Morgan. We didn’t get £50 back though.

When travelling the Canal between the Caribbean sea and the Pacific Ocean we actually traversed north west to south east. Rather bizarre Prior to the Americans completing the canal, the famous Frenchman, Ferdinand .de Lesseps, who had successfully completed the Suez Canal, attempted another sea level canal, cut across the isthmus. They started in 1880 but had to give up due to the high loss of life and the engineering impossibility of the project. As our son Stephen pointed out, it is not possible to build a sea level canal when one end has no tidal difference and the other has a tidal range of twenty feet. You either need a lock or you have to plug against a raging current half of the time. No doubt De Lesseps would not have died in ignominy and his son would not have gone to prison if they had had Stephen as their consulting engineer in the nineteenth century.

None of the successful American project would have been possible if it hadn’t been for Dr. William Gorgas, an expert in tropical medicine. He eradicated almost all the mosquitoes in Panama prior to the construction. It was only just becoming generally known that mosquitoes carry yellow fever and malaria, and despite the cost of fumigation and providing piped drinking water and spraying oil on standing water, he persuaded the American authorities that his theories, that mosquitoes carried the diseases, and not miasma{general bad air}, were correct. The French had lost about 22000 souls on the project, including the chief engineers wife, daughter and son in law to yellow fever and other tropical diseases. They had built excellent hospitals but had put the legs of the hospital beds in basins of water to prevent the ants getting into bed with the patients. Unfortunately the standing water was a breeding ground for mosquitoes which subsequently killed yet more patients. Part of the huge death toll was also caused by the construction of the Culebra cut, which created many land and mud slides that rained down on the construction workers. These continue today and looking at the cut material you can see why, with the many differing rock and soil types and obvious slip planes.

When we traversed the canal, and came to the locks, our advisor{pilot}, who was a very nice Panamanian man, put us in between two smaller yachts, both French. Stephen and our professional line handler were very good with their long lines on the bow of Atlantia and the two French line handlers on the boats on either side of us were appalling, shouting at each other the whole time through the, mercifully short, lock passages. Atlantia was protected from the walls by two rather large and voluble bumpers, although Susan was also continually pushing fenders down between us to ensure we arrived in the Pacific without a scratch. No mean effort.

The pilot said he didn’t really like going through the Canal with French boats because the crew was too excitable. We can see why now, although many of the French are charming people. We were grateful for the numerous tires we also carried on either side and were pleased when a fellow yachtsman, about to go through the canal the opposite way, came over to ask if we could give him half our tyres, now that we had completed the passage. We persuaded him to take them all. We told him,’ you can never have too many tyres’. He looked very smart covered in tyres as he made his way to the canal the following day.

After the Canal we spent a night at the deserted Isla Bona about twenty miles south of Panama City. A tiny island, it is home to about two thousand brown pelicans and two thousand frigate birds, as well as turkey vultures and a couple of ospreys.

There seemed to be continuous aerial battles between the frigate birds and the pelicans, over fish, and of all things, small branches. Strange, since we didn’t see any nests. No doubt it is the beginning of the nesting season, although frigate birds are not supposed to breed here, only in Barbuda and Galapagos. We think we have found an in between spot, new to science. We all went swimming. It was cold.

We returned to Panama city via the holiday island of Taboga whose anchorages were full of sports fishing boats and people lounging on the beaches beneath colourful umbrellas.

It is the island where Gauguin rested after a stint digging the canal, with 75000 other people, and before he came to his final resting place in the western Pacific, and also before he sold a picture or two. Many people used to go to Taboga to escape the yellow fever, and pirates used to plot their campaigns from there. The only plotting we regrettably had was Stephen and Susan’s exit from Panama. A suicidal taxi driver took us to the International airport south of Panama city, where we dropped Stephen and Susan for their flight back to Glasgow via Amsterdam. The cost of the flights was apparently quite economic and it was certainly of great assistance to have them help us through the Canal. Their motto is now ‘No Canal Too Large’.

Having discovered that Margaret’s passport would not have six months remaining for our entry into New Zealand later this year, and that immigration officers have been overzealous with their stamping of Will’s passport, we decided to have them renewed here at the British Embassy in Panama City. It had only taken Allison, a yachting friend and fellow traveller, five days to have her passport renewed, and she knew all the ropes. She even took us to the Embassy. If we had known of the sorry episode of inefficiency and ineptitude that was to follow, despite the oozing charm that it was excused with, we might have taken the chance of renewing Margaret’s passport in New Zealand despite the time gap. We hope to get our passports back on Monday for a departure Tuesday, nearly twenty days after we handed in our forms and having paid the British Government for extra rapid service.{that money will be refunded to us, we are glad to report}. We have now stocked up twice for an imminent departure but will go to the supermarket again tomorrow for, hopefully, a final run. We have been royally entertained by our friends however, here at the anchorage at La Playita, Balbao. It is about a mile from the yacht club at Balbao, but unlike the club this anchorage is free, and is not full up. Allison and Derek from Falmouth {the original one} are on their yacht Kalida and had a great party last night, although we ran out of ice. They taught us to dry meat by hanging it in the rigging. Apparently you can also do this with fish. We look forward to trying.

Peter was given a birthday party on Green Coral. Peter and Rosie are from Switzerland { Zurich} and Rosie has helped us with a couple of necessary translations whilst shopping. She seems to speak innumerable languages, all very well. Other new friends left yesterday, for the Galapagos islands. Gordon and Anne, on board Equinox, are from Port Edgar Yacht Club, about ten miles away from the Royal Forth Yacht club in Edinburgh. A small world, and we didn’t know them before we arrived here. They are doing a fast track, two year trip, around the world before settling in Italy. We will see them in the Adriatic if not before.

Whilst waiting for our passports we have also been out to the Las Perlas islands about 30 miles south of Panama City. We really enjoyed ourselves in the remote anchorages; pearls set in a silver sea. One of the anchorages was just off a long strand of golden sand backed by coconut palms. Idyllic.

The natives still dive for pearls there, as they have done for over 700 years. The 24 carat Peregrina pearl that adorned Mary Tudor’s crown came from here. The pearl divers gave us a cheery wave as they came back from their fishing grounds.

We sang the Pearl Fishers Song for them, but we don’t think they recognised it over the ‘putt putt’ of their single cylinder diesel engine. We waved back. Unfortunately, unlike the rest of the world they didn’t come alongside to sell us anything. Not a single pearl. We hear they can stay under water for four minutes searching for oysters, very impressive. A feature of evolution?

Our next port of call is the Galapagos islands. Just to prove that evolution also continues in language we have heard them called the Gallop Paygos islands. Admittedly we believe the gentleman was American. Survival of the fittest? Darwin, who was Josiah Wedgwood’s son in law, was the author of the 1859 publication ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Species in the Struggle for Life’. His publication revolutionised the thinking in the western world about Creation, and the reason for there being so many species of living creatures. He is supposed to have gained his basic ideas for the earth shattering book in the Galapagos Islands. His thoughts were also crystallized and spurred by another great , but little known botanist Alfred Wallace, whose exploits in the Spice Islands in 1858 gave him similar, but perhaps more coherent, thoughts about the survival of the fittest. There is an excellent book on the subject of Alfred Wallace’s travels in Indonesia by the well known historian and traveller Tim Severin, whose book, ‘The Spice Islands Voyage, In search of Wallace,’ published by Abacus Travel, Will has just finished reading. We really look forward to visiting both of these areas to see the origins of the theories that now count alongside the earths religions and philosophies. Whilst here we have also explored the old town of Panama city, which dates to its rebuilding after the sack by Sir Henry Morgan but most of which has fallen into genteel, and sometimes complete, decay. It will eventually be restored, although the Panamanians seem more intent on pouring their money into multi-storey’s at the moment. Some of the old town is very beautiful.

We are also trying to sort out the over exuberance of the Visa people and have filled up with fuel and water. Must keep busy. You can never have too many tires. Hope you like the Pics

Love ATLANTIA. P.S. you will notice no exclamation marks on this letter. This is because some of the keys on the computer have given up including that one. Next time there may be no eees or capital ts. Could make for exciting reading .