Panama – Not Even Fantasy

Above: Going to be completely honest I’m not sure if I even have any pictures from Panama. Need to ask around for any

1/2/17 to 1/5/17 – Panama City, Panama

Crew – John Orta, Lily Orta

*slight note* this one is going to be quicker than usual, simply because we only had two or three days here compared to the two weeks of Fiji or Israel. Cool? Lets get started

Panama was our final stop after Columbia in the second half of our winter break. And this country had two main attractions I want to cover plus some other nonsense: The Panama Canal and a rainforest.

The Rainforest
You can easily google some quick facts about rainforests. The fact that they contain 90% of the diversity of life on the planet including an estimated 14,000 new diseases that we have no treatment for. There is so much animal life that it has poorer soil than the arctic because the plants are dependent on getting minerals from the animal life. I’m going to focus on the fun part, the sheer number of things that can kill you.

Which to be clear was absurd if you entered the actual rainforest. Even my family is not suicidal for no reason and we were in the tourist portion. For clarification I wanted to reference dungeons and dragons, the nerdy game that oddly enough requires you to have friends. It has fantasy, roleplaying and eight players around a table playing various fantasy characters and a ninth player being the gamemaster (god) and controlling the world. The key part to why I love this game was because everything relies on the system of

1. Person says what happens and describes reasonably how
2. The gamemaster says what to roll dice to roll to see if it happens
3. Player rolls
4. Gamemaster announces result.

Simple right? Well the rules are clunky but that’s the entire idea, what your character can do should only be limited by your imagination and what the GM declares fair.

The players don’t try to say “I cast fireball” if they are a barbarian who can’t read and the gamemaster doesn’t send enemies that can instantly paralyze and eat them.

Which was great when our guide told us to watch out for the centipedes that leap from the leaves above us and try to land on us. Besides them being squishy, large and colorful, they will paralyze your arm when they land on you if you are lucky and your entire body if you are not. Which is something that I would call bullshit on if a player tried to use that in one of my games, but here we are looking for these demonic centipedes.

Past that though, the most thrilling part of a rainforest that I realized firsthand was the diversity of color. Ok light green dominates but so many creatures had entire rainbows stretched on their skin in a way that you never see in most biomes. The sheer amount of the forest that is moving was insane. Ants keep their colonies on the move, so they don’t even bother to build nests, also fight world wars across continents. Look it up I promise it’ll be worth your while.

Of course, bugs are absolutely swarming you and humid conditions are unpleasant in the winter god forbid you visit in the summer, but that’s just a part of travelling to exotic areas. Plus we knew that going in.

There are also snakes that hide in trees and if you touch a tree one could bite you and cause your heart to stop within two hours. If you do not like that we have a beautiful blue dart frog the size of my watch that has enough venom to kill ten adult humans. Past that millions of bullet ants, each bite is around 30x as painful as a honeybee sting and of course piranhas. Yes, piranhas don’t eat humans normally. If they are hungry though, a dozen can strip you down to your bone in less than five minutes. Cheery.

Screw it pictures explain this better.

The Panama Canal

Now that I have been a tree-hugging environmentalist, I’m going to cover the second word in my major and cover one of the greatest engineering feats ever pulled off.

Yes, I understand that in the modern world the Panama canal would be impressive but far from groundbreaking, but the world that the canal was constructed in was considerably closer to the age of the pyramids than ours in construction technology. There were no power tools, malaria and yellow fever had few to none effective treatments, and all of the modeling software we now take for granted was nowhere near existed, they didn’t have calculators for what were incredibly complex water pressure calculations.

To deal with the earlier problems, they had to appeal vast amounts of DDT, just invented at the time, pretty much anywhere because any single mosquito could kill a worker, so the only option was to wage a genocidal war against the mosquitos… and the construction workers actually won.

The water level between the Pacific and Atlantic is not actually equal, more like 85 ft of height in different. So there had to be massive pistons built underneath the Panama Canal to lift the boats up and down quite literally when crossing from one side to the other.

Each piston gets power through two massive chambers underneath it. Depending which way the ship will travel, a chamber will be flooded which forces a hilariously massive lever down and pushes up or down the piston that the ship sits on. 26,700,000 gallons of water are used for one chamber to give the required force to push the ship up. There are six of these pistons in the canal, eight hours for a ship to pass through. 15,864 ships used the canal in 2019. S That’hardcore engineering.

If a wizard cast the spell literally called “miracle” and asked me for this feat of engineering to be created within a year I would say that’s unlikely at best. That spell involves a god coming to help you out, and the Panama Canal did it in an amazingly short amount of time.

I of course spent far too long being engrossed in the combination of history and hydraulic engineering involved. Lily was bored after five minutes. Niche interests.

Everything Else

We seriously didn’t have that much time in this country after those two events which took up our days mostly and preparing for the flight home (9 hours surprisingly). I do however remember wanting ice cream at 10 pm in Panama City so I went looking for it on my own.. without cell service… in a foreign city while screaming American tourist when I was 14 years old.

Which gave me in my goddamn defense a fantastic view of the culture! Street murals, artwork in parks and the biome plus economic prosperity gave the city a look that was not comparable to any of the countries in Central America I have seen before.

Look, a sticking point whenever I hear about points like this in the news is that the country or the people of the country are now seen as dangerous. But walk 10 minutes in the non-gentrified parts of Oakland at night and you will not fare any better. I absolutely deserved to get yelled at by my dad for that kind of stupid stunt that could get me mugged (I searched it up while writing Panama City isn’t known for violent crime against tourists) but that could happen anywhere. I’m just generally a lucky bastard. To finish out a drawn-out dungeon and dragons comparison, if I was running this game I probably would have given myself at least a worrisome moment there.

But I do want to mention the city itself! Incredibly modern, skyscrapers and cosmopolitan. It has more in common with San Francisco than the cities in Columbia. The century long economic boon of the Panama Canal has allowed the city to thrive on trade and be a first world city, if not extended to the entire country. I do not have a ton to say about the city which was our only destination in the country because well, it’s close to San Francisco. Does this justify US imperialism? Absolutely not. But does deserve note.

Sam’s Sermon Scales:

West Oakland BART similarities? – 6/10. I mentioned before but remarkably similar in vibe to San Francisco and Oakland. With that said the humidity just adds a whole new level of nastiness and with it comes bugs which make everything seem grosser even if the city itself is not.

“I could make this better!” – N/A. Before I drank coffee, I wasn’t jacked up on anxiety juice consistently until the beginning of 2019.

Folks of Culture? – 5/10. Vibrant culture but not a country that exports it. Our trip had culture in a far third place behind engineering ingenuity and natural beauty. Is that the only view of Panama? Of course not, the country has magnificent culture. The main issue with this rating scale is that it is completely dependent on what I saw and for me it was the least impressive part of the trip. I hope I don’t disrespect anyone with that answer.

Golden Hour Opportunities? – 7/10. Complicated to say the least? The rainforest was not that picturesque at all because of how dense it is. Every picture naturally looks oversaturated and that’s the big view attractions I saw when I was there. Beautiful in person but not a majestic country for Facebook photos. The Panama Canal remains a marvel of engineering and breathtaking if you see it in action but it’s more or less a lot of concrete with a boat on top.

Did the vegetarian starve? – 8/10. It was not a vegetarian’s haven for sure, but it also was not hard to find vegetarian meals at every restaurant or sketchy street location we stopped at. We did not go out of our way to eat any crazy food (compared to say the ants and worms tacos I had in Mexico)

“Hey boss, can I work more hours?” – 7/10. I was not running finances for this trip, but it seemed slightly cheaper than prices in California, so I would hedge my bets around being as expensive as the Midwest overall. Take it how you will, you will not steal with ultra-cheap prices but it was not Italy.

Cooler than Middle Earth? – 8/10. Rainforests are vastly different than any other biome you will experience except for a tropical coral reef and I think the experience of being in one was incredibly novel. Past that, the ancient ruins are too hard to reach or completely banned to visitors so impressive but not mind-blowing.

Overall, I fully recommend the country, especially because it was very welcoming to visitors and not particularly hard to reach for a short trip. Its got a variety of unique sites if you like nature of engineering. Otherwise I can’t help you but I’m sure there’ll be something for you.

Photo credit goes to my dad and google.

Best,

Sam