Canals and rain in Panama City

Hola! The hurricane season is still on, and the next storm around here is always around the corner. So far the rain's been rather subtle, but at the time of writing this it's raining cats and dogs, the pavement outside is really getting hammered (as are the patrons sitting in here..). Despite of what some travel reviews I read recently have said about the city, I certainly didn't find it very "enchanting" or pleasant, rather than a standard latin american city with way too much exhaust and chaotic traffic.



Used the one day stopover in PC to pay the mandatory tourist visit to the canals among other things. While they advertise tourist busses to the Miraflores locks (closest canal locks to PC, about 12km away from the Centro), you may as well hop on a local bus and walk away only 35c poorer. Instead of just repeating the tourist brochure info (which you'll find on Wikipedia too obviously) about the canal and its incredible past and present, I'll just go ahead and mention that this month (Oct 2010) it is estimated that the canal reaches 1 million passing boats, since the start of its almost 100 years of operation.

Deciding we didn't want to stay for another night here, we grabbed express bus tickets for a bus leaving for the mountains near Costa Rican border; departure at midnight, will be exciting to see how it goes since we've been hitting the sack at 9pm latest..