We were picked up from the hotel at 9.30 a.m and first we visited the old town of Panama. The buildings are very ruined but they are starting to rebuild the old town which is called casco viejo. It is the same than in havanna and old Panam-city belongs to the “Weltkulturerbe” as Unesco declared. There are nice places and once upon a time only the rich people lived there. I was really impressed by the Indian women, they offered handicraft souvenirs, and they were dressed in their traditional way, for example they had specially ornamented legs. I was astonished by a typical cold drink here: it was just an frozen water-ice block, the man scrached it and put some flavour on it – I’ve never seen it before but we didn’t dare to try it because we don’t know if the water is good or not.
After that we drove to the Panama-canal. A direct connection from the Pacific to the caribbean sea. 40 ships pass every day: for the big ones the fair is about 200.000 dollar and the ship needs 24 hours. sailing boats and yachts must pay around 500 dollars, once a man swam trhough the canal and had a special agreement – he only had to pay 36 cents. There is also a museum, where you can learn more about the history of the channel. It was build from 1904 till 1914 and 75.000 people worked on it but around 25.000 people died (many of them because of malaria). We have the same system at the river danube.
After that we started our voyage to David. This is a town near the border to Costa Rica and there is the harbour, where we will get on board. We stayed in the Grand national hotel, we arrived very late about 8 o’clock pm. We just went for dinner, a bottle of wine, some gin tonic and than fell asleep.
