Colon, Panama - January 10

Partly cloudy, 33 degrees with more humidity than yesterday

Another lazy morning is how we spend the beginning of today. We stayed in bed until about 10:30 watching a couple of the ship’s

Alguila - Columbian beer

enrichment lectures on TV. About 2 of these enrichment lectures take place each day in the ship’s theatre and are recorded to be played on the ship’s TVs later. We pretty much never attend these lectures live, but always watch them on the TV when getting ready for the day or just relaxing. They typically have to do with the part of the world we are visiting. However, there is one lecturer on this cruise who is talking about the inner workings of Broadway.

gigantic container ship in the lock

Our visit to the locks of the Panama Canal was in the afternoon after we dock around noon.

Yesterday we noticed that a major Columbian beer was called Alguna, it wasn’t the beer we drank at the

Balboa - Panamanian beer

pub we visited, but we noticed it all over. Today they have it in the ship’s bars – this is a good thing. Occasionally the local beers won’t be on the ship and I think that is a real shame. Drinking local beer and eating local food is a major highlight of travelling and often we aren’t able to access these things off of the ship, it’s fun when we get to have them on board!

The Panama Canal is the highlight of this 18-day leg for most people – including us. Today we visited the new locks (called Agua Clara) of the

searching for wildlife

canal and cruised around the Gatun Lake which is the artificial lake forming a major part of the canal.

The visit to the locks was a bit of a let down…it was self guided time to see a huge ship (this was interesting) ship go through the locks and that was about it. There was a short interpretative film about the

look closely...there's a bird

locks, but we missed it each time it played.

The second part of our visit to Panama is cruising on Gatun Lake. This is a

sloth

huge artificial (the world’s 2^nd largest artificial lake) lake full of wildlife. Today was where we finally saw some wildlife – not a lot, but some. Wildlife sightings are a major goal for me on vacation. I don’t want to hit a zoo where sightings are guaranteed, I love to see animals when seeing them is by chance. During our visit to the like we saw howler monkeys, sloths, a baby crocodile and some birds. This lake was firmed when a river was dammed to create the canal.

Another bird

During the visit to the lake we try our first Panamanian beer…Balboa – 3 USD at a hotel where we got onto the boat for the lake.

Back onboard for the evening, the ship had it’s outdoor at the pool deck BBQ. They do a pretty amazing job transforming the pool deck into a space for a BBQ. Calling it a BBQ is a bit misleading…it’s not like any BBQ I’ve ever been to…they have any and all kinds of food you can

monkey

imagine, a band and dining under the stars.

behind Chris is the same boat we are on