We made it to Santiago safe and sound and are in a great hostel with lots of very friendly 20-somethings from all over the world. We're having a barbecue tonight in the courtyard with them and free wine and beer.Dang. We could have had free whiskey or gin on the Taca flight, too. I'm gonna have to take up drinkin'...Bill, you and Inga should be here. It's alot like Chimbas.One of the young men here is from Columbia, Harold, a doctor who's move...

Actually, Portobelo itself was safe enough, it was Colon that was scary. But more on that later.We rode the luxurious Panama Canal train to Colon. It was punctual, smooth and had a wonderful glass dome for observing monkeys in the trees overhead. You sit at tables of 4 in the chilly air conditioning while the jungle and canal sweep by. They served coffee, but no snack as some bloggers have mentioned, so we ate breakfast in Colon.A couple at the table next to us h...

Isabel would never have let this happen. We'd planned to spend three days in Panama City, take the Canal train to Colon on the Caribbean side, then a bus to Portabelo where we'd stay for 2 days, then return to PC to catch the flight back to Costa Rica on the 13th.We had NOT planned on a holiday. Panama really knows how to holiday. After our fiasco "English" city tour yesterday the manager of the hotel tried to make up by giving us a $30 refund and offeri...

We took an English speaking city tour today that included being hauled out to the Miraflores Locks to the Canal museum and dumped out by our surly non-communicative guide. We were totally unimpressed with her, but loved the museum and took a bunch of pictures trying to embed all that information in our feeble brains. There's so much to remember the more we put in the more falls out.After that she took us to a chuchi area and said, get out here--you have 15 mi...

We met another wonderful couple from Canada today Heather and Phil---they're almost as wonderful as you! They're from Saskachawan and were on the Canal tour with us and 100 of our closest friends.We did what's called a partial transit--took a bus to Gamboa where we boarded our boat in the canal, then rode down through two locks to the Pacific ocean.It was FREAKING awesome. I was totally blown away by the magnitude of what we were witnessing. And me, w...