Yesterday I tried to get a job as a line holder to cross the Panama Canal on a sailboat with some random people...but those jobs are tough to get unless you have a lot of flexibility in your travel schedule and get on the list in advance. So I did the next best thing and booked a spot on a tour that bussed people into the interior to get on a boat to sail south toward the Pacific. I spent my day transiting half of the Panama Canal!
The canal connects a couple of lakes with the Pacific and Caribbean. It was started by the French in the 1880's and they planned on digging a sea level ditch with snow shovels that was to be about 1/3 the size of the canal the Americans eventually finished. The French are awesome. If they had succeeded, the currents created by the differences in the tides (1.5 ft on the Atlantic side and 20 ft on the Pacific side) would have created the best white water rafting spot ever.
The most impressive part of the canal is the cut through the continental divide. They just dug a ditch through a mountain. The locks themselves were also impressive as the were a little bigger than those I ran across every day in Ballard.
Tomorrow I head to Santa Catalina for a couple of days of scuba diving. The first clown car bus experience of the trip. Ah, central American chicken busses.
Pics below of the Mira Flores locks and the bridge of the Americas that links the North and south American continents.
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